A reader protests:
Did your readers, who I look to as a refreshingly open-minded community, even read Coates’ article? To quote him:
Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution.
And we devolve into half-serious talk about half-black children and then curl up in the fetal position and say, “It makes my head hurt”?
Coates himself realizes, I think, that we may never have a day when white folks are writing checks to black folks. And that’d probably do more harm than good anyway. But what we can do is help the people who have been harmed decade after decade with jobs and healthcare and whatever else we can think of to bridge the gap. But importantly – acknowledge aloud that we are acting out of a sense of obligation to right a wrong we have the capacity to try and fix.
Another passes along “three handy tips to help you suss out folks who haven’t actually read” TNC’s essay. Number one: “They talk a lot about slavery.” Another concurs:
I admire what Ta-Nahesi Coates is doing by revisiting the argument for reparations. And I am also deeply disappointed reading comments on The Dish and around the internet that can’t get past the year 1865. This is not just about slavery. If I understand him correctly, this is a thought exercise to update the reparations claim through the 20th century (and 21st) that moves past slavery to implicate North and South, as well as immigrants who arrived after the Civil War. Sharecroppers working white land after a landless emancipation, black maids and sharecroppers denied Social Security, decades of African Americans paying taxes for FHA loans they couldn’t have and for freeways to those white Levittowns that tore through black neighborhoods and forced African Americans into projects.
I believe Coates wants his reader to look at every stop on this reparations tour and make his or her case for where they would get off, to argue where they would draw the line. But once they see the route he is taking, all I read is, “Oh, slavery, that’s my stop. Would’ve been nice for money back then, but what can you do?”
Another is on the same page:
In synthesizing for his readers the tremendous work done over the past two decades by historians about how suburbia was created as a white’s-only domain, Coates is making two different arguments about the logic for reparations that we normally hear when slavery’s at its center. He’s arguing first that the material effects of racial inequality, effects underwritten by federal policy, are far more recent than the usual “slavery was a long time ago” argument. There are no antebellum slaveowners alive, but there are millions of people who were suburban homeowners between 1938 and 1968.
Second, he’s showing, again mainly in the Lawndale sections, how suburban segregation created the conditions whereby blacks could be defrauded by contract sellers who dramatically increased home prices and held the deed so they could evict people on any pretenses in order to resell their homes, multiplying their profit many times over. Beryl Satter, whose work Coates is drawing from, estimates that contract selling stripped one million dollars a day out of Lawndale alone.
People asking Coates how reparations would work have a duty to actually consider the argument he’s making. Are so many unwilling to do so, and so willing to fall back on “75 percent of southern whites didn’t own slaves,” because it’s too uncomfortable to look at their parents’ or grandparents’ houses as spaces of Jim Crow?
Previous Dish on the reparations discussion here, here, and here.
The Dish 