Final Capstone Essay based on Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations"
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.
Course Objectives:
- Evaluate arguments in terms of bias, credibility, and relevance.
- Assess an argument's claims by examining assumptions, by differentiating between facts and inferences, by recognizing errors in logic, by analyzing support, and by identifying both explicit and implied conclusions.
- Recognize and assess argumentative claims embedded in literary works, advertisements, political tracts, and presentations in other media.
- Express critical viewpoints and develop original arguments in response to social, political, and philosophical issues and/or to works of literature and literary theory.
- Demonstrate the ability to evaluate electronic sources and databases, to incorporate research from on-line and print media, and to compose unified, coherent, fully supported argumentative essays that advance their claims by integrating primary and secondary sources, and by employing the tools of critical interpretation, evaluation, and analysis.
Student Learning Outcomes:
Upon completion of this course, students will:
- Compose an argumentative essay that shows an ability to support a claim using analysis, elements of argumentation, and integration of primary and secondary sources.
- Identify and assess bias, credibility, and relevance in their own arguments and in the arguments of others, including primary and secondary outside sources.
- Write an essay that is correct in MLA format, paragraph composition, sentence structure, grammar, spelling, and usage.
Course Catalog Description:
This course focuses on the development of critical thinking skills. Students will apply these skills to the analysis of written arguments in various forms and genres, both classic and contemporary, and to the writing of effective persuasive essays. Students will learn to evaluate and interpret data, to recognize assumptions, to distinguish facts from opinions, to identify and avoid logical fallacies, to employ deductive and inductive reasoning, and to effectively assert and support argumentative claims.
One. Express critical viewpoints and develop original thesis-driven arguments in response to social, political, and philosophical issues and/or to works of literature and literary theory. This argumentative essay will be well organized, demonstrate an ability to support a claim using analysis and elements of argumentation, and integrate primary and secondary sources.
Two. Use at least three sources and not over-rely on one secondary source for most of the information. The students should use multiple sources and synthesize the information found in them.
Three. Address issues of bias, credibility, and relevance in primary and secondary sources.
Four. Demonstrate understanding of analytical methods and structural concepts such as inductive and deductive reasoning, cause and effect, logos, ethos, and pathos, and the recognition of formal and informal fallacies in language and thought.
Five. Use MLA format for the document, in-text citations, and Works Cited page.
Six. Integrate quotations and paraphrases using signal phrases and analysis or commentary.
Seven. Sustain the argument, use transitions effectively, and use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Resources
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 Case for American History" (response to above)
"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"
One. How were black slaves equated with property?
Coates writes:
The consequences of 250 years of enslavement, of war upon black families and black people, were profound. Like homeownership today, slave ownership was aspirational, attracting not just those who owned slaves but those who wished to. Much as homeowners today might discuss the addition of a patio or the painting of a living room, slaveholders traded tips on the best methods for breeding workers, exacting labor, and doling out punishment. Just as a homeowner today might subscribe to a magazine like This Old House, slaveholders had journals such as De Bow’s Review, which recommended the best practices for wringing profits from slaves. By the dawn of the Civil War, the enslavement of black America was thought to be so foundational to the country that those who sought to end it were branded heretics worthy of death. Imagine what would happen if a president today came out in favor of taking all American homes from their owners: the reaction might well be violent.
We see to this day, especially in the South but not limited there, that there are sympathizers of the Confederacy who erect the Confederate flag and talk about “state rights” and “Northern aggression” in the context of slavery. For them, their white identity rests on the “right” to have slavery. For them “state rights” really means the right to own slaves. To discuss this topic in front of these sympathizers to this day is to endanger one’s own life.
Two. How did terrorism afflict black Americans?
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Radical Republicans attempted to reconstruct the country upon something resembling universal equality—but they were beaten back by a campaign of “Redemption,” led by White Liners, Red Shirts, and Klansmen bent on upholding a society “formed for the white, not for the black man.” A wave of terrorism roiled the South. In his massive history Reconstruction, Eric Foner recounts incidents of black people being attacked for not removing their hats; for refusing to hand over a whiskey flask; for disobeying church procedures; for “using insolent language”; for disputing labor contracts; for refusing to be “tied like a slave. . . . “
Terrorism carried the day. Federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877. The dream of Reconstruction died. For the next century, political violence was visited upon blacks wantonly, with special treatment meted out toward black people of ambition. Black schools and churches were burned to the ground. Black voters and the political candidates who attempted to rally them were intimidated, and some were murdered. At the end of World War I, black veterans returning to their homes were assaulted for daring to wear the American uniform. The demobilization of soldiers after the war, which put white and black veterans into competition for scarce jobs, produced the Red Summer of 1919: a succession of racist pogroms against dozens of cities ranging from Longview, Texas, to Chicago to Washington, D.C. Organized white violence against blacks continued into the 1920s—in 1921 a white mob leveled Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” and in 1923 another one razed the black town of Rosewood, Florida—and virtually no one was punished.
