Essay based on Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations"
First Choice
In a 5-page essay, typed and double-spaced, support, refute, or complicate Coates' claim that the United States is morally compelled to give reparations to African-Americans for the sins of slavery.
Resources for Reparations Debate
Coates and Bernie Saunders on Reparations
"The Enduring Solidarity of Whiteness"
"An Open Letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Liberals Who Love Him"
"Ta-Nehisi Coates' Case for Reparations and Spiritual Awakening"
"The Case Against Reparations"
"The Radical Chic of Ta-Nehisi Coates"
"The Case for Considering Reparations"
"The Impossibility of Reparations"
"The Radical Practicality of Reparations"
"An Ingenious and Powerful Case for Reparations in The Atlantic"
"Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Case for Reparations"
Resources for Minimum Wage Debate
1. Linking Higher Wages to Lower Crimes
2. Should We Raise the Minimum Wage?
3. Raising Minimum Wage Won't Reduce Inequality
4. Minimum Wage Debate: Who's Right?
5. Minimum Wage Laws: Ruinous Compassion
6. Minimum Wage Laws and Dangers of Government by Decree
7. Minimum Wage Hike Is the Wrong Fix
8. Why We Need to Raise the Minimum Wage
“The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates: Lesson 1
One. In the Jim Crow South, we read that black families lived under a kleptocracy. Define this term.
Whites stole “all facets of society” from blacks: the right to vote, protection from the law, the right to work for a fair wage, an education, and anything that would point to their humanity.
Perhaps the worst state was Mississippi. “Between 1882 and 1968 more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state.” A lot of these lynchings occurred the night before an election to keep black-hostile politicians in power.
Financial oppression afflicted blacks in the South through debt peonage (also called debt slavery), a form of profiteering and exploitation of black farmers by setting unfair prices to put these farmers in eternal debt and to suck the life out of them.
Mississippi denied education to blacks and exploited their illiteracy by claiming certain individuals, like Clyde Ross’s father, owed back taxes. Someone unable to read was in no position to refute such a claim, often handed out in obscure legalize. This happened in 1923.
The result of a bogus claim, was repossessing all of the family’s property and treasure. This happened all the time. We read that black property was stolen and turned into a white country club.
Could the son Clyde Ross escape the poverty of his exploited parents and get a good education? No. While his white counterparts took the bus to the distant school, Clyde was denied the bus ride because of his skin color.
We read that Clyde sees America for what it really is: “It was in these early years that Ross began to understand himself as an American—he did not live under the blind decree of justice, but under the heel of a regime that elevated armed robbery to a governing principle.”
During Jim Crow, masses of blacks fled Mississippi, which for them was hell on earth.
Clyde Ross joins the Army and while stationed in California he sees he’s treated differently than in the South. He can shop, walk the streets without being harassed, go to restaurants. California is a completely different world than the Jim Crow South, which is kleptocracy.
Even when Clyde Ross moves to Chicago and isn’t oppressed by overt racism, he is victimized by predatory lending and homeownership discrimination that sucks the money out of him.
Two. Why does Coates bring up the fact that Clyde Ross joined the Contract Buyer’s League?
The Contract Buyer’s League, a collection of black homeowners from North Lawndale, Illinois, fought against the predatory lending, dishonest, and outright theft that white capitalists performed against the black community.
The CBL went into these white speculators’ neighborhoods and informed the communities of the deceit and greed they committed, shaming them.
Most importantly, the CBL demanded recompense or compensation with interest for the money that was stolen from them.
In other words, this black organization in the year 1968 demanded reparations, though in 1976 they were denied those reparations in a jury trial.
Coates is bringing up this reparation to show that the black community is still being victimized by predators and deserves, like the CBL, reparations.
In law, we call this precedent, a rule or principle established in a previous case.
Coates wants to show us that we have precedent for black community’s legal struggle to fight for reparations for crimes committed against them.
Coates brings us back to freed slave Belinda Royall who was granted a reparation all the way back to 1783. Coates writes, “At the time, black people in America had endured more than 150 years of enslavement, and the idea that they might be owed something in return was, if not the national consensus, at least not outrageous.”
Three. How is North Lawndale faring today?
The city, which is 92% black, is in shambles with infant mortality being double the national average.
Forty-three percent of the people live below the poverty line, double Chicago’s overall rate.
Forty-five percent of all residents are on food stamps.
The incarceration rate is 40 times higher than the community with the highest white incarceration rate.
Four. What is the difference between the term “low economic status” and “ecologically distinct”?
