Why the Bruce’s Beach $20 million sale isn’t a model for reparations

By Andrew W. Kahrl, Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Virginia

True reparation requires repair, and this solution doesn’t fix the sources of racial inequality in the U.S. real estate system.

The descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce were finally able to claim their inheritance. In 1924, the city of Manhattan Beach, California, invoked the power of eminent domain to seize two beachfront lots from the couple — who had been using it to operate a popular Black resort — to purge the city of Black beachgoers. Last year, Los Angeles County took the unprecedented move of handing ownership of the property back to the couple’s closest living heirs. Last week, the Bruces’ great-grandsons sold it back to the county for nearly $20 million.

After the sale was announced, some on social media criticized the Bruces’ decision to sell, particularly after a hard-won battle to have the property returned to the family. But they had every right to sell the land and should feel no obligation to hold onto the property merely for its symbolism. 

However, equally as shortsighted is treating this case as a model for reparations for all Black Americans, as some have suggested. Doing so would ignore that true reparation requires repair, and this solution doesn’t address the sources of racial inequality in America’s real estate system.

To understand why, we must first recognize how the Bruces’ lots became so valuable in the first place. In so many real estate markets formed in 20th century America, value was created and capital accumulated through racialized forms of dispossession, while Black exclusion from these same markets served to protect and enhance those values. Manhattan Beach’s pricey real estate market today is due in no small measure to the wealth and whiteness of the people who live there (the city’s median income is nearly three times greater than the national average, and Black people constitute 0.5% of the city’s population). 

For this reason, we should commend Los Angeles County for returning the land to its rightful owners but not assume that merely expanding Black real estate holdings can close a racial wealth gap that these very markets helped to create and perpetuate.

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