I predict that Ta-Nehisi Coates will win many awards for his latest piece making the case for reparations for the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and predatory housing policies. He’s right that the subject has become a taboo, largely because the first questions people ask are who should be paid and who should do the paying. I’d add to that a second problem. The way blacks were oppressed historically was that they were arbitrarily treated as a distinct class of citizens based on a subjective perception of their race. It didn’t matter if they were half-black, a quarter-black, or an eighth-black, so long as they looked recognizably African.
We’ve done away with that way of thinking, at least under the law. In order to institute some form of reparations, we’d probably have to reintroduce the same arbitrary standard to identify the people who are deserving of compensation.
It may be the case that there are still-living individuals who can demonstrate that they were the victims of, say, a predatory housing system that robbed them blind. But, then, the same case can be made for many of those who were robbed blind during the most recent housing boom.
I think if there were to be reparations, it wouldn’t be a cash transfer to individuals, but some kind of commitment to communities. Beyond the political difficulty of achieving a just settlement, it’s hard to even come up with a solution in an idealized world.
FSM, Coates is an AMAZINGLY GREAT writer!
I’m saving this article, and I’ll be reading this over the weekend, during the slow holiday blogging period.
As I said in the other thread, I’m simply in awe of his writing. I think he means ENDING
From his blog piece:
“[Ending] White supremacy was not about getting black and white people to sit at the same lunch table, it was about getting white people to stop stealing shit from black people–labor, bodies, children, taxes, lives.
“Liberals, intellectuals, and pundits have spent the past few years dancing around this historically demonstrable fact. I rarely hope for my writing to have any effect. But I confess that I hope this piece makes people feel a certain kind of way. I hope it makes a certain specimen of intellectual cowardice and willful historical ignorance less acceptable. More, I hope it mocks people who believe that a society can spend three and a half centuries attempting to cripple a man, 50 years offering halfhearted aid, and then wonder why he walks with a limp.”
Reparations should be intended to reduce the “wealth gap” between blacks and whites, which has a long historical train. It’s much easier to build wealth when you already have some.
So, I’m not sure how you erase that “wealth gap” without individual payments. Certainly Pell grants or community aid and such can go a long way to erasing the “income gap”, but the wealth gap will take something incredibly difficult.
I’m only halfway through the article right now, but it’s fine work. I agree that Mr. Coates will receive many honors for this.
How reparations could work in real life is a puzzle. I’m also wary of what expectations might arise from a reparations policy. I can already hear conservatives calling for an end to any social program that serves a recognizable number of black people.
“Welfare? End it! We paid reparations! Food stamps? We paid! Affirmative action? Paid!”
While reparations might begin to right the ledger for generations of theft from black people, they can’t balance the privilege attached to being white in our society.
Continue the reading, because Coates is less interested in immediate answers about who cuts a check to whom. What he wants is an intensive, pervading national dialog and education about America’s past. He thinks HR 40 could help that move along and unwrap that puzzle. He wants nothing less than for America to regain its soul. The rest will follow.
The Canadian government’s efforts in regard to past wrongs against native people would be a decent model to follow.
Until the current administration in Canada.
When the powers that be in America and their privileged heirs decide to stop stealing, when the police and security officers employed by those powers decided to stop enslaving and killing, there might be the hope of reasonable talk of reparations. America’s massive economic infrastructure was built on stolen land and slave labor and deadbeat commercial debtors going bankrupt. No wonder we don’t know how to make a humane economy work.
It is the right time to go there. Ta-Nehisi Coates does it well.
But for now, the concrete action step is to stop stealing, and stop looking the other way when it is is minorities who are being stolen from.
Right, the US can’t even deliver justice TODAY and it’s supposed to consider reparations for YESTERDAY. Reduce the black prison population to more normal proportions, for instance, physically rebuild communities, for a starter. The matter of who receives reparations is a hypocritgical2 distraction. The black people deserve it as a whole and there are many ways to deliver it without discussing who gets the cash, always the cash—that’s something to bicker about.
I think Coates choice of housing discrimination points to an issue well worth efforts for creating reparation. Housing effects education and personal safety. Those also effect criminal justice issues and employment discrimination. Housing is a good leading issue with which to work. With housing issues improved, everything else has a better chance of working.