Three. What was the racist practice of redlining?
We read:
Whereas shortly before the New Deal, a typical mortgage required a large down payment and full repayment within about 10 years, the creation of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in 1933 and then the Federal Housing Administration the following year allowed banks to offer loans requiring no more than 10 percent down, amortized over 20 to 30 years. “Without federal intervention in the housing market, massive suburbanization would have been impossible,” writes Thomas J. Sugrue, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. “In 1930, only 30 percent of Americans owned their own homes; by 1960, more than 60 percent were home owners. Home ownership became an emblem of American citizenship.”
That emblem was not to be awarded to blacks. The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.” A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesirables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters—and “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.”
The federal government concurred. It was the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, not a private trade association, that pioneered the practice of redlining, selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it insured be covered by a restrictive covenant—a clause in the deed forbidding the sale of the property to anyone other than whites. Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods.
Four. How has the plunder of black Americans continued after slavery?
We read:
The federal government is premised on equal fealty from all its citizens, who in return are to receive equal treatment. But as late as the mid-20th century, this bargain was not granted to black people, who repeatedly paid a higher price for citizenship and received less in return. Plunder had been the essential feature of slavery, of the society described by Calhoun. But practically a full century after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the plunder—quiet, systemic, submerged—continued even amidst the aims and achievements of New Deal liberals.
Other examples of the plunder, in addition to predatory lending, are the profits made from mass incarceration, and the criminalizing of poverty, which leads to municipal violations.
This plundering of blacks is not perceived correctly by liberals. As we read:
Liberals today mostly view racism not as an active, distinct evil but as a relative of white poverty and inequality. They ignore the long tradition of this country actively punishing black success—and the elevation of that punishment, in the mid-20th century, to federal policy. President Lyndon Johnson may have noted in his historic civil-rights speech at Howard University in 1965 that “Negro poverty is not white poverty.” But his advisers and their successors were, and still are, loath to craft any policy that recognizes the difference.
Five. How does Coates counter argue the notion that “fatherhood is the great antidote” to problems in the black community?
Coates writes:
From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder. Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon a lucrative target for rapacious speculators. Contract sellers did not target the very poor. They targeted black people who had worked hard enough to save a down payment and dreamed of the emblem of American citizenship—homeownership. It was not a tangle of pathology that put a target on Clyde Ross’s back. It was not a culture of poverty that singled out Mattie Lewis for “the thrill of the chase and the kill.” Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.
Six. Why does Coates argue that reparations are a superior means for exacting justice to affirmative action?
Coates writes:
The urge to use the moral force of the black struggle to address broader inequalities originates in both compassion and pragmatism. But it makes for ambiguous policy. Affirmative action’s precise aims, for instance, have always proved elusive. Is it meant to make amends for the crimes heaped upon black people? Not according to the Supreme Court. In its 1978 ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Court rejected “societal discrimination” as “an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past.” Is affirmative action meant to increase “diversity”? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people—the problem of what America has taken from them over several centuries.
This confusion about affirmative action’s aims, along with our inability to face up to the particular history of white-imposed black disadvantage, dates back to the policy’s origins. “There is no fixed and firm definition of affirmative action,” an appointee in Johnson’s Department of Labor declared. “Affirmative action is anything that you have to do to get results. But this does not necessarily include preferential treatment.”
Yet America was built on the preferential treatment of white people—395 years of it. Vaguely endorsing a cuddly, feel-good diversity does very little to redress this.
Seven. According to Coates, what is the foundation of America that has been swept under the carpet as America wallows in its Myth of Fairness and Innocence?
Coates writes:
To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy, to pretend that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of unregulated capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with the sin of national lying. The lie ignores the fact that reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same. The lie ignores the fact that closing the “achievement gap” will do nothing to close the “injury gap,” in which black college graduates still suffer higher unemployment rates than white college graduates, and black job applicants without criminal records enjoy roughly the same chance of getting hired as white applicants with criminal records.
