The Case for Reparations
- Thread starter QueEx
- Start date
this has been posted on and discussed..
but I dont give a fuck I could see this posted
all fuckin day!!
Truth is a beautiful thing!!
I also bet a lot of prestigious universities are sitting on
our stolen land!
but I dont give a fuck I could see this posted
all fuckin day!!
Truth is a beautiful thing!!
I also bet a lot of prestigious universities are sitting on
our stolen land!
America Is Coming to Terms with Its Racial Past—Let’s Look Ahead Instead
America Is Coming to Terms with Its Racial Past—Let’s Look Ahead Instead
John McWhorter
05.22.14
We don’t need a “national conversation.” We have that every day. We need reading programs, no War on Drugs, and other concrete solutions.
There was a time when reparations for slavery was a hot issue in race discussions in America. Randall Robinson’s The Debt was widely read, and there were endless forums on the issue nationwide. However, 9/11 broke the flow, and before long, Hurricane Katrina and then a certain senator from Illinois basically rendered reparations yesterday’s news.
However, in this month’s Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates revives the issue. There is little point in rehashing the rather easy arguments against the old-school notion of reparations in the form of cash payments to black people. Coates chronicles and pays his respects to this kind of proposal but seems to feel that they would be mere genuflection. He wants “more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe.”
His proposal is richer than any such thing; namely, he calls for a psychosocial revolution in American thought—“the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences.” It seems that for Coates, the money would be unimportant except as a vehicle of this transformation of perception, his main interest. As such, he is ultimately presenting, he is ultimately presenting an extended version of a now traditional call among educated black people for a “conversation” on race.
The idea is that the civil rights revolution was incomplete, and that black people will only truly overcome when America as a whole comes to a full and penitent understanding of the role that racism has played in black people’s past and present. Not just in the form of bad words and real-estate covenants, but as an institutional un-leveler of the playing field, as a micro-aggressional poison in social interactions, as what many term “what America has always been all about.”
Yet one can fully acknowledge the scourge that racism is and has been while being perplexed at a depiction of America as somehow blind to it. Far from turning a blind eye to the issue, America would seem rather obsessed with race, and has been for a long time.
Take even two random years a good while ago now. In 2001, a traveling museum exhibit of the Henrietta Marie slave-ship artifacts was launched and broke attendance records in 20 cities, while at a centennial celebration of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, organizers highlighted the racially discriminatory side of the original event. The following year, Washington Representative Hans Dunshee, white, agitated to have Jefferson Davis’ name removed from a Seattle highway and replaced by the name of a black Civil War veteran, William P. Stewart. Meanwhile in Ohio, white Underground Railroad buffs decried historical distortions in a museum then in the planning stages, while in York, Pennsylvania, to counter a white supremacist group that had travelled there to demonstrate, 400 people, white and black, held a unity rally. One could go on, year by year.
Despite frequent claims that America “doesn’t want to talk about race,” we talk about it 24/7 amidst ringing declamations against racism on all forms. Over the past year’s time, I need only mention Trayvon Martin, Paula Deen, Cliven Bundy, and Donald Sterling. Over the past few years, three of the best-selling and most-discussed nonfiction books have been Isabel Wilkerson’s chronicle of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns, Rebecca Skloot’s book about the harvesting of a black woman’s cancer cells (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks), and Michelle Alexander’s invaluable The New Jim Crow. And let’s not forget recent major release films such as The Help, 12 Years a Slave, and The Butler.
Can we really say that these are signs of a nation in denial about race, racism, and its history?
Yet for writers like Coates, somehow none of this is enough. A shoe has yet to drop. We remain an “America that looks away,” “ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.” But what, exactly, is the suggestion here? Surely not that no racism exist anywhere in the country—but what, then? In exactly what fashion could 317 million people “reckon” or come to certain eternally elusive “terms” with racism? Especially in a way that would satisfy people who see even America’s current atonements as insufficient?
The haziness here recalls doctrine more than proposal. The reality is something less proactive than reactive, not an initiative but a condition—a matter of identity. Four-hundred years of slavery and Jim Crow left us unwhole, and unfortunately susceptible to a baseline sense of existential grievance as a keystone of being black.
The only question is why things would not have come out this way. But, because we are faced with a matter of identity, a sense of self, we have to ask: would the “coming to terms,” once it had happened, be enough?
Imagine: “Okay. The acknowledgment has been expressed. I accept it, and now, finally we can move on.”
I just can’t see it. More likely would be “They better not think they can just say sorry and be done with it.” One imagines the tweets: “400 years and it’s all over with a Conversation? #ItsNotOver.”
