The Case for Reparations via The Atlantic.
As for “where to start” on such a monumental endeavor, John Conyers’s HR 40 would be right up there.
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I have read “The Case for Reparations” and HR 40. Both seem to be proposing the need for a solution without actually proposing a solution.
I understand why Sanders argued that it was impossible. It doesn’t just seem monumental, it seems stupid.
The problem is complex, dynamic, and entrenched. No simple or elegant solution is going to present itself upon further investigation or examination. Any attempt to fix the problem is going to be ham-fisted and likely to cause just as many problems as it solves.
The best solution is probably to create an environment that allows the problem to fix itself. That would probably involve the very liberal positions Sanders is advocating. I think Ta-Nehisi can see that Sanders response is pragmatic, but it lacks the headline appeal that a MacArthur-Genius-Grant-winning author and French patisserie advocate wants to endorse.
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I understand this, though it’s about answering the question, collectively, “Is this important?”
You cannot begin to consider the practicalities of it before you commit to the justice of it, then and only then does it become meaningful to talk about solutions. It might be impossible. I happen to think that say, a $50,000 check to every black person without specificity would do more harm than good unless say, given only to those already poor. However you slice it, America may have created an unpayable debt, in which case, black Americans will be in a position, in the interests of justice, to forgive it or accept lesser terms. This idea that we’re going to just pay black people an insane amount of money to the detriment of a stable economy is ridiculous, and people in favor of reparations will agree. But fundamentally it is important to acknowledge the injustice that begets the question in the first place.
I have long argued that peace in the Middle East might be achievable if only Israel would admit to the injustice at the heart of its formation, something Israel has long refused to do, and something that has been mythologized out of the official histories. It would answer precisely 0% of the current practical challenges, but simply that rhetorical act would carry force. It would start something important. That’s what needs to happen in this country where black people are gunned down by agents of the state for the most trivial of offenses. We need something important to happen. People are so focused on the endings of this discussion that they’ve lost all sight of how significant the beginnings would be. The how and why come out of a conversation about bitterness, struggle, and humanity. I would trade that for some GDP.
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This whole argument is very complicated. You start with trying to determine who benefited, and by how much, and from which person’s slavery. Then, once you find the descendants of those people, the difficult part begins. If a family lost their breadwinner or their sons fighting for the North in the Civil War, that has to count for something. The families that owned the slave ships were usually New Englanders, surely some of the blame goes to them. When you start to try to quantify blame and victimhood, it quickly becomes overwhelming, and the farther we get from the actual events, the harder it gets. And are we only considering chattel slavery in North America from 1783 to 1865? Do we involve Spain, France, and Holland for injustice that took place in their North American territories? How about wage slavery? Part of Mr. Coat’s argument is that Black labor built the USA, but that overlooks Chinese labor in the west, and Child labor in the 19th and early 20th century. Some families worked for mills or other industries, were forced to pay rent to and buy staples from that same company, often finding themselves unable to ever pay their accumulating debt to the company, and subject to arrest if they tried to flee. Appalachian coal mining families worked for generations without accumulating wealth. We could go on forever.
What it comes down to, is an oversimplification of history. Human history is almost nothing but conquest and migration. Nobody is going to undo that. Talk of reparations is nothing but an excuse to cause controversy with the goal of selling books or buying votes.
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Maybe it seems that way because you’re just not reading closely enough. Or listening. As Coates says in the Democracy Now interview:
In fact, you know, since the article was published, several times, at least two or three times, I have written very, very specifically about what it would look like in my case.
In terms of “The Case for Reparations,” I focused on housing and the damage done through redlining, which was not a highly racialized form of damage—it was a racist form of damage. I think we need to be really, really clear about that. It was specifically—you know, did specific damage to black people because they were black. And in the case of redlining, we have the maps. We know exactly where the communities are that were damaged. We have census reports. We know who lived there. In cases of, for instance, the GI Bill or FHA loans that black people were not allowed to have, we have folks who could go before a claims office and say, “I tried to do this. This was denied to me.” So we don’t have a problem of knowing where folks live. We don’t have a problem knowing what communities were affected. I would target those communities for investment and target those specific people, you know, given that they could prove what happened to them, for investment. That’s a very specific—that’s a limited case of reparations, but it’s what I focused on in terms of housing. And certainly someone could make a case—someone could make a case for reparations in terms of other things, in terms of education, in terms of healthcare, in terms of the criminal justice, and could argue for specific solutions in the same way.
There’s all sorts of ways that systematically abused black communities could be helped. The trouble isn’t a lack of ways to start correcting the generationally transferred ills of slavery (and of so many forms of communal abuse since). The trouble is people who arent black failing to see those systematic, generationally transferred ills. The trouble with adequately correcting the ongoing legacy of white supremacy is convincing white people of its very existence.
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That way madness lies. Black people were not disenfranchised.
The families of slaves were severely disenfranchised.
Africans before slavery was banned had a pretty shitty existence.
Africans in America after slavery but before civil rights reforms had a varying level of shitty existence depending on location
Africans who immigrated to America after 1970 had it pretty ok. They probably had a shitty time, but a lot of immigrants have a shitty time in the first generation.