To be “ecologically distinct” means to live in a desert of finance, jobs, nutrition, education, and family. Everyone is in jail, and there is nothing in this ecosystem to sustain or nourish an individual. It is a wasteland. These long forgotten wastelands have huge murder and incarceration rates, which the rest of society ignores. The only time these wastelands become relevant media stories is when there is a riot and civic unrest threatens America’s comforting notion of living in a stable society.
In these wastelands we see that though Jim Crow overt racism is gone, there is still the crisis of economic stagnation. The income gap between black and white households is the same today as it was in 1970.
In terms of money, nothing has changed.
Worse, we read that “whites born into affluent neighborhoods tended to remain in affluent neighborhoods, blacks tended to fall out of them.”
In other words, blacks are at a higher risk of falling into poverty.
To show the staggering disparity of wealth between white and black families, we must turn to the Pew Research Center, which estimates that white households are worth 20 times as much as black households.
There are other disparities as well: For example, “black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000.”
As we all know, richer communities have higher educational standards, so this speaks to the economic prospects of the children.
According to Coates, these poor neighborhoods are traps. He writes, “As a rule, poor black people do not work their way out of the ghetto—and those who do often face the horror of watching their children and grandchildren tumble back.”
These traps are racially isolating as well. Coates cites the Manhattan Institute that points out that while segregation has declined since the 1960s, African Americans remain the most segregated of all groups.
This segregation reinforces poverty. As Coates writes, “With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin. The resulting conflagration [spreading or blazing fire] has been devastating.”
Five. What counterargument (to Coates’ claim that America is morally compelled to give African Americans reparations) does Coates address in Part II of his essay?
Some will argue that the problems black face are not rooted in money but in values, morality, and “individual grit.”
Coates quotes Philadelphia Major Michael Nutter: “Too many men making too many babies they don’t want to take care of, and then we end up dealing with your children.”
This is the narrative you’ll hear on Fox News and elsewhere.
Coates rejects this narrative. He writes, “The kind of trenchant [deeply rooted] racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable. The essence of American racism is disrespect. And in the wake of the grim numbers, we see the grim inheritance.”
My international students will sometimes disagree with Coates on this point. They will say they have come here with little or no financial resources, but because of the values of their family they find a way to be successful in America. Their narrative conflicts with Coates’.
How can we defend Coates here? We can say that international students don’t come from neighborhoods bearing the marks of slavery, racism, and Jim Crow. We can say that the disadvantages inside an American inner city or ghetto do not make for a fair comparison with the disadvantages people suffer in other countries.
Coates actually addressed a relevant question about black immigrants faring better than African Americans in a 2009 essay written for The Atlantic titled “Why Do Black Immigrants Do Better Than Native Blacks?” Here is the essay:
This argument pops up from time to time, but it's been coming up a lot lately. It always seemed to me that the question answers itself--an immigrant is someone who's specifically come to this country to capitalize and exploit opportunity. Comparing any immigrant group to virtually any native-born group is like comparing the most ambitious members of one team with the entirety of another team. This is to say nothing of whatever skills, education and wealth a particular immigrant group may bring to bear.
I think a natural--but ultimately cheap--reaction is to appeal to the Myth Of The Black Immigrant. If we can prove that other black people come here and do well, than it must mean that our ideals and our execution of them have, indeed, been righteous. It's just that the American blacks are too lazy and self-pitying to see this.
I think the best grappling I've seen with this was by Malcolm Gladwell, himself an immigrant black of West Indian descent. He rather brilliantly combines his own first person experience, his family's views, and some actual social science to show that, as he says it, someone must always be the villain. Forgive me for quoting at length. The piece is quite lovely:
I grew up in Canada, in a little farming town an hour and a half outside of Toronto. My father teaches mathematics at a nearby university, and my mother is a therapist. For many years, she was the only black person in town, but I cannot remember wondering or worrying, or even thinking, about this fact. Back then, color meant only good things. It meant my cousins in Jamaica. It meant the graduate students from Africa and India my father would bring home from the university...
But things changed when I left for Toronto to attend college. This was during the early nineteen-eighties, when West Indians were immigrating to Canada in droves, and Toronto had become second only to New York as the Jamaican expatriates' capital in North America. At school, in the dining hall, I was served by Jamaicans. The infamous Jane-Finch projects, in northern Toronto, were considered the Jamaican projects. The drug trade then taking off was said to be the Jamaican drug trade. In the popular imagination, Jamaicans were--and are--welfare queens and gun-toting gangsters and dissolute youths. In Ontario, blacks accused of crimes are released by the police eighteen per cent of the time; whites are released twenty-nine per cent of the time. In drug-trafficking and importing cases, blacks are twenty-seven times as likely as whites to be jailed before their trial takes place, and twenty times as likely to be imprisoned on drug-possession charges.