Many would argue that this would be just the right thing, that America would remain “on the hook” for efforts aimed at black uplift. And I’m all for the uplift, but wonder what the atonement would add. In a hundred years, who will look back and say that black America would have been better off in the early twenty-first century if there had been a national Reparational Realization about race?
Coates argues that we need this as “the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely.” The writing is resonant, but must America “see itself” so squarely in this particular regard? Why, exactly, must history, in this instance, be stage-managed so closely? It would seem that what black America needs is not for white and other people to “understand” us or our past, but for us to be assisted in making our future brighter than our present, secure in “understanding” ourselves, thank you very much.
The War on Drugs must end, since with its demise, acrimonious and often lethal interactions between the police and young black men would cease as a foundational experience of being black. In schools, few are aware of how magical the effect would be of reading programs that actually work for poor kids, as I have written about here. We must utilize the reality of Obamacare to bring black America into a new relationship with the health-care system. Efforts to coach poor black parents on child care, having results in programs such as the Harlem Children’s Zone, should be taken to scale.
All of those things can happen—and in fact, are happening—without the profound national transformation in thought that writers like Coates seek.
Yet in race discussions one is taught that opinions of the kind I have just expressed are “conservative.” However, this is sloppy terminology. I am seeking to conserve nothing; I am looking ahead—and I am quite confident that I am not alone.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...its-racial-past-let-s-look-ahead-instead.html
America Is Coming to Terms with Its Racial Past—Let’s Look Ahead Instead
John McWhorter
05.22.14
We don’t need a “national conversation.” We have that every day. We need reading programs, no War on Drugs, and other concrete solutions.
There was a time when reparations for slavery was a hot issue in race discussions in America. Randall Robinson’s The Debt was widely read, and there were endless forums on the issue nationwide. However, 9/11 broke the flow, and before long, Hurricane Katrina and then a certain senator from Illinois basically rendered reparations yesterday’s news.
However, in this month’s Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates revives the issue. There is little point in rehashing the rather easy arguments against the old-school notion of reparations in the form of cash payments to black people. Coates chronicles and pays his respects to this kind of proposal but seems to feel that they would be mere genuflection. He wants “more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe.”
His proposal is richer than any such thing; namely, he calls for a psychosocial revolution in American thought—“the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences.” It seems that for Coates, the money would be unimportant except as a vehicle of this transformation of perception, his main interest. As such, he is ultimately presenting, he is ultimately presenting an extended version of a now traditional call among educated black people for a “conversation” on race.
The idea is that the civil rights revolution was incomplete, and that black people will only truly overcome when America as a whole comes to a full and penitent understanding of the role that racism has played in black people’s past and present. Not just in the form of bad words and real-estate covenants, but as an institutional un-leveler of the playing field, as a micro-aggressional poison in social interactions, as what many term “what America has always been all about.”
Yet one can fully acknowledge the scourge that racism is and has been while being perplexed at a depiction of America as somehow blind to it. Far from turning a blind eye to the issue, America would seem rather obsessed with race, and has been for a long time.
Take even two random years a good while ago now. In 2001, a traveling museum exhibit of the Henrietta Marie slave-ship artifacts was launched and broke attendance records in 20 cities, while at a centennial celebration of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, organizers highlighted the racially discriminatory side of the original event. The following year, Washington Representative Hans Dunshee, white, agitated to have Jefferson Davis’ name removed from a Seattle highway and replaced by the name of a black Civil War veteran, William P. Stewart. Meanwhile in Ohio, white Underground Railroad buffs decried historical distortions in a museum then in the planning stages, while in York, Pennsylvania, to counter a white supremacist group that had travelled there to demonstrate, 400 people, white and black, held a unity rally. One could go on, year by year.
Despite frequent claims that America “doesn’t want to talk about race,” we talk about it 24/7 amidst ringing declamations against racism on all forms. Over the past year’s time, I need only mention Trayvon Martin, Paula Deen, Cliven Bundy, and Donald Sterling. Over the past few years, three of the best-selling and most-discussed nonfiction books have been Isabel Wilkerson’s chronicle of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns, Rebecca Skloot’s book about the harvesting of a black woman’s cancer cells (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks), and Michelle Alexander’s invaluable The New Jim Crow. And let’s not forget recent major release films such as The Help, 12 Years a Slave, and The Butler.
Can we really say that these are signs of a nation in denial about race, racism, and its history?
Yet for writers like Coates, somehow none of this is enough. A shoe has yet to drop. We remain an “America that looks away,” “ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.” But what, exactly, is the suggestion here? Surely not that no racism exist anywhere in the country—but what, then? In exactly what fashion could 317 million people “reckon” or come to certain eternally elusive “terms” with racism? Especially in a way that would satisfy people who see even America’s current atonements as insufficient?