Eight. What are the two main reasons Coates champions reparations?
The first is lost money. As we read:
Scholars have long discussed methods by which America might make reparations to those on whose labor and exclusion the country was built. In the 1970s, the Yale Law professor Boris Bittker argued in The Case for Black Reparations that a rough price tag for reparations could be determined by multiplying the number of African Americans in the population by the difference in white and black per capita income. That number—$34 billion in 1973, when Bittker wrote his book—could be added to a reparations program each year for a decade or two. Today Charles Ogletree, the Harvard Law School professor, argues for something broader: a program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.
To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America’s origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte.
Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap. Reparations would seek to close this chasm. But as surely as the creation of the wealth gap required the cooperation of every aspect of the society, bridging it will require the same.
**
The second reason is intangible: The much needed history lesson to correct the Myth of American Innocence. As we read:
Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate—the kind that HR 40 proposes—we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world.
Coates continues to discuss the basics of this unjust American history:
The early american economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about “black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer.
And this destruction did not end with slavery. Discriminatory laws joined the equal burden of citizenship to unequal distribution of its bounty. These laws reached their apex in the mid-20th century, when the federal government—through housing policies—engineered the wealth gap, which remains with us to this day. When we think of white supremacy, we picture colored only signs, but we should picture pirate flags.
On some level, we have always grasped this.
Coates continues:
We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past—at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it.
And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.
Nine. How does Coates refute the notion that reparations will divide us?
Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.
What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.
Ten. Why does Coates bring up the reparations debate in Germany?
Coates writes:
We are not the first to be summoned to such a challenge.
In 1952, when West Germany began the process of making amends for the Holocaust, it did so under conditions that should be instructive to us. Resistance was violent. Very few Germans believed that Jews were entitled to anything. Only 5 percent of West Germans surveyed reported feeling guilty about the Holocaust, and only 29 percent believed that Jews were owed restitution from the German people.
“The rest,” the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, Postwar, “were divided between those (some two-fifths of respondents) who thought that only people ‘who really committed something’ were responsible and should pay, and those (21 percent) who thought ‘that the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich.’ ”
Germany’s unwillingness to squarely face its history went beyond polls. Movies that suggested a societal responsibility for the Holocaust beyond Hitler were banned. “The German soldier fought bravely and honorably for his homeland,” claimed President Eisenhower, endorsing the Teutonic national myth. Judt wrote, “Throughout the fifties West German officialdom encouraged a comfortable view of the German past in which the Wehrmacht was heroic, while Nazis were in a minority and properly punished.”
Konrad Adenauer, the postwar German chancellor, was in favor of reparations, but his own party was divided, and he was able to get an agreement passed only with the votes of the Social Democratic opposition.
Coates continues:
The reparations conversation set off a wave of bomb attempts by Israeli militants. One was aimed at the foreign ministry in Tel Aviv. Another was aimed at Chancellor Adenauer himself. And one was aimed at the port of Haifa, where the goods bought with reparations money were arriving. West Germany ultimately agreed to pay Israel 3.45 billion deutsche marks, or more than $7 billion in today’s dollars. Individual reparations claims followed—for psychological trauma, for offense to Jewish honor, for halting law careers, for life insurance, for time spent in concentration camps. Seventeen percent of funds went toward purchasing ships. “By the end of 1961, these reparations vessels constituted two-thirds of the Israeli merchant fleet,” writes the Israeli historian Tom Segev in his book The Seventh Million. “From 1953 to 1963, the reparations money funded about a third of the total investment in Israel’s electrical system, which tripled its capacity, and nearly half the total investment in the railways.”
Israel’s GNP tripled during the 12 years of the agreement. The Bank of Israel attributed 15 percent of this growth, along with 45,000 jobs, to investments made with reparations money. But Segev argues that the impact went far beyond that. Reparations “had indisputable psychological and political importance,” he writes.
Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. But they did launch Germany’s reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name.
Assessing the reparations agreement, David Ben-Gurion said:
For the first time in the history of relations between people, a precedent has been created by which a great State, as a result of moral pressure alone, takes it upon itself to pay compensation to the victims of the government that preceded it. For the first time in the history of a people that has been persecuted, oppressed, plundered and despoiled for hundreds of years in the countries of Europe, a persecutor and despoiler has been obliged to return part of his spoils and has even undertaken to make collective reparation as partial compensation for material losses.
