Some say minimum wage isn't the issue: Universal Basic Income is, as we see here.
Universal Basic Income: Side Effect of the Tech Revolution?
The Progressive Case for Replacing the Welfare State with Basic Income
Why Universal Basic Income Is a Terrible Idea
Arguments Against Universal Basic Income (UBI)
One. A dependent society is a dysfunctional society.
Two. A lack of self-reliance diseases the soul and corrupts society.
Three. Acute dependence leads to totalitarianism and dehumanization. See The Giver.
Four. Acute dependence breaks down the family unit. Parents aren't responsible for their children; the government is.
Five. Being "off the grid" makes one chronically depressed, non-productive, and unemployable.
Essay based on Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations"
Writing Option #5 for Final:
Support, refute, or complicate Ta-Nahisi Coates' argument in "The Case for Reparations" that America is morally compelled to devise an effective reparations program for eligible African-Americans.
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"
“The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates: Lesson 1
What were slaves worth as an asset?
To underscore his point that the kleptocracy, the systematic stealing from the lives of African-Americans, compels us to consider reparations, 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.”
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.
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.
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.
Kleptocracy
Coates has brilliantly added a third dimension to the reparations debate: The Kleptocracy, the systematic thievery against black lives and resources that started with slavery and continues today.
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 African-Americans 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.”
What were slaves worth as an asset?
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.”
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.
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.
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)
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 African-Americans 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
Ways to Improve Your Critical Reading and Assess the Quality of Your Sources
- Do a background check of the author to see if he or she has a hidden agenda or any other kind of background information that speaks to the author’s credibility.
- Check the place of publication to see what kind of agenda, if any, the publishing house has. Know how esteemed the publishing house is among peers of the subject you’re reading about.
- Learn how to find the thesis. In other words, know what the author’s purpose, explicit or implicit, is.
- Annotate more than underline. Your memory will be better served, according to research, by annotating than underlining. You can scribble your own code in the margins as long as you can understand your writing when you come back to it later. Annotating is a way of starting a dialogue about the reading and writing process. It is a form of pre-writing. Forms of annotation that I use are “yes,” (great point) “no,” (wrong, illogical, BS) and “?” (confusing). When I find the thesis, I’ll also write that in the margins. Or I’ll write down an essay or book title that the passage reminds me of. Or maybe even an idea for a story or a novel.
- When faced with a difficult text, you will have to slow down and use the principles of summarizing and paraphrasing. With summary, you concisely identify the main points in one or two sentences. With paraphrase, you re-word the text in your own words.
- When reading an argument, see if the writer addresses possible objections to his or her argument. Ask yourself, of all the objections, did the writer choose the most compelling ones? The more compelling the objections addressed, the more rigorous and credible the author’s writing.