The haziness here recalls doctrine more than proposal. The reality is something less proactive than reactive, not an initiative but a condition—a matter of identity. Four-hundred years of slavery and Jim Crow left us unwhole, and unfortunately susceptible to a baseline sense of existential grievance as a keystone of being black.
The only question is why things would not have come out this way. But, because we are faced with a matter of identity, a sense of self, we have to ask: would the “coming to terms,” once it had happened, be enough?
Imagine: “Okay. The acknowledgment has been expressed. I accept it, and now, finally we can move on.”
I just can’t see it. More likely would be “They better not think they can just say sorry and be done with it.” One imagines the tweets: “400 years and it’s all over with a Conversation? #ItsNotOver.”
Many would argue that this would be just the right thing, that America would remain “on the hook” for efforts aimed at black uplift. And I’m all for the uplift, but wonder what the atonement would add. In a hundred years, who will look back and say that black America would have been better off in the early twenty-first century if there had been a national Reparational Realization about race?
Coates argues that we need this as “the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely.” The writing is resonant, but must America “see itself” so squarely in this particular regard? Why, exactly, must history, in this instance, be stage-managed so closely? It would seem that what black America needs is not for white and other people to “understand” us or our past, but for us to be assisted in making our future brighter than our present, secure in “understanding” ourselves, thank you very much.
The War on Drugs must end, since with its demise, acrimonious and often lethal interactions between the police and young black men would cease as a foundational experience of being black. In schools, few are aware of how magical the effect would be of reading programs that actually work for poor kids, as I have written about here. We must utilize the reality of Obamacare to bring black America into a new relationship with the health-care system. Efforts to coach poor black parents on child care, having results in programs such as the Harlem Children’s Zone, should be taken to scale.
All of those things can happen—and in fact, are happening—without the profound national transformation in thought that writers like Coates seek.
Yet in race discussions one is taught that opinions of the kind I have just expressed are “conservative.” However, this is sloppy terminology. I am seeking to conserve nothing; I am looking ahead—and I am quite confident that I am not alone.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...its-racial-past-let-s-look-ahead-instead.html
Mention them. Also the mention the controversy over the Washington Redskins mascot.
McWhorter's right in one respect, we do often have conversations on race but what those cases show is that more often than not, we're having two different conversations on race.
All great ideas but when the efforts are made, they are then presented, either directly or indirectly, as programs to help Black people exclusively and the White, Fox News masses are rallied to fight it.
A Legal and Moral Basis for Reparations
Unjust enrichment, and its counterpart, unjust
impoverishment, give rise to the idea of restitution
As recently as 2009, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution belatedly apologizing for this country’s oppression of African Americans: “The Congress
Sadly, these mostly white senators added a disclaimer explicitly barring African Americans from seeking reparations for the role of the government in this officially recognized oppression.
Reparations is an issue that arises sporadically because of the three-plus centuries of slavery and Jim Crow on which this country is founded, and one that Ta-Nehisi Coates revives in this month’s Atlantic Monthly.
One rationale for reparations lies in the reality of the stolen labor and millions of African Americans enslaved until 1865, legally segregated from the 1870s to the 1960s, and who face much discrimination today. This theft of labor and lives was carried out for centuries by whites as individuals and by local, state and federal institutions backed by law.
A legal basis for reparations could rest in the concept of unjust enrichment, an idea traditionally associated with relationships between individuals. Unjust enrichment involves circumstances that “give rise to the obligation of restitution, that is, the receiving and retention of property, money, or benefits which in justice and equity belong to another,” according to Ballentine’s Law Dictionary. One can extend the idea of restitution for unjust enrichment to the conditions of large-scale group oppression.
Implicit in the idea of unjust enrichment is the counterpart idea of unjust impoverishment, the condition of those suffering at the hands of those unfairly enriched. From the 1700s to the mid-1800s, white families and communities were enriched directly, or by means of economic multiplier effects, by slave plantations and related economic enterprises. Economist James Marketti once estimated that the labor stolen from enslaved African Americans from 1790 to 1860 was worth in the range of $2.1 to $4.7 trillion (in 1983 dollars), after taking into account lost interest.
Those who have attacked the idea of owing back wages to African Americans, arguing those are too-distant debts, ignore the huge damages done to African Americans during the century of near-slavery during Jim Crow segregation. Millions alive today suffered severe losses under Jim Crow and can actually name who did much of that discrimination and unjust impoverishing. The current worth of all black labor stolen by whites through the means of slavery, Jim Crow, and discrimination (plus interest) is estimated by some economists in the range of $6 to $24 trillion. And this figure doesn’t include compensation for great physical and mental suffering and millions of untimely deaths.