In a followup Coates says though:
“I hope this is the start of a long conversation. I made my argument from the perspective of housing, but I strongly suspect that reparations arguments could be made from the perspective of criminal justice, education, health care, or from any number of angles. For writers out there interested in this I can only quote the words of a brave man: Drop it now. The people are ready.”
Quentin, I see Coles doing a great job in this astonishingly persuasive essay in addressing your point here. Yesterday’s sins are the very creators of today’s injustices. We CAN’T gain justice today without dealing with the destructions of institutionalized racism. He also shows historical examples of nations providing reparations, displaying that all it takes to decide that reparations are politically possible in the United States is for enough of our citizens to decide it is possible.
I pay Ta-Nehisi my greatest compliment: he changed my mind on this issue.
A lot of what could be called reparations is stuff we should be doing anyway. I mean, we should be investing a lot more resources in impoverished communities, regardless of whether it’s a just settlement or not.
Of course, you don’t want to just throw money at the problem, you want to make sure it’s spent effectively. (I find it odd that Republicans, those wise custodians of the public’s money, are so enamored of block grants.) That would mean things like making sure poor communities have outstanding schools and health clinics, which isn’t exactly a revolutionary concept. All communities should have outstanding schools and health clinics.
Block grants are a curious form of local political patronage financed by federal funds, instead of directing and earmarking additional funds to where there have been historic inequalities.
Affluent communities then become skilled at the process for directing block grant money to them unless there are regulations that explicitly prohibit those sorts of transfers.
It’s an extraordinary piece, but not surprising for Coates who has been delivering great social commentary for so long.
I like that he chose Chicago as a motivating example. North Lawndale is a good place to look for these stories. Yet it leaves me sighing about how oblivious Chicago’s mayor is to all this. Only two weeks ago, I heard Rahm on WVON radio finger wagging with “Where are the parents?”
Note that Coates isn’t so obsessed with the particulars at this point. He just wants to start the research and dialog for solutions. In fact, when he talks about reparations, he is really talking about fundamental conversion of consciousness and a pivotal reconciliation with America’s past and its original sin. In his words (MY BOLD):
He has pointed out the way. EVERYONE who hasn’t needs to be reading most (if not all) the books he references in this piece: Family Properties, The GI Bill, Great American City, Warmth of Other Sons…
It’s a place to start. And white progressives need to be ready to help provoke a national dialog.
The best form of reparations, in my opinion, would be subsidized post secondary education for everyone who needs help. I see no reason to limit to those of a certain skin color. If a white kid from an underprivileged background wants to better himself or herself, we all benefit. The ACA is also a huge step in the direction of caring for everyone.
I think it’s a crime how this generation has defunded education in order to keep taxes for the wealth low.
Reparations does not have to be direct payment of $. African American communities need jobs and they need jobs right now. Jobs enable the creation of wealth and more important the creation of new families. Look at Detroit…nothing will change without jobs. How about letting Detroit partner with someone to put wind mills on some of the abandoned land and sell electricity into the grid? The national Afro American youth unemployment rate is around 20%…that must change.
Yes. The “liberal” jobs training and more education solution is worthless when there are no jobs. The insufficient supply of jobs is a feature and not a bug of capitalism.
There are no jobs because there is no investment. There is no investment because there is no demand for increased capacity. There is no demand for increased capacity because there there is less money available for spending and more debts sucking off existing cash flows. There is less money because there are no jobs and because two successive long-term recessions have stripped the middle class of what few financial assets they had. Needless to say, black communities beginning to make headway were particular targets of fraud (as usual).
Can you even post comments at him anymore?
Anyhow, if you do this what about American Indians? What happened there is genocide and that’s just to start. Was it as bad as slavery and what followed? I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe it was close. What about other races who have historically been considered second class citizens shouldn’t they also get something?
He concerns himself with black Americans, but that is only part of a larger whole and the country would have to address it’s entire history of racial brutality. Probably another reason why it gets so little discussion.
I don’t think the point is achieving perfect justice. I think the point is taking a first step.