Something more than moral pressure calls America to reparations. We cannot escape our history. All of our solutions to the great problems of health care, education, housing, and economic inequality are troubled by what must go unspoken. “The reason black people are so far behind now is not because of now,” Clyde Ross told me. “It’s because of then.” In the early 2000s, Charles Ogletree went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to meet with the survivors of the 1921 race riot that had devastated “Black Wall Street.” The past was not the past to them. “It was amazing seeing these black women and men who were crippled, blind, in wheelchairs,” Ogletree told me. “I had no idea who they were and why they wanted to see me. They said, ‘We want you to represent us in this lawsuit.’ ”
Eleven. Can we put a price tag on these reparations?
Coates writes:
Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.
Summary of Coates' Reasons for Supporting Reparations
One. Predatory, discriminatory housing laws plundered African-Americans’ money in the past and present for lining the coffers of white people.
Two. Black lives—including the very body—were plundered as part of America’s Kleptocracy in which white slave owners and business people became millionaires at a rate faster than in any part of the world.
Three. Reparations are not a radical, fringe idea but have historical precedent in mainstream thought from the Colonial period in America, to post WWII Germany, and to post WWII America (we gave reparations to Japanese Americans who suffered in the internment camps in 1988).
Four. Centuries of racial discrimination and Jim Crow laws have created “ecologically distinct” poverty communities that perpetuate poverty. These communities are deserts of opportunity, nutrition, jobs, education, health care, etc., and no one in their right mind would want to live in these places. They are hell on earth, places long abandoned and ignored by the rest of America.
Five. Four hundred years of racial discrimination have created a social stigma in which blacks are perceived as being the lowest on the totem pole. It is difficult to measure the psychological effects of this demonization and social stigma. It is difficult to measure the plunder of identity of a people taken here on ships and told for centuries that they are subhuman and mere pieces of property to be bartered and sold like cattle. In contrast, African blacks who immigrate to America navigate the American Dream in the absence of this incomprehensible psychological baggage.
Six. The powerhouse of the American economy that made it a dominant economy in the world before the Civil War and made whites in the South the richest people in the world was built on the blood of slavery.
Seven. The plunder of African-Americans continues centuries after slavery. They are demonized, left in the inner city opportunity deserts, and plucked off the streets into the Industrial Prison Complex, part of a privatized multi-billion-dollar business that employs over 2.5 million Americans and has created an immoral economy on the backs of people of color.
Eight. Reparations are superior to Affirmative Action whose aims remain vague and wishy-washy. In contrast, reparations have a clear objective: To recompense African-Americans for money lost and to correct the Myth of American Innocence.
Nine. Reparations are a corrective to America’s Great Lie: Its Myth of Innocence and Equality. Destroying this Myth is an essential part of a moral reckoning and spiritual awakening.
This Great Lie is so deep that millions of white Americans, especially in the South, still worship the lie of White Supremacy and believe they have the “right” to own slaves and that slave ownership is essential to their “white identity” and the “legacy of honoring their white ancestors.” These white people engage in all sorts of mythologies, erecting statues of white Confederate generals in front of government buildings, waving Confederate flags, and re-enacting the Civil War in which the Confederate Army is venerated of a noble mission. All of these romantic mythologies sweep the evils of slavery under the carpet and are therefore a lie and a moral abomination.
Opposition to Coates
Opposition #1: We should help people based on economic class, not race.
In his essay "Why Precisely is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations?" Coates writes:
This is the “class first” approach, originating in the myth that racism and socialism are necessarily incompatible. But raising the minimum wage doesn’t really address the fact that black men without criminal records have about the same shot at low-wage work as white men with them; nor can making college free address the wage gap between black and white graduates. Housing discrimination, historical and present, may well be the fulcrum of white supremacy. Affirmative action is one of the most disputed issues of the day. Neither are addressed in the “racial justice” section of Sanders platform.
Sanders’s anti-racist moderation points to a candidate who is not merely against reparations, but one who doesn’t actually understand the argument. To briefly restate it, from 1619 until at least the late 1960s, American institutions, businesses, associations, and governments—federal, state, and local—repeatedly plundered black communities. Their methods included everything from land-theft, to red-lining, to disenfranchisement, to convict-lease labor, to lynching, to enslavement, to the vending of children. So large was this plunder that America, as we know it today, is simply unimaginable without it. Its great universities were founded on it. Its early economy was built by it. Its suburbs were financed by it. Its deadliest war was the result of it.