Most whites whose families have lived in the U.S. for generations benefit from significant racial advantages their ancestors gained under slavery, Jim Crow or post-1968 discrimination. An examination of generational histories of white families and families of color by sociologist Jennifer Mueller found huge differences in the acquisition and transfer of economic assets: compared to families of color, white families had “more than six times as many transfers of monetary assets across generations.”
Large-scale homestead acts operating from the 1860s and federal housing and veterans programs after World War II also mean that many white families have benefited and secured significant assets from “white affirmative action.” The Homestead Act of 1862 provided 246 million acres of productive land, and wealth, for 1.5 million families over seven decades. Depending on calculations for things like marriage and childbearing, social scientist Trina Williams estimates that 20 to 93 million Americans, overwhelmingly white, are current beneficiaries of this one asset-generating program. In Mueller’s family histories, whites reported five times as many instances of garnering such government-derived assets over multiple generations than did families of color. Not surprisingly, the 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances found huge racial differentials in family wealth. White families’ median wealth is about eight times that of black families, and this gap has grown in recent decades.
Most whites consider reparations for damages suffered by African Americans to be too radical, but white politicians, judges and ordinary citizens have accepted the principle of reparations for certain past damages.
Contemporary reparations might take several forms. One would be the gradual transfer of compensating wealth from unjustly enriched white communities to unjustly impoverished black communities, a government transfer linked to explicit restorative goals. The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America has sought $400 million for both individual compensation and asset-generating programs enabling impoverished black communities to prosper. Substantial reparations would include providing well-funded government programs, over generations, at local and state levels for upgrading education, job training, housing and incomes for African Americans – as individuals, families and communities.
Many argue there is no money for such moral and constitutional action. Yet, the U.S. government found more than a trillion dollars to bail out private institutions in the Great Recession—and trillions for recent irresponsible military actions. A U.S. government that was heavily involved in sustaining slavery and Jim Crow, and is implicated in contemporary discrimination, can find the substantial amounts needed to meet this country’s moral and restorative obligations to long-oppressed African Americans.
Joe Feagin is Ella C. McFadden Professor in sociology at Texas A & M University, and author of Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations (3rd ed., Routledge, 2014).
(A) acknowledges the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow laws; and
(B) apologizes to African-Americans on behalf of the people of the United States, for the wrongs committed against them and their ancestors who suffered under slavery and Jim Crow laws.”
Sadly, these mostly white senators added a disclaimer explicitly barring African Americans from seeking reparations for the role of the government in this officially recognized oppression.
Reparations is an issue that arises sporadically because of the three-plus centuries of slavery and Jim Crow on which this country is founded, and one that Ta-Nehisi Coates revives in this month’s Atlantic Monthly.
One rationale for reparations lies in the reality of the stolen labor and millions of African Americans enslaved until 1865, legally segregated from the 1870s to the 1960s, and who face much discrimination today. This theft of labor and lives was carried out for centuries by whites as individuals and by local, state and federal institutions backed by law.
A legal basis for reparations could rest in the concept of unjust enrichment, an idea traditionally associated with relationships between individuals. Unjust enrichment involves circumstances that “give rise to the obligation of restitution, that is, the receiving and retention of property, money, or benefits which in justice and equity belong to another,” according to Ballentine’s Law Dictionary. One can extend the idea of restitution for unjust enrichment to the conditions of large-scale group oppression.
Implicit in the idea of unjust enrichment is the counterpart idea of unjust impoverishment, the condition of those suffering at the hands of those unfairly enriched. From the 1700s to the mid-1800s, white families and communities were enriched directly, or by means of economic multiplier effects, by slave plantations and related economic enterprises. Economist James Marketti once estimated that the labor stolen from enslaved African Americans from 1790 to 1860 was worth in the range of $2.1 to $4.7 trillion (in 1983 dollars), after taking into account lost interest.
Those who have attacked the idea of owing back wages to African Americans, arguing those are too-distant debts, ignore the huge damages done to African Americans during the century of near-slavery during Jim Crow segregation. Millions alive today suffered severe losses under Jim Crow and can actually name who did much of that discrimination and unjust impoverishing. The current worth of all black labor stolen by whites through the means of slavery, Jim Crow, and discrimination (plus interest) is estimated by some economists in the range of $6 to $24 trillion. And this figure doesn’t include compensation for great physical and mental suffering and millions of untimely deaths.
Most whites whose families have lived in the U.S. for generations benefit from significant racial advantages their ancestors gained under slavery, Jim Crow or post-1968 discrimination. An examination of generational histories of white families and families of color by sociologist Jennifer Mueller found huge differences in the acquisition and transfer of economic assets: compared to families of color, white families had “more than six times as many transfers of monetary assets across generations.”