After I had moved to the United States, I puzzled over this seeming contradiction--how West Indians celebrated in New York for their industry and drive could represent, just five hundred miles northwest, crime and dissipation. Didn't Torontonians see what was special and different in West Indian culture? But that was a naïve question. The West Indians were the first significant brush with blackness that white, smug, comfortable Torontonians had ever had. They had no bad blacks to contrast with the newcomers, no African-Americans to serve as a safety valve for their prejudices, no way to perform America's crude racial triage.
Not long ago, I sat in a coffee shop with someone I knew vaguely from college, who, like me, had moved to New York from Toronto. He began to speak of the threat that he felt Toronto now faced. It was the Jamaicans, he said. They were a bad seed. He was, of course, oblivious of my background. I said nothing, though, and he launched into a long explanation of how, in slave times, Jamaica was the island where all the most troublesome and obstreperous slaves were sent, and how that accounted for their particularly nasty disposition today.
I have told that story many times since, usually as a joke, because it was funny in an appalling way--particularly when I informed him much, much later that my mother was Jamaican. I tell the story that way because otherwise it is too painful. There must be people in Toronto just like Rosie and Noel, with the same attitudes and aspirations, who want to live in a neighborhood as nice as Argyle Avenue, who want to build a new garage and renovate their basement and set up their own business downstairs. But it is not completely up to them, is it? What has happened to Jamaicans in Toronto is proof that what has happened to Jamaicans here is not the end of racism, or even the beginning of the end of racism, but an accident of history and geography. In America, there is someone else to despise. In Canada, there is not. In the new racism, as in the old, somebody always has to be the nigger.
Read the whole thing. It's wonderful.
Here is an essay by Larry Davis, “Why Can’t African-Americans be as Successful as Immigrants?”
Other immigrant groups have come to America and worked their way out of poverty and into the mainstream. Why haven’t blacks followed the example of these other groups?
There are a number of reasons why black Americans are unlike immigrants. First, blacks are not only ethnically different from white immigrant groups but racially different as well. Even at a distance, they are visibly distinguishable from European immigrants due to their dark skin color. European ethnicities have become much less relevant to most white people, but skin color remains a salient feature in our society. And, although most European immigrants did face hostility and discrimination upon their arrival here, it soon dissipated along with their “foreign accents” as they assimilated as whites into American culture.
For people of African descent the notion of America being an ethnic melting pot largely failed to become a reality. Blacks have never been able to blend in and become part of the larger American group even though, as a people, they have really tried.
They have tried to work alongside whites, live in neighborhoods with whites, go to school with whites, volunteer to fight wars with whites, learn to speak like whites and even engaged in such ridiculous behaviors as employing skin whiteners to look more like whites. Despite all this, white Americans on the whole have not been capable of seeing beyond their differences in skin color. Hence, for African-Americans, race and color differences have never ceased to be a road block to their integration into larger society.
Psychologists have long known that the perception of a difference has a powerful impact on how we feel about people and interact with them. The greater the perceived visual difference, the greater the believed difference in another’s underlying attributes. Even blacks who are white in every other respect except skin color — for example, in how they talk and dress, who their friends are, who they vote for, or pray to, and even how they think about other blacks — are still at the end of the day perceived as being different and therefore not really one of the majority group.
A second reason blacks differ from immigrants is that the vast majority are not immigrants but [have ancestors who] came to this country as slaves. They spent 246 years in slavery: that’s 10 generations in bondage, with no control over their labor or livelihoods and, of course, without civil or legal rights of any kind.
Imagine the impact this would have on any group of people. In most instances, this group had no cognizance of a common history or shared cultural identity to sustain it. It is fair to say that these individuals were largely defined by who they were not, rather than who they were.
Suppose for a minute that we took all the white ethnic groups — Germans, Italians, Jews, Swedes, Irish, etc. — and forced them all into one group so that they had no sense of ethnic group identity, culture, language or history to sustain them after they arrived in this country. What a tremendous disadvantage this would have been to their group development and progress in America.
While it is true that blacks have been here for centuries, it was not until the 1960s that many black people had the legal rights and privileges given to most white ethnics immediately upon their arrival to America. This is a fact of major importance when attempting to compare blacks to any other ethnic or racial group in America, but one which many Americans overlook, dismiss and sometimes choose to deny.