One can’t evade these facts by changing the subject. Some months ago, black radicals in the Black Lives Matters movement protested Sanders. They were, in the main, jeered by the white left for their efforts. But judged by his platform, Sanders should be directly confronted and asked why his political imagination is so active against plutocracy, but so limited against white supremacy. Jim Crow and its legacy were not merely problems of disproportionate poverty. Why should black voters support a candidate who does not recognize this?
Opposition #2: A trillion-dollar payment would result in $20,000 for every African-American. This would make a symbolic statement, but not be enough to make a significant difference in changing the power hierarchy. Not even a 3 trillion dollar payment would make a real difference.
We could concede that the above is true; however 20K could help someone go to college and make a small dent in helping that person. That is better than nothing.
But overall, the sad truth is that even a trillion-dollar payment is a "drop in the bucket" and that "The Man" will still be the "shot caller."
Opposition #3: "Distant harm from centuries ago does not affect African-Americans today."
We could counter argue that segregation still exists, environmental deserts still exist, the wealth gap still exists, and mass incarceration, a form of profit for the government and big business built on mostly people of color flourishes today.
Opposition #4: If we give reparations to African-Americans, where does all this reparations business end? What about migrant workers who are exploited in the fields and forced to work for a subhuman wage? What about the stolen wages from immigrants in the restaurant business? Is it fair to give reparations to one disadvantaged group but not another?
We should give reparations to ALL people. Coates' argument is not to give reparations to one group at the exclusion of another. To say so is to commit a Straw Man fallacy.
Opposition #5: As Shelby Steele contends, the reparations movement encourages victimization, dependence, and infantilization in the black community, traits that contradict the heroism and warriorhood of great Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King.
But the above could said to be a Straw Man Fallacy. Some might counter by observing that too many whites are playing "victims" to "reverse racism," too many whites show an unhealthy dependence on their white privilege, and too many whites are "infants" in their refusal to accept responsibility for America's original sin: a country whose wealth and identity were built on racism, slavery, and Jim Crow.
Opposition #6: Kevin Williamson observes that Coates' argument isn't really for reparations but for America to expose the truth about the depths of racism in American history. We read from Williamson's refutation essay:
Mr. Coates does not make the case so much for reparations as for a South Africa–style truth-and-reconciliation commission. “The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.” The purpose of a debate on a reparations bill of the sort being offered by John Conyers Jr. is not so much to construct a program of economic compensation as it is to have another verse of that Democratic hymn, an honest conversation about race. (As though we ever talked about anything else.) And this gets to the real defect in Mr. Coates’s approach. The purpose of public policy in this area can be one of two things. The first is a program focused on trying to improve in real terms the lives of those who are poorly off and those born into circumstances that are likely to lead to their being poorly off adults, proceeding with the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that such programs will disproportionately benefit black Americans, as they should. The second option is a symbolic political process designed to confer a degree of psychic satisfaction on relatively well-off men and women such as Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Opposition #7: Williamson charges that Coates' reparations arguments encourages tribalism, which is anti-liberal and anti-democratic:
Once that fact is acknowledged, then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress. Mr. Coates also, I think, miscalculates what the real-world effects of converting our liberal conception of justice into a system of racial appropriation might mean. There are still, after all, an awful lot of white people, and though many of them might be inclined to make amends under some sort of racial truce following the process Mr. Coates imagines, many of them might simply be inclined to prevail. The fact is that the situation of African Americans in the United States has improved precisely to the extent that whites have begun to forgo tribalism and to genuinely commit themselves to the principles of liberalism, the long march toward a more perfect Union. The alternative — a system of exclusive interests in which black and white operate effectively in opposition — is not only morally repugnant, but likely to undermine the genuine political and economic interests of African Americans.
Lesson Three:
Counterargument and Rebuttal
Daily Kos Response to Above Video
"Shelby Steele and the Exhilaration of Terror and Freedom"
"The Case Against Reparations"
"The Case for American History" (response to above)
Review: Opposition to Coates
Opposition #1: We should help people based on economic class, not race.