I’ve always been in favor of reparations for all those who have been slaves themselves. If you are the descendent of slaves, no reparations.
I’ve always been in favor of confiscatory estate taxes on the descendants of plantation owners myself. And the factory owners. They’re the ones that keep encouraging the theft and fanning the divisions.
And individual reparations, while important, are not as helpful to restoring justice as are infrastructure justice and resource justice and environmental justice.
Native Americans should not be being for forced by the federal government (which in fact owns reservation land) to be the route of a pipeline that primarily benefits non-Indian North Dakotans (and primarily non-North Dakotans to be blunt about it). Stealing the quality of the land is as much current theft as any theft by slavery or removal.
Hoping we hear from Rickyrah on this. C’mon, R!
And, at another place on the ideological spectrum here at the Frog Pond, it would be worthwhile to hear from Arthur Gilroy. Coles describes quite a PermaGov conspiracy in his piece here. AG decries institutionalized poverty, yet shows little concern for its causes and cures.
Also worth reading from Coates:
The Case for Reparations: An Intellectual Autopsy
It’s about how his thinking on reparations has changed in the last few years. It’s also got some interesting links.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations-an-intellectual-autopsy
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This is an eye opening piece. Although many comments on this thread point out how nearly impossible it would be in a practical sense to cover enough bases given the countless lives that have been trampled by slavery and its legacy, I like how effectively it brings the issue to the here and now through the lens of Chicago.
It dovetails nicely with the Donald Sterling story, in which an NBA owner who’s made a vast fortune in real estate while being allowed by the league for decades to discriminate against minorities. Bomani Jones wrote about Sterling 8 years ago, with zero response from the league:
<http://blackamericaweb.com/2014/04/30/espns-bomani-jones-breaks-the-donald-sterling-situation-down-once-and-for-all-listen>
The Cost: What Stop and Frisk Does to a Young Man’s Soul
Every afternoon when Trey left school in his car, two white patrolmen would follow him in their cruiser, sometimes a few blocks, sometimes several miles, before turning on their patrol lights.
When my godson Trey was a toddler growing up in Brooklyn, every white woman who saw him fell in love with him. He was a beautiful child, sweet natured, affectionate, with cocoa-colored skin and a thousand-watt smile. I remember sitting with him and his mom in a pizzeria one day, watching as he played peekaboo with two white ladies at a nearby booth. “What a little doll!” the ladies cooed. “Isn’t he adorable?”
I told Marilyn I dreaded the day he would run up against some white person’s prejudice.”His feelings are going to be hurt,” I said. “He won’t know it’s about this country’s race history, he’ll think it’s about him. Because so far in his young life every white person he’s ever met has adored him.” Marilyn nodded, but her closed expression seemed to say I was talking about things I didn’t really understand.
……………………..
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/21/the-cost-what-stop-and-frisk-does-to-a-young-man-s-
soul.html
America was built on 400 years of intergenerational theft from black people: theft of labor, theft of capital, theft of opportunity, theft of dignity, theft of body.
We’re not ready as a country now for the conversation TNC wants to have now any more than we were in 1865.
The response, which proves everything in his brilliant piece, is always “What more do you people want from us?”
There is nothing just in Coates’ piece that is new to me, because I know the history of the African in America. I am also from Chicago, so I know the history of how Chicago became the most segregated city in America. I appreciate his article, because it will be added to my files of Black history. I was for reparations in theory, because of the 200+ years of slave labor. But, we live in a country that does not want to deal with the actuality of American chattel slavery. We live in a country where people actually criticized 12 Years A Slave, for not having “happy slaves”. We live in a country where people are STILL trying to deny Sally Hemings. We live in a country where huge swaths of White people seem to want to believe that the Black community came to these shores looking like West Africans, and somehow, the rainbow of shades that we are now came through osmosis. We live in a country where when faced with the actual surviving victims of the Tulsa Race Riots, they couldn’t be bothered to give them reparations. That’s been their hook-nobody today experienced slavery….always a bullshyt argument, proven by their response to the Tulsa victims. I do appreciate Coates for focusing as much of his work as possible on American Apartheid as he does.