The topic of slavery and its very real and lasting damage to black people is something that Americans have not yet been capable of addressing. The indignities of slavery were followed by 100 years of Jim Crow during which blacks were legally denied access to good educations, adequate housing, equal public facilities and fair working opportunities. Both the GI Bill and Social Security were largely denied to them. These and other disenfranchisements are the foundation for today’s enormous black-white wealth gap. In short, blacks have been denied access to much of what made America the land of opportunity.
So, some would ask, what about immigrants of color, such as Asians, Latinos and even other people of African descent? Why can they come to America and often do better than indigenous poor blacks?
Clearly, some groups come to America better prepared to take advantage of the opportunity that does exist. Immigrants – including black immigrants – frequently come to this country with empty pockets but rarely with empty heads. Human capital has been and continues to be a major contributor to the success of many newly arriving immigrants.
They often come from countries where they were artisans, bakers, pipe fitters, tailors, farmers, chefs, managers and entrepreneurs. In contrast, many American blacks never had the chance to acquire significant levels of human capital. Whatever skills and talents they had when they arrived were quickly devalued in favor of agricultural slave labor, and many have never had the opportunity to learn or acquire even the most basic skills needed for success in an increasingly industrialized society.
Third, immigrants are often the most talented and well-to-do among their own racial and or ethnic groups. It is not uncommon to see physicians, scientists or professionals from Third World countries and assume they are representative of individuals from those countries; they are not. Frequently, they are from the most privileged families and classes within their respective countries. Although perhaps not rich, some come with sufficient financial capital to launch and support the start of small businesses or to back relatives who want to start a business. Their immigration here is an example of what is referred to as the “brain drain,” that is, the best trained and educated of other countries leave their countries to achieve greater benefits in the country to which they immigrate.
Fourth, immigrants as a group are exceptionally motivated. Almost daily, we learn about individuals who are willing to risk their lives for an opportunity at a better economic life. They are willing to board unseaworthy rafts and boats to cross an ocean, while armed with the knowledge that many others before them have died attempting such a voyage. Some will climb border fences, swim rivers and even risk encountering right-wing border militias in search of better economic opportunities. It has probably always been the case that those who were willing to leave the country, or the farm, or the village and come to the “promised land” of opportunity have been more ambitious and motivated than their counterparts who elected to stay behind.
Finally, some contend that blacks should compare themselves to the poor in other countries, such as those in Africa or Asia. Comments like “blacks should be thankful for not being as poor as people in Africa” are common. The problem with asking blacks to compare themselves to people in other countries is that blacks are Americans. Most were born in this country, they pay taxes in this country and they fight and die in all of its wars.
It is true that black Americans feel that America owes them something, and that is to be treated like white Americans. Expecting them to compare their standards of living to noncitizens is not only insulting to them as people who have helped to build this country, but is also unfair to them as American citizens.
In large part, blacks have been segregated not just from most other racial and ethnic groups, but also from the American immigrant experience and the gradual opening of opportunities that have characteristically come with it.
Here is “An Open Letter to Black African Immigrants” from Nadege Seppou:
Dear Black African immigrant,
The America you dreamt of is an America you never conceived of.
You are officially black. In your country you were just you, no color attached to your identity, but now you are black. Stop saying I am Nigerian, I am Zimbabwean, or I am Kenyan. America doesn’t care about any of that, in America you are simply black. You will try to fight, deny, and resist every time someone calls you black. You resist your newly prescribed blackness because a ladder of racial hierarchy exists in America.
Sooner than later, you will realize your blackness puts you at the bottom of this ladder irrespective of the educational or financial status you acquire. Every rejection of your new found blackness will be an attempt to move away from the bottom of this ladder, to resist the label that the color of your skin has subjected you to. It takes some time getting used to, you know, this whole race and being black thing, but sooner that later you will understand America’s tribalism and you will learn to navigate through it.
People will hold stereotypes about you. Some might ask if you’ve lived on trees and or jungles and others won’t even ask, they’ll assume you did. Others will think your entire existence has been defined by hunger and poverty. In case you haven’t noticed you sound different, you do. And people will not fail to remind you of the obvious, your accent. Some may laugh and others will make you repeat words and sentences over and over again because they are unable to “understand.” You will be very confused and will think to yourself, “But I speak better English than you.” Despite all these, do not be ashamed of your identity. Don’t allow people’s ignorance harden your heart towards them. As much as you possibly can, dismantle these stereotypes by telling the other stories they haven’t been exposed to.
White Americans will say you are better than American blacks, but please do not fall for this trap. You will be told you behave better, work harder, and are more educated than American blacks. You will be tempted to agree and will sometimes want to shout, “YES, I’M NOT LIKE THEM, WE AFRICANS ARE DIFFERENT!” Just don’t...don’t even think it.