Large-scale homestead acts operating from the 1860s and federal housing and veterans programs after World War II also mean that many white families have benefited and secured significant assets from “white affirmative action.” The Homestead Act of 1862 provided 246 million acres of productive land, and wealth, for 1.5 million families over seven decades. Depending on calculations for things like marriage and childbearing, social scientist Trina Williams estimates that 20 to 93 million Americans, overwhelmingly white, are current beneficiaries of this one asset-generating program. In Mueller’s family histories, whites reported five times as many instances of garnering such government-derived assets over multiple generations than did families of color. Not surprisingly, the 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances found huge racial differentials in family wealth. White families’ median wealth is about eight times that of black families, and this gap has grown in recent decades.
Most whites consider reparations for damages suffered by African Americans to be too radical, but white politicians, judges and ordinary citizens have accepted the principle of reparations for certain past damages.
U.S. courts have required corporations to compensate deformed children of mothers who took drugs during pregnancies without knowing of harmful side effects. That those decisionmakers were long gone didn’t let the corporations off the hook.
Significantly, the U.S. government has actively pressured the German government since World War II to make large-scale reparations to victims of the Holocaust, although those making the reparations were not part of Nazi governments. The moral principle here is similar to that asserted in arguments for reparations for contemporary African Americans, whose socioeconomic conditions reflect damage done by past and present generations of whites.
Additionally, federal appellate Justice John Minor Wisdom has argued that the anti-slavery amendments to the U.S. Constitution set a constitutional principle for government remedial action: “When a present discriminatory effect upon blacks as a class can be linked with a discriminatory practice against blacks as a race under the slavery system, the present effect may be eradicated under the auspices of the thirteenth amendment.”
Additionally, federal appellate Justice John Minor Wisdom has argued that the anti-slavery amendments to the U.S. Constitution set a constitutional principle for government remedial action: “When a present discriminatory effect upon blacks as a class can be linked with a discriminatory practice against blacks as a race under the slavery system, the present effect may be eradicated under the auspices of the thirteenth amendment.”
Contemporary reparations might take several forms. One would be the gradual transfer of compensating wealth from unjustly enriched white communities to unjustly impoverished black communities, a government transfer linked to explicit restorative goals. The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America has sought $400 million for both individual compensation and asset-generating programs enabling impoverished black communities to prosper. Substantial reparations would include providing well-funded government programs, over generations, at local and state levels for upgrading education, job training, housing and incomes for African Americans – as individuals, families and communities.
Many argue there is no money for such moral and constitutional action. Yet, the U.S. government found more than a trillion dollars to bail out private institutions in the Great Recession—and trillions for recent irresponsible military actions. A U.S. government that was heavily involved in sustaining slavery and Jim Crow, and is implicated in contemporary discrimination, can find the substantial amounts needed to meet this country’s moral and restorative obligations to long-oppressed African Americans.
Joe Feagin is Ella C. McFadden Professor in sociology at Texas A & M University, and author of Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations (3rd ed., Routledge, 2014).
http://time.com/132034/a-legal-and-moral-basis-for-reparations/
"We are discussing reparations at this moment because in two years Barack
Obama will leave the White House, having repaired the economic collapse
that greeted his inauguration, but with African-Americans still unemployed
at a rate twice that of whites, and struggling to see how this world
differs from the status quo ante. Those who saw Obama’s election as
redemption for slavery were off by fourteen decades: his election was
supposed to expiate sins much closer to the surface, and therefore far more
difficult, and far too expensive, to confront.
The point of Coates’s essay—and, ultimately, the point of this
conversation, despite the political impossibility of enacting reparations—
is a broader understanding of black poverty as the product of public policy
and private theft facilitated by racism. The belief that blacks have been
given too much is made possible by the refusal to countenance
how much was actually taken away in the first place."
Obama will leave the White House, having repaired the economic collapse
that greeted his inauguration, but with African-Americans still unemployed
at a rate twice that of whites, and struggling to see how this world
differs from the status quo ante. Those who saw Obama’s election as
redemption for slavery were off by fourteen decades: his election was
supposed to expiate sins much closer to the surface, and therefore far more
difficult, and far too expensive, to confront.
The point of Coates’s essay—and, ultimately, the point of this
conversation, despite the political impossibility of enacting reparations—
is a broader understanding of black poverty as the product of public policy
and private theft facilitated by racism. The belief that blacks have been
given too much is made possible by the refusal to countenance
how much was actually taken away in the first place."
- What We Talk About When We Talk About Reparations
A Response to Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Case for Reparations" in Post #1
The Impossibility of Reparations
Considering the single most important question about racial restitution: How would it work?
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/the-impossibility-of-reparations/372041/
The Impossibility of Reparations
Considering the single most important question about racial restitution: How would it work?
