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The case of reparation coates essay
The case for reparations by ta-nehisi coates purpose for writing
The case of reparations
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Last year, Ta-Nehisis Coates’ Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations” threw a national spotlight on a debate and movement that has been ongoing, yet for the large part unseen, for more than 150 years. Reparations suddenly became a topic of national debate, which like most things today focused on the merits of the idea versus proposing any real solutions to the issues. Coates’ article is no different, offering a litany of offensives without proposing any real solvency to the issues that have oppressed the black community in America for the past several hundred years. In the article, Coates maintains that social, economic, and political injustices against blacks have compounded over the years: “Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy.” He argues that even though slavery and segregation ended, these inequities have crippled many black communities and left them on an uneven playing field—only reparations can even this field. In his 15,000-word treatise, Coates uses many pieces of evidence to validate his case for reparations. Primarily, Coates focuses on three rifts to stake his claim. Initially, Coates highlights the …show more content…
His argument is substantive in outlining the plight of black Americans; however, he is anything but substantive in offering any means by which the current inequities can be truly addressed. Unlike Robin Kelley, who in his article “For Reparations and Transformations” suggests that reparations come in the form of entitlement programs, education and investment in “historically black ghetto communities.” Coates offers the issues and Kelley the possible solutions. However, are these solutions
Coates wrote a 176 page long letter to his 14 years old son to explain what the African American society were going through at the time being. In the book, Coates used himself as an example to demonstrate the unjust treatment that had been cast upon him and many other African Americans. Readers can sense a feeling of pessimism towards African American’s future throughout the entire book although he did not pointed it out directly.
There are many contradictions pertaining to slavery, which lasted for approximately 245 years. In Woody Holton’s “Black Americans in the Revolutionary Era”, Holton points out the multiple instances where one would find discrepancies that lie in the interests of slaveowners, noble figures, and slaves that lived throughout the United States. Holton exemplifies this hostility in forms of documents that further specify and support his claim.
For as long as I can remember, racial injustice has been the topic of discussion amongst the American nation. A nation commercializing itself as being free and having equality for all, however, one questions how this is true when every other day on the news we hear about the injustices and discriminations of one race over another. Eula Biss published an essay called “White Debt” which unveils her thoughts on discrimination and what she believes white Americans owe, the debt they owe, to a dark past that essentially provided what is out there today. Ta-Nehisi Coates published “Between the World and Me,” offering his perspective about “the Dream” that Americans want, the fear that he faced being black growing up and that black bodies are what
Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the article “The Case for Reparations” presents a powerful argument for reparations to black African American for a long time of horrendous injustice as slavery plus discrimination, violence, hosing policies, family incomes, hard work, education, and more took a place in black African American’s lives. He argues that paying such a right arrears is not only a matter of justice; however, it is important for American people to express how they treated black African Americans.
William Julius Wilson creates a thrilling new systematic framework to three politically tense social problems: “the plight of low-skilled black males, the persistence of the inner-city ghetto, and the fragmentation of the African American family” (Wilson, 36). Though the conversation of racial inequality is classically divided. Wilson challenges the relationship between institutional and cultural factors as reasons of the racial forces, which are inseparably linked, but public policy can only change the racial status quo by reforming the institutions that support it.
Coates’ article “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” opens with the story of a man named Daniel Moynihan. Moynihan, born to a broken family in the great depression era, entered politics and developed to become an important political figure in the labor department during the 1960’s. The principal belief of Moynihan was that unemployment was destructive to the potential social mobility of the poor, a lynchpin of the American dream. Once the civil rights movement gained momentum, Moynihan gained interest on how his theory affects black families specifically and began to research this topic. The results of his research showed just how devastating the effects of three hundred of years of slavery and institutionalized racism were on black families and how much worse off they were than white families in general.
Back on those days, there were black veterans, who were fighting and giving out their blood for their country. They were doing the same duties as whites veterans did, but blacks did not get the same benefits. Their education, mortgage, and housing benefits lagged behind the benefits of ‘whites’ (Dickerson 53). There is no better example for racial injustice than this one that is about these heroes who didn’t get what they deserved, for a society which prioritize people based on their havings. Likewise, Coates presents another example of racial injustice for black people. It was a black man that was selling cigarettes and polices shot him, or like he states “sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed” (553). He was just earning his bread, there was no reason for a policeman shoots him like he was a criminal. If instead of being a black man would be a “white” man, the police would probably have more consideration. The fact of being part of a minority, it is an automatic signal that this person will be treated as he has a lower
While the formal abolition of slavery, on the 6th of December 1865 freed black Americans from their slave labour, they were still unequal to and discriminated by white Americans for the next century. This ‘freedom’, meant that black Americans ‘felt like a bird out of a cage’ , but this freedom from slavery did not equate to their complete liberty, rather they were kept in destitute through their economic, social, and political state.
Black Power, the seemingly omnipresent term that is ever-so-often referenced when one deals with the topic of Black equality in the U.S. While progress, or at least the illusion of progress, has occurred over the past century, many of the issues that continue to plague the Black (as well as other minority) communities have yet to be truly addressed. The dark cloud of rampant individual racism may have passed from a general perspective, but many sociologists, including Stokely Carmichael; the author of “Black Power: the Politics of Liberation in America”, have and continue to argue that the oppressive hand of “institutional racism” still holds down the Black community from making any true progress.
From slavery being legal, to its abolishment and the Civil Rights Movement, to where we are now in today’s integrated society, it would seem only obvious that this country has made big steps in the adoption of African Americans into American society. However, writers W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin who have lived and documented in between this timeline of events bringing different perspectives to the surface. Du Bois first introduced an idea that Baldwin would later expand, but both authors’ works provide insight to the underlying problem: even though the law has made African Americans equal, the people still have not.
In “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates sets out a powerful argument for reparations to blacks for having to thrive through horrific inequity, including slavery, Jim Crowism, Northern violence and racist housing policies. By erecting a slave society, America erected the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy. And Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history. Paying such a moral debt is such a great matter of justice served rightfully to those who were suppressed from the fundamental roles, white supremacy played in American history.
Finally, Frazier discusses the result of this displacement on the black middle class. Because the black bourgeoisie buys into the ideals of white America more and is simultaneously more exposed to its hostility, their sense of inferiority is compounded. They seek to fill this void in two ways.
Reparations For 246 consecutive years, blacks have been kidnapped, whipped to death, mutilated, and raped. From 1619 to 1865, these generations of slave families were living as property rather than human beings. History would agree that the crimes done against these set of selected people do not compare to those of other races. Many people don’t know that there were sex slave farms that practiced a process known as “buck breaking”.
Imagine you’re young, and alone. If your family was taken from you and suffered horribly for your freedom, would you want to be repaid in some form? In the article “The Case for Reparations” Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses a great deal of information about reparations, and if they should be given. Reparations are when a person or people make amends for the wrong they have done. Ta-Nehisi believes that from two hundred years of slavery, ninety years of Jim Crow laws, sixty years of separate but equal, and thirty five years of racist housing policy, that America is shackled. Only if we face the compounding moral debt can America be free. Until we face the reality of what happened together, we will always be bound by the lies that have been told.
The Reconstruction failed to bring justice, social and economic equality to freed African-American in many ways. For example, “ Education- Separated...”