The praise of your acquired characteristic and culture becomes a justification for white Americans to perpetuate discriminatory treatments towards American blacks. These statements of praise have an underlying message of, “If Africans can do so well then surely racism has nothing to do with anything, therefore, American Blacks are to be blamed for their condition in America”. This problematic line of reasoning sustains cultural racism. I beg of you, refrain from nodding in agreement when you receive such faulty praise.
Navigating through America’s complex social construct is a process. The sooner you become conscious of the nuances involved, the better for Black America as a whole.
With love,
Another Black African immigrant
Six. Were reparations considered radical at the beginning of America’s history?
We read that the ideas about reparations were mainstream. Coates lists many slave-owners and nonslave-owners alike who recompensed former slaves.
All the while, Coates points out, there has been a counter sentiment toward reparations. As Coates quotes from a Chicago Tribune editorial from 1891 as to why black Americans should be grateful for being enslaved here and should not ask for reparations: “They have been taught Christian civilization, and to speak the noble English language instead of some African gibberish. The account is square with the ex-slaves.”
Is the account square? Were blacks brought over from Africa lavished with the moral purity, virtues and glories of Christianity?
Coates will have none of this. He makes the case that not only have African-Americans been systematically used and exploited, kept down by the man, as it were, but that their exploitation has fueled wealth and privilege for whites. The economic powerhouse that dominated the world was the result of slavery and this evil institution rested on the fallacious religion, not of Christianity, but of White Supremacy.
Seven. What is the history of democracy in America?
Democracy is white democracy, and this white democracy could not flourish without “black plunder.” As Coates writes in the beginning of Part IV., “America begins in black plunder and white democracy, two features that are not contradictory but complementary.”
White Supremacy, accompanied by a fear, hatred, and dehumanization of blacks, had not grown into the evil monster it was at its peak during the Civil war. As Coates points out, “When enslaved Africans, plundered of their bodies, plundered of their families, and plundered of their labor, were brought to the colony of Virginia in 1619, they did not initially endure the naked racism that would engulf their progeny. Some of them were freed. Some of them intermarried. Still others escaped with the white indentured servants who had suffered as they had.”
Sadly, Coates observes, 100 years later any kind of alliance between poor whites and blacks would be impossible because the lies of White Supremacy had taken hold of white people like a malignant cancer.
The law supported this vile racism. As Coates writes, “For the next 250 years, American law worked to reduce black people to a class of untouchables and raise all white men to the level of citizens.”
From the beginning of American history, the great divide was not the rich and the poor but the white and the black.
The white wealth was built on slavery. As we read, “Nearly one-fourth of all white Southerners owned slaves, and upon their backs the economic basis of America—and much of the Atlantic world—was erected. In the seven cotton states, one-third of all white income was derived from slavery. By 1840, cotton produced by slave labor constituted 59 percent of the country’s exports.”
To underscore his point, Coates quotes Yale historian David W. Blight: “In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together.”
Coates writes, “The vending of the black body and the sundering of the black family became an economy unto themselves, estimated to have brought in tens of millions of dollars to antebellum America. In 1860 there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the country.”
This wealth was built on crimes against humanity, specifically crimes against black people. As we read:
When the wife and children of Henry Brown, a slave in Richmond, Virginia, were to be sold away, Brown searched for a white master who might buy his wife and children to keep the family together. He failed:
The next day, I stationed myself by the side of the road, along which the slaves, amounting to three hundred and fifty, were to pass. The purchaser of my wife was a Methodist minister, who was about starting for North Carolina. Pretty soon five waggon-loads of little children passed, and looking at the foremost one, what should I see but a little child, pointing its tiny hand towards me, exclaiming, “There’s my father; I knew he would come and bid me good-bye.” It was my eldest child! Soon the gang approached in which my wife was chained. I looked, and beheld her familiar face; but O, reader, that glance of agony! may God spare me ever again enduring the excruciating horror of that moment! She passed, and came near to where I stood. I seized hold of her hand, intending to bid her farewell; but words failed me; the gift of utterance had fled, and I remained speechless. I followed her for some distance, with her hand grasped in mine, as if to save her from her fate, but I could not speak, and I was obliged to turn away in silence.
In a time when telecommunications were primitive and blacks lacked freedom of movement, the parting of black families was a kind of murder. Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy—in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America’s rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy. The labor strife that seeded Bacon’s rebellion was suppressed. America’s indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values. Assessing antebellum democracy in Virginia, a visitor from England observed that the state’s natives “can profess an unbounded love of liberty and of democracy in consequence of the mass of the people, who in other countries might become mobs, being there nearly altogether composed of their own Negro slaves.”
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