In his essay "Why Precisely is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations?" Coates writes:
This is the “class first” approach, originating in the myth that racism and socialism are necessarily incompatible. But raising the minimum wage doesn’t really address the fact that black men without criminal records have about the same shot at low-wage work as white men with them; nor can making college free address the wage gap between black and white graduates. Housing discrimination, historical and present, may well be the fulcrum of white supremacy. Affirmative action is one of the most disputed issues of the day. Neither are addressed in the “racial justice” section of Sanders platform.
Sanders’s anti-racist moderation points to a candidate who is not merely against reparations, but one who doesn’t actually understand the argument. To briefly restate it, from 1619 until at least the late 1960s, American institutions, businesses, associations, and governments—federal, state, and local—repeatedly plundered black communities. Their methods included everything from land-theft, to red-lining, to disenfranchisement, to convict-lease labor, to lynching, to enslavement, to the vending of children. So large was this plunder that America, as we know it today, is simply unimaginable without it. Its great universities were founded on it. Its early economy was built by it. Its suburbs were financed by it. Its deadliest war was the result of it.
One can’t evade these facts by changing the subject. Some months ago, black radicals in the Black Lives Matters movement protested Sanders. They were, in the main, jeered by the white left for their efforts. But judged by his platform, Sanders should be directly confronted and asked why his political imagination is so active against plutocracy, but so limited against white supremacy. Jim Crow and its legacy were not merely problems of disproportionate poverty. Why should black voters support a candidate who does not recognize this?
Opposition #2: A trillion-dollar payment would result in $20,000 for every African-American. This would make a symbolic statement, but not be enough to make a significant difference in changing the power hierarchy. Not even a 3 trillion dollar payment would make a real difference.
We could concede that the above is true; however 20K could help someone go to college and make a small dent in helping that person. That is better than nothing.
But overall, the sad truth is that even a trillion-dollar payment is a "drop in the bucket" and that "The Man" will still be the "shot caller."
Opposition #3: "Distant harm from centuries ago does not affect African-Americans today."
We could counter argue that segregation still exists, environmental deserts still exist, the wealth gap still exists, and mass incarceration, a form of profit for the government and big business built on mostly people of color flourishes today.
Opposition #4: If we give reparations to African-Americans, where does all this reparations business end? What about migrant workers who are exploited in the fields and forced to work for a subhuman wage? What about the stolen wages from immigrants in the restaurant business? Is it fair to give reparations to one disadvantaged group but not another?
We should give reparations to ALL people. Coates' argument is not to give reparations to one group at the exclusion of another. To say so is to commit a Straw Man fallacy.
Opposition #5: As Shelby Steele contends, the reparations movement encourages victimization, dependence, and infantilization in the black community, traits that contradict the heroism and warriorhood of great Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King.
But the above could said to be a Straw Man Fallacy. Some might counter by observing that too many whites are playing "victims" to "reverse racism," too many whites show an unhealthy dependence on their white privilege, and too many whites are "infants" in their refusal to accept responsibility for America's original sin: a country whose wealth and identity were built on racism, slavery, and Jim Crow.
Opposition #6: Kevin Williamson observes that Coates' argument isn't really for reparations but for America to expose the truth about the depths of racism in American history. We read from Williamson's refutation essay:
Mr. Coates does not make the case so much for reparations as for a South Africa–style truth-and-reconciliation commission. “The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.” The purpose of a debate on a reparations bill of the sort being offered by John Conyers Jr. is not so much to construct a program of economic compensation as it is to have another verse of that Democratic hymn, an honest conversation about race. (As though we ever talked about anything else.) And this gets to the real defect in Mr. Coates’s approach. The purpose of public policy in this area can be one of two things. The first is a program focused on trying to improve in real terms the lives of those who are poorly off and those born into circumstances that are likely to lead to their being poorly off adults, proceeding with the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that such programs will disproportionately benefit black Americans, as they should. The second option is a symbolic political process designed to confer a degree of psychic satisfaction on relatively well-off men and women such as Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Opposition #7: Williamson charges that Coates' reparations arguments encourages tribalism, which is anti-liberal and anti-democratic:
Once that fact is acknowledged, then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress. Mr. Coates also, I think, miscalculates what the real-world effects of converting our liberal conception of justice into a system of racial appropriation might mean. There are still, after all, an awful lot of white people, and though many of them might be inclined to make amends under some sort of racial truce following the process Mr. Coates imagines, many of them might simply be inclined to prevail. The fact is that the situation of African Americans in the United States has improved precisely to the extent that whites have begun to forgo tribalism and to genuinely commit themselves to the principles of liberalism, the long march toward a more perfect Union. The alternative — a system of exclusive interests in which black and white operate effectively in opposition — is not only morally repugnant, but likely to undermine the genuine political and economic interests of African Americans.