By David Frum
The Atlantic
June 3, 2014
The United States government launched its reparations program to African Americans in autumn of 1969. Originally known as “the Philadelphia plan,” the program set quotas for black employment in construction trades. Over the next decades, such quotas would spread from industry to industry, and would expand into higher education and public contracting.
The plan is usually credited to the Nixon administration. Sometimes it’s even described as a secret scheme to split the Democratic base. The history is more prosaic. The plan originated under the Johnson administration, Ta-Nehisi Coates makes an eloquent case for restitution to black Americans, not only for wrongs done before 1865, but as much or more for wrongs done in the century of segregation that followed. Yet this powerful essay explicitly disavows any consideration of the single most important question about the restitution he has in mind: How would it work?
The affirmative action experience since 1969 offers some insights into what is likely to happen next:
1) The program will expand to additional groups.
Within only a very few months of the implementation of Philadelphia plan, preferences of various kinds were extended to women, Hispanics, and other groups. With any program of reparations, likewise, other claimants will come forward. If African Americans are due payment for slavery and subjugation, what about Native Americans, who lost a whole continent? What about Mexican-Americans, who were deprived by the Mexican-American war of the right to migrate into half their former country? Japanese Americans, interned during World War II? Chinese Americans, the victims of coolie labor and the Oriental Exclusion Acts? Members of these groups may concede that they were not maltreated in the same way as African Americans—and may not be entitled to exactly the same consideration. But if black Americans are entitled to almost a trillion dollars in compensation (Coates suggests a figure of $34 billion a year “for a decade or two”) surely these other maltreated groups must be entitled at least to something?
Coates’s essay is built on an unstated assumption that America’s racial composition is essentially binary, a white majority that inflicts inequality; a black minority that suffers inequality. Others enter into his imagination only at the hazy edges: "One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one’s ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. … A nation outlives its generations.”
But the “others” are now 25 percent of the nation and rising fast. Does the Fujianese delivery man pedaling through the brownstones of Fort Greene owe a debt to the people whose food he carries? How much? The reparations idea—so long politically outlandish—has become thinkable today because of the gathering power of the Obama political coalition. But nothing would blow that coalition apart faster than the internal redistribution Coates contemplates from some constituencies to others. And if the idea is that the newest arrivals to America will be persuaded to accept paying reparations as a cost of immigration—or that new Americans can be cajoled to pay a symbolic something because the bulk of the burden will be carried by the dwindling white majority (a majority that already feels ever more culturally insecure and economically beset)—well, that’s a prescript for an even more dangerous political explosion.
2) The question of who qualifies will become ever more contested and embittered.
Under today’s racial preference rules, a nephew of the King of Spain or the daughter of the chairman of the biggest bank in Chile would both qualify for Hispanic preferences if they resided in the United States. Harvard can (and does) meet its African American diversity requirements with the children of recent African immigrants, whose families never experienced slavery or segregation in this country.
The problem of “who qualifies?” is explosive enough with hiring and admissions preferences. As the benefits at stake expand to the vast dimensions urged by Coates, the question will become more explosive yet. Does a mixed race person qualify? How mixed? What about recent immigrants from Africa or the West Indies? What about future immigrants? What about illegal immigrants from Africa who subsequently gain legalization—would amnesty come with a check attached?
3) Side effects will be large and unexpected.
Affirmative action characterizes some parts of the American economy more strongly than others, and in particular the public sector more than the private sector. This pervading fact has shaped the growth of the black middle class. Black Americans are 30 percent more likely than non-blacks to work in the public sector, where they earn higher wages relative to whites than they do in private employment. This strategy brought security to many black families in the years between 1970 and 2008.
But the strategy came at a cost.
First, the strategy tethered black economic advancement to the growth of government. That growth has become ever more fiercely contested in recent years. Since 2008, it has abruptly halted and reversed.
Second, the strategy detoured talented people away from the higher risks and rewards of the private sector, and especially from entrepreneurship. Black Americans are less than half as likely as white to own their own businesses.
A reparations plan is likely to prove even more distorting.
If paid to individuals as an income stream, reparations would dis-incentivize work.
If paid to individuals as a lump sum, reparations would expose one of America’s least financially sophisticated populations to predatory practices that would make subprime lending seem socially responsible by contrast.
If paid to institutions or collective entities … well, let’s look at that under another header.
4) The program will work severe inequities.
Affirmative action’s quirks and injustices are notorious. But they will be nothing compared to the strange consequences of a reparations program. Not all black people are poor. Not all non-black people are rich. Does Oprah have a housecleaner? Who changes the diapers of Beyonce’s baby? Who files Herman J. Russell’s taxes? Will their wages be taxed and the proceeds redirected to their employers?
Within the target population, will all receive the same? Same per person, or same per family? Or will there be adjustment for need? How will need be measured? Will convicted criminals be eligible? If not, the program will exclude perhaps one million African Americans. If yes, the program would potentially tax victims of rape and families of the murdered for the benefit of their assailants.
