So y’all know that Ta-Nehisi Coates is my favorite long-form journalist working today. His latest—“The Case for Reparations”—is a doozy.
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 has been devastating.
One thread of thinking in the African American community holds that these depressing numbers partially stem from cultural pathologies that can be altered through individual grit and exceptionally good behavior. (In 2011, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, responding to violence among young black males, put the blame on the family: “Too many men making too many babies they don’t want to take care of, and then we end up dealing with your children.” Nutter turned to those presumably fatherless babies: “Pull your pants up and buy a belt, because no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.”) The thread is as old as black politics itself. It is also wrong. The kind of trenchant 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.
…
But while the people advocating reparations have changed over time, the response from the country has remained virtually the same. “They have been taught to labor,” the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1891. “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.”
Not exactly.
I had to sit with it a while, because honestly, if you’d asked me before I read this article whether I supported reparations for the descendants of slaves my answer would have been an unequivocal “no.” The slaveholders are dead, that chapter in history is closed, yadda yadda.
The thing is, it isn’t closed. As a country, we kind of went directly from allowing slavery (pre-Civil War) to preferring not to talk about slavery (as a high school student in Arkansas I was directly taught that the Civil War was “not about slavery”). It’s not ancient history, either. You only have to go a couple generations back to find people who were born in slavery. Jim Crow is a living memory. Redlining and prison injustice and voter disenfranchisement—stuff that’s happening right now—is a direct legacy of slavery.
As a country, we need to stop pretending that slavery is a shameful-but-closed chapter that lies somewhere far back in the mists of history.
So, I have changed my mind. I believe that the U.S. government should pay reparations to families descended from slaves, probably an equivalent to the survivor benefit that’s paid to heirs of soldiers killed in combat. It won’t “make it right,” of course—nothing could do that—but it would be an open-eyed acknowledgement that justice continues to be owed.