Coates' Rebuttals to Williamson
Rebutal #1: Williams charges that reparations are a form of racial apportionment, but according to Coates reparations are not about racial apportionment; they are about injury apportionment. As Coates argues:
Williamson says he is opposed to "converting the liberal Anglo-American tradition of justice into a system of racial apportionment." He then observes that, in fact, that tradition, itself, has always been deeply concerned with "racial apportionment." Thus within the second paragraph, Williamson is undermining his own thesis—if the Anglo-American tradition is what he concedes it to be, no "converting" is required. We reverse polarity for a time, and then we all live happily ever after.
Or probably not. That is because Williamson's entire framing is wrong. Reparations are not due because black people are black, but because black people have been injured. And the Anglo-American tradition has never been a system of "racial apportionment," but of racist apportionment. Like most writers and public intellectuals (liberal and conservative) Williamson's reply is rooted in the idea of "race" as constant—i.e. there is a "black race" that can be traced back to Africa, and a "white race" that can be traced back to Europe. There certainly is such a thing as African and European ancestry, and that ancestry is not entirely irrelevant to our world. But ancestry is tangential, and sometimes wholly unrelated, to racism, injury, and reparations.
We know this because there is no constant idea of "black" or "white" across time or space. We know this because Charlie Patton fathered the blues, andAlessandro de Medici ruled in Venice. Black in America is not black in Brazil, and black in modern America is not even black in 18th-century Louisiana. Nor are people we consider "white" today any sort of constant. Throughout American history it has been common to speak of an "Italian race," an "Irish race," a "Frankish race," a "Jewish race" even a "Southern race." One might take a hard look at Williamson's agreeable portrait, for instance, and note the problem of assigning anyone to a race. "Race," writes the imminent historian Nell Irvin Painter, "is an idea, not a fact."
In this country, at this moment, "African-Americans" are an ethnic group comprised of individuals of varying degrees of direct African ancestry. Nothing about this fact necessitated plunder or injury, and it is the injury—through red-lining, black codes, slaves codes, lynching, ghettoization, fraud, rape, and murder—with which reparations concerns itself. The point is not "racial apportionment," which is to say giving people things because they are black. It is injury apportionment, which is to say restoring things to people who have been plundered.
Rebuttal #2: Williamson and others point out that reparations money won't make a difference in the distribution of wealth. Coates' reply is this:
Racism, and its progeny white supremacy, is concerned with dividing human beings, on the basis of ancestry (which is very real) and slotting them into a hierarchy (which is an invention). "Race" is that hierarchy—and any study of the word across history bears out its relationship to assigning value and scale across humanity. In polite society we've moved past overtly hierarchal ideas about "race," but the problem of imprecise naming remains with us. Let us bypass that imprecision—the Anglo-American tradition which Williamson extolls has, as he concedes, sought to erect and uphold a racist hierarchy. Reparations seeks its total and complete destruction.
**
Here is perhaps a weakness in Coates' essay: If we agree with Coates that, "Reparations seek its [racial hierarchy's] total and complete destruction," we did not see such a plan in Coates' essay. He needs to explain how reparations, the kind he wants, will achieve this.
Rebuttal #3: To Williamson's point that not all African-Americans should get reparations because not all African-Americans have been victimized by racism, Coates rebuts:
Williamson believes that reparations must either boil down to a "symbolic political process" or a series of polices that helps America's poor and disproportionately aids African-Americans. How, Williamson asks, can one make a claim on behalf of Sasha and Malia Obama, in a world of poor whites? In much the same way that a factory which pumps toxins into a poor neighborhood is not indemnified because a plaintiff rises to become a millionaire. Taking Williamson's argument to its logical conclusion, a businessman brutalized by the police should never sue the city because, well, homelessness.
People who are injured sometimes achieve great things—this does not obviate the fact of their injury, nor their claim to recompense. Warren Moon achieved more than the vast majority of white quarterbacks. Had racism not forced him into the CFL for the first five crucial years of his career, he might have had more success than any quarterback to ever play the game. Satchel Paige enjoys an honor which the vast majority of white baseball players shall never glimpse—induction in the Hall of Fame. What might Paige achieved had he not been injured by white supremacy for the vast majority of his career? Mr. Clyde Ross is a homeowner, and considerably better off than many of his North Lawndale neighbors. To achieve this he worked three jobs and lost time that he should have been able to invest in his children. What might Mr. Ross have been had he not endured racist plunder from Clarksdale to Chicago?