And if reparations were somehow delivered communally and collectively, disparities of wealth and power and political influence within black America will become even more urgent. Simply put, when government spends money on complex programs, the people who provide the service usually end up with much more sway over the spending than the spending’s intended beneficiaries. The poorer the beneficiaries, the more powerfully this rule holds—and it has held strongest of all in programs intended to aid the black poor. The District of Columbia public schools have excelled at delivering stable jobs to their unionized employees. They have failed their students.
5) The legitimacy of the project will rapidly fade.
Affirmative action ranks among the least popular thing that U.S. governments do. When surveyed, white Americans crushingly reject race preferences, Hispanic Americans object by a margin of 2 to 1, and black Americans are almost evenly divided, with only the slightest plurality in favor.
Now imagine how Americans will feel when what is redistributed by racial calculus is not university admissions or workplace promotions but actual, foldable cash.
Ta-Nehisi Coates anticipates this trouble by suggesting that reparations might be paid not to individuals but collectively to African Americans as a group. He favorably cites the example of German reparations to the state of Israel after World War II.
But the state of Israel was a sovereign, elected by a democratic process. Few in the Jewish world doubted that Israel could and did act for the Jewish people as a whole. Black Americans, however, do not have a state of their own. If reparations are deemed some kind of collective debt to black Americans as a group, rather than to black Americans as individuals, then the question will arise: Who decides how this money will be distributed? Some kind of National Endowment for Black America? Chosen how? Accountable to whom?
Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree suggests widening the concept of reparations even further, into a national "program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.” In that case, reparations would cease to be a new program, but would become instead a new argument in favor of the preexisting policy preferences of the left wing of the Democratic party. Earlier in his article, Coates quotes with seeming disdain the radio host Rush Limbaugh’s disparagement of the Affordable Care Act as a form of “reparations." But aren’t Limbaugh and Ogletree more or less in agreement here?
Coates dismisses all these questions and so many others. He suggests the country first enact Rep. John Conyers’ Reparations Bill and then open a discussion about how reparations would work. But committing yourself to a solution before you have any idea whether such a solution is workable—or, rather, in defiance of pretty strong reasons that your solution is utterly unworkable—is not a responsible reaction to America’s racial dilemmas.
Instead, we’ll be all too likely to repeat once more the sad pattern of so many civil rights initiatives: the bold announcement, the raised hopes, the unexpected difficulties, the suppression of open discussion of those difficulties, the ossifying of the project into bureaucracy, the realization of failure, the discovery of the political impossibility of reforming or repairing the failure.
In his Lincoln Memorial address of 1963, Martin Luther King spoke of the words of the Declaration of Independence as “promissory note” on which the nation had defaulted. He meant this as a metaphor, not a financial analysis. Ta-Nehisi Coates has taken him literally. King understood, however, that the wrongs of which he spoke could not be redressed with money (or money alone), and that is even more true today than in 1963.
A real-world example:
Young black Americans spend on average 4.5 hours more per day with electronic media (notably television, video games, and other forms of online entertainment) than do their white counterparts, for a total in excess of 13 hours. While all young people spend a lot of time in front of screens, black youth watch far and away the most television: almost 3.5 hours per day, or an hour and a quarter more than young whites. Almost 80 percent of black youth say they "usually" eat meals in front of a TV.
The disparity is growing wider, not narrowing, as more forms of electronic media become available. The disparity shrinks, but does not disappear, with education and income. The best predictor of how much TV a child will watch is not whether he or she lives in a single or two-parent family. It is not family income or wealth. It is race: Even the most advantaged black youth spend 90 minutes more per day with electronic media than do their white contemporaries. It won’t surprise you to hear that heavy use of electronic media correlates with all kinds of bad outcomes, from obesity to poor school performance. (Across all races, only about 16-20 minutes per day of screentime is connected to schoolwork.)
It’s not difficult to draw a chain of causation from the exploitation so stirringly described by Ta-Nehisi Coates to the TV-dependence of black youth in the 2010s. In this case, however, detailing the cause does not reveal the remedy. To realize their full potential, those kids must watch less TV. No plausible government program can shut down their devices for them. That decision—like almost every decision that leads to self- and collective improvement—must come from within families and within individuals.
The great white lie America tells itself is that the passage of civil-rights laws in the 1960s and '70s lifted the burden of the racial past. But racial subjugation imposed over 350 years could not and was not alleviated over a single generation. Today’s white Americans inherit financial assets and human capital accumulated over a long span of time—and very possibly by robbing or cheating victims of color.