Then, as you said, you would have base it off of actual income. It wouldn’t do any good to just give random people money. This is already an insanely complicated formula.
Easier
We just create scholarships and stuff for the disenfranchised group. All kinds of things designed to boost their economic standing. Except, that they don’t live in a vacuum. We tried it with affirmative action with mixed results. We could create greater prosperity in the black community or we could just make a mess and waste trillions of dollars.
Might actually work
We implement programs that are designed to end poverty while also being vigilant against racism and discrimination. It aint pretty, but things might eventually work out in the end. Sure, you wind up not doing as much as you could to help, but your the “leaders of the country”. You are the same people who send millions of people off to war to die.
I agree it would be a bad idea, it’s a specific example of a bad idea… I don’t understand what you’re getting at. Also, yes they were and are. The proportion of black Americans rendered ineligible to vote in the present day is tragically high. They are literally disenfranchised. I don’t know any other way to characterize that. That slavery is (because the current prison system employs it) and was worse is not an answer to the issue of whether or not African Americans continue to suffer from its legacy and whether the unpaid and economically significant labor of black slaves deserves renumeration. My grandfather and his father were paid for their labor, which paid for my father’s benefits as a child, which he passed on to me. Wealth and status are inheritable, and black people in this country never received their fair share.
We use insanely complicated formulas to drive global finance. Sophisticated systems are puzzles solvable by human ingenuity, not impossibilities.
It’s interesting that you say this, because increasingly people are realizing that the problem with poor people isn’t that they cannot perform skilled labor, but that they don’t have money. That’s literally what makes people poor. The solution appears to be giving people money. Maybe not cash, but housing-first schemes have helped the homeless a lot more than temporary shelters and employment-first schemes have. So ending poverty is realistic, but giving black people wealth isn’t… somehow?
Finally, the bulk of my argument remains unaddressed, that the conversation can beget a just outcome without having to resort to extreme measures. This country has to formally contend with how it has profited from the labor of black Americans.
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That article and its followup are the last things I ever intend to read by Coates. It was hasty, sloppy, offensive, and the followup article made several statements that were provably false.
To insulate himself from this knowledge, Coates turned off all comments.
I think his genius grant has gone to his head.
Wow…
Part of his argument is that the exopropriation of weatlh from African Americans did not end with slavery, but continued, and continues right up until today. It’s about addressing more than just history, but what’s happening right now too. It’s all interconnected.
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Tougher than the substantive piece of fixing and distributing reparations, is the procedural piece. Whatever the outcome, what procedure can be followed that acknowledged as legitimate and fair — regardless of the substantive outcome?
Coates’s critics on the left focused on Sanders’s credentials as a fighter against inequality, corruption and the finance industry (contrasting that with Hillary Clinton’s cozy relationship with Wall Street and Bill Clinton’s racist criminal justice and welfare policies). [via OP].
I know it’s not quite the same issue you were commenting about, but isn’t it interesting that there’s even a question that Sanders is the better choice?
It’s true that organized workers didn’t act effectively (as a majority left consensus) for racial justice after the '64 Civil Rights Act. They voted for Wallace and Nixon and Reagan.
Corporations, the professions, courts and universities arguably became more tolerant sanctuaries for racial equity and centers of racially progressive policy.
Have those cultural politics reached some kind of tipping point now? After all that time, could working voters work more effectively for racial justice?
The racist dogwhistle issues used by the Nixon and Reagan coalitions for working voters for the past 40 years do seem to have stopped working so well.
I’m in no way saying it makes up for the crimes against them, but some states have given the surviving tribes things like exclusive casino license and very limited self-government autonomy on the reservations they were forced on to. Again, not saying it’s compensation for what was done to the aboriginal people of the United States, just that it is more than African Americans have gotten from their government.
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Slavery is still legal in the United States. WHY IS THIS STILL A THING?
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Given the demand constraints on the economy now, the multiplier likely make it a better-than-even-trade, meaning employment and tax receipts would more than cancel out the debt.
Thats the kind of white guilt that even a Nixon-era Republican could get behind.
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You are so disappointed! I can tell.
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We could start by honoring contracts written in the last few years by extraction businesses. That might not be a bad idea.
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I’m always a little fascinated by people who see turning off comments as some kind of tell-tale sign that the author is being disingenuous. As if the howlings of hundreds of ill-informed people are supposed to bring anything of value to the author. It’s not that comments can’t ever be insightful or interesting, but no one wades through them hoping for a nugget of amazing truth buried in what is always a shitpile in one way or another.
It’s not as if Coates won’t read any responses to his article, from peers, observers, and rivals. But he is going to force the lay reader to take a little bit of time with their thoughts before they can express whatever unresearched blather they were itching to type as they read… if they could contain themselves to bother to read the whole of the article. And yes, I said lay reader, because most people who read an article on the Internet and decide to get Very Upset About It haven’t done even a minimum of research and haven’t had their comment pass through so much as a copy-editor. But no! Their contribution is oh so important because… everyone is entitled to their opinion?