Rebuttal #4: Williamson says that economic injustice should address poverty, not race, but Coates counters:
The problem of racism is not synonymous with the problem of the poverty line. Indeed, it is often in the fate of the most conventionally successful African-Americans that we see the full horror of a corrupt social contract. The injury of racism means many things, virtually all of them bad. It means making $100,000 a year but living in neighborhoods equivalent to white people who make $30,000 a year. It means belonging to a class whose men comprise some eight percent of the world's entire prison population. It means, if you do go to college, still enjoying lesser employment prospects than white college graduates. It means living in a family with roughly a 20th of the wealth of those who do not suffer your particular ailment. In short, it means quite a bit—and these effects do not merely haunt the poor. My heart bleeds for the white child injured by the departure of parents. But God forbid the injury of racism be added to the burden.
The pervasive effects of the injury should not surprise—the injuring and exploitation of black people regardless of economic class has been one of the dominant themes of American history. It is only the obviation, or ignorance, of history that allows us to escape this. The result must be an especially tortured specimen of reasoning:
Some blacks are born into college-educated, well-off households, and some whites are born to heroin-addicted single mothers, and even the totality of racial crimes throughout American history does not mean that one of these things matters and one does not. Once that fact is acknowledged, then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism.
Williamson's "fact" can not be acknowledged because, even by Williamson's crude measures, it is artifice. There are—at most—1.5 million people who use heroin in this country. The ranks of the African-American poor are roughly eight times that.
Rebuttal #5: Reparations are not "anti-white," or intended to divide the country racially. As Coates explains:
More importantly, the claim of reparations does not hinge on every individual white person everywhere being wealthy. That is because reparations is not a claim against white Americans, anymore than reparations paid to interned Japanese-Americans was a claim against non-Japanese-Americans. The claim was brought before the multi-ethnic United States of America.
Rebuttal #6: It doesn't make sense to make current whites who didn't enforce slavery pay black Americans who weren't slaves. To this point, Coates counters:
There seems to be great confusion on this point. The governments of the United States of America—local, state and federal—are deeply implicated in enslavement, Jim Crow, redlining, New Deal racism, terrorism, ghettoization, housing segregation. The fact that one's ancestors were not slave-traders or that one arrived here in 1980 is irrelevant. I did not live in New York when the city railroaded the Central Park Five. But my tax dollars will pay for the settlement. That is because a state is more than the natural lives, or occupancy, of its citizens. People who object to reparations for African-Americans because they, individually, did nothing should also object to reparations to Japanese-Americans, but they should not stop there. They should object to the Fourth of July, since they, individually, did nothing to aid the American Revolution. They should object to the payment of pensions for the Spanish-American War, a war fought before they were alive. Indeed they should object to government and society itself, because its existence depends on outliving its individual citizens.
Rebuttal #7: Reparations are useless since black Americans are doomed to be economically behind whites, even in a world without racism. Coates' replies:
Williamson then posits that black people would still be poor because they'd be far behind the native white population. Williamson never considers that the two groups might intermarry—because he believes in "race," which is to say creationism. For that same reason he ignores the fact there was no "New World" with "native whites" to come to without the labor of African-Americans. Europeans did not purchase enslaved Africans because they disliked the cut of their jib. They did it because they had taken a great deal of land and needed bonded labor to extract resources from it. Africans—aliens to society, existing beyond the protections of the crown—fit the bill.
"The people to whom reparations were owed," Williamson concludes. "Are long dead." Only because we need them to be. Mr. Clyde Ross is very much alive—as are many of the victims of redlining. And it is not hard to identify them. We know where redlining took place and where it didn't. We have the maps. We know who lived there and who didn't.
This was American policy. We have never accounted for it, and it is unlikely that we ever will. That is not because of any African-American's life-span but because of a powerful desire to run out the clock. Reparations claims were made within the natural lifetimes of emancipated African-Americans. They were unsuccessful. They were not unsuccessful because they lacked merit. They were unsuccessful because their country lacked the courage to dispense with creationism.
So it goes.
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