It’s not even like I’m dismissing online comments out of some patrician air of dismissal, because why, why, why does anyone think that all views must be taken into consideration? I suspect that the people who tend to think this are younger. When I was younger I had a high tolerance for listening to bullshit I knew was bullshit and it wasn’t until later that I realized that not all utterances are worth wasting my time on. People who know their shit tend to get coverage before those who don’t. Even if he is wrong, wrong, wrongity wrong, Coates would find his time better spent reading an economic criticism of him from a professional economist before he gets them from user_asdfjerkl on the 1,427,325,733rd comment on the article, saying for the uncountableth time, “How could we afford it?”
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Not directly related, nor unrelated really, to the topic at hand, but I just heard on NPR that the DOJ just announced a Civil Rights suit against Ferguson. This is due to Ferguson’s city counsel failing to pass a previous agreement with the DOJ, reasoning that compliance would bankrupt the city.
What they’re saying is - or at least what I’m hearing - is that they don’t know how to run their city without the tools that systemic racism provides them, that they need to illegally extract wealth from the African American community in order to balance their books.
If that’s not an indicator of how structurally ingrained racism is in this country, I don’t know what is.
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I find the whole concept of reparations so long after the fact such an odd one to fixate on. Look at the issue for more than a few seconds and it’s beyond obvious it’s completely unworkable.
There was a time for reparations, but that passed well over a hundred years ago. beyond that you’re essentially arguing that people should be punished/compensated for the crimes of their (distant) ancestors.
Now there’s a world-shattering concept if ever i saw one. I’m fairly sure pretty much every single person on the planet could find examples of wrongs done to their ancestors by other peoples ancestors…
How far back should we go when asking people who had absolutely nothing to do with the initial problem pay reparations to people who also had nothing to do with the problem?
More specifically, how well do you need to trace ancestry to claim these reparations? How far back should be needed for people bearing the cost? What of mixed-race ancestry, do they need to pay reparations to themselves? What of people who immigrated after the abolition of slavery, should they get charged? And so on…
Some posters have mentioned reparations should be used to fight inequality in poorer areas, whilst i approve the end here that doesn’t justify the means. It should be tackled for certain, but because it’s the right thing to do regardless, not because of reparations which will only cause much resentment.
The instant appearance of a negative attitude toward even the suggestion of studying reparations is really bizarre to me. That we could go a day discussing American history or prosperity without discussing the need for reparations seems strange to me. The strangest thing of all is this straw-man image of how reparations would play out that seems to emerge every time the discussion arises. Somehow people are imagining a government official walking around to individual blue-collar American’s houses, pushing them down, spitting on them, saying “how does it feel now, plantation boy, with your fancy cotton and tobacco money! Who’s got the whip now!?!” and then foreclosing on their home, taking $100,000 and giving it to the next black person who walks down the street.
Nobody (that I know of) is talking about blaming currently living individuals for the plight of black people (except where specific individuals have committed specific racist crimes, i.e. those complicit and explicitly performing redlining, cops killing black kids, etc…) or extracting from specific individuals for reparations. America’s collective wealth, prosperity and opportunities would not exist as they are to the level that they do without having been built on the backs of free labor from tortured, abused people. The nation as a whole benefits. The nation needs to say “thank you for suffering, against your will, so that that the country could become enormously successful” and a huge “oh and sorry you didn’t get your cut, and were continually shit on and excluded for the next 200 years.”
The argument for progressive taxation is not so different from the argument for reparations, really. Those who have benefited more from the support and success of the fertile soil of the nation should give back the most to the continuing success of the nation through taxation. That money should be directed at building infrastructure for all, but also focus on lifting up the poorest among us who have not benefited in the same way, with an acknowledgement that some of that may be based on barriers put in place by the shadier of the wealthy and more successful. Supporting everyone in their aim to be successful makes the whole nation stronger and wealthier, not poorer. This is not a zero-sum game. Healing wounds, and helping people economically will actually benefit everyone (honestly, I’d be for it even if it didn’t, and there was a little sting in it…) So reparations really just become a case for a special kind of progressive taxation that is directed at black people and black communities, who have suffered the most, in both distant and recent history, and on whose backs and with whose blood the fertile soil of America was built.
The form of “payout” could be almost anything, from scholarships, to direct cash, to investment in infrastructure in communities with strong protections against harmful gentrification. It could even just be a huge endowment to the NAACP or an organization with a similar mandate to seek out a squash racist policies and practices, hold people responsible when they specifically commit acts racist acts (killing black kids, redlining, etc…).
The whole pound-of-flesh attitude toward reparations is pretty gross too. “Oh, but what if some black person gets too much!!?!, what if a black immigrant whose ancestors weren’t slaves gets some!!” Oh. Fucking. Well. They deeefinitely got some of that run-off racism, so relax. Also, if Oprah ends up with her cash transfer, she’d probably cry for a while that some kind of fucking justice had finally been served, then donate her share to a good cause.
Stop killing the conversation before it starts. Stop fearing white people getting uncomfortable. Let’s at least have the fucking conversation.
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