In refuting that lie, however, Ta-Nehisi Coates advances an error that also does harm: that black Americans can build their future by debunking white Americans’ illusions about their past. It does not work that way. Racism may have turned the TV set on. Anti-racism won’t turn the TV set off.
The government of the United States could trace the genealogy of every white family and send a massive bill to the descendants of every slaveholder and every slumlord who did business from 1619 through 1968. It could redistribute that money in a princely lump sum. But that money won’t change unhealthy dietary patterns, or enhance language skills, or teach the habits on which thriving communities are built.
Germany and Israel may not be historically exact precedent for Coates’s plan. The more exact precedent may be the sudden surge of oil wealth into the Middle East after 1973. Nations that had always felt themselves cheated of their due suddenly saw their incomes triple and quadruple. Yet the nations did not progress. The wealth of nations is built on their human capital—and the oil income not only failed to enrich them, but oftentimes incentivized behavior that left (or will leave) those nations in many ways worse off than before.
The human qualities that advance a community and a nation were defiantly acquired by black Americans themselves under conditions of horrifying adversity. Their development has accelerated as equality has come nearer to view.
Disparities remain, of course. Coates challenges all Americans to remember where those disparities came from—and to think hard what is owed to those on the wrong end of them.
If “reparations” means remembrance and repentance for the wrongs of the past, then let’s have reparations. Americans tell a too-flattering version of their national story. They treat slavery as ancillary rather than essential. They forget that the work of slaves paid this country’s import bill from the 17th century until 1860. They do not acknowledge that the “freedom” championed by slaveholding Founding Fathers, including the author of the Declaration of Independence, included the freedom to own other human beings as property. They can no longer notice how slavery is stitched into every line of the Constitution and was supported by every single early national institution. The self-reckoning we see in Germany and other European countries does not come easily to Americans—and is still outright rejected by many.
If “reparations” means intensifying the nation’s commitment to equal opportunity for all its people—and most especially for the descendants of those once enslaved—then (again) let’s have reparations. Better schools, more jobs, some form of universal health coverage, an immigration policy that does not exert endless downward pressure on the wages of America’s least skilled workers, improved nutrition especially in early childhood, higher taxes on alcohol, more effective and less punitive enforcement of drug laws—there’s a program of group betterment awaiting the right advocates at the right time.
But if “reparations” means what most Americans reasonably interpret it to mean—cash flowing from some Americans to others in race-conscious ways meant to redress the racial wrongs of the past—then it’s a disastrous idea for all groups in society.
And if, when you advocate reparations, you aren’t sure which of the above things it does mean, then your advocacy should be postponed until you are.
The Atlantic
June 3, 2014
The United States government launched its reparations program to African Americans in autumn of 1969. Originally known as “the Philadelphia plan,” the program set quotas for black employment in construction trades. Over the next decades, such quotas would spread from industry to industry, and would expand into higher education and public contracting.
The plan is usually credited to the Nixon administration. Sometimes it’s even described as a secret scheme to split the Democratic base. The history is more prosaic. The plan originated under the Johnson administration, Ta-Nehisi Coates makes an eloquent case for restitution to black Americans, not only for wrongs done before 1865, but as much or more for wrongs done in the century of segregation that followed. Yet this powerful essay explicitly disavows any consideration of the single most important question about the restitution he has in mind: How would it work?
The affirmative action experience since 1969 offers some insights into what is likely to happen next:
1) The program will expand to additional groups.
Within only a very few months of the implementation of Philadelphia plan, preferences of various kinds were extended to women, Hispanics, and other groups. With any program of reparations, likewise, other claimants will come forward. If African Americans are due payment for slavery and subjugation, what about Native Americans, who lost a whole continent? What about Mexican-Americans, who were deprived by the Mexican-American war of the right to migrate into half their former country? Japanese Americans, interned during World War II? Chinese Americans, the victims of coolie labor and the Oriental Exclusion Acts? Members of these groups may concede that they were not maltreated in the same way as African Americans—and may not be entitled to exactly the same consideration. But if black Americans are entitled to almost a trillion dollars in compensation (Coates suggests a figure of $34 billion a year “for a decade or two”) surely these other maltreated groups must be entitled at least to something?
Coates’s essay is built on an unstated assumption that America’s racial composition is essentially binary, a white majority that inflicts inequality; a black minority that suffers inequality. Others enter into his imagination only at the hazy edges: "One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one’s ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. … A nation outlives its generations.”
But the “others” are now 25 percent of the nation and rising fast. Does the Fujianese delivery man pedaling through the brownstones of Fort Greene owe a debt to the people whose food he carries? How much? The reparations idea—so long politically outlandish—has become thinkable today because of the gathering power of the Obama political coalition. But nothing would blow that coalition apart faster than the internal redistribution Coates contemplates from some constituencies to others. And if the idea is that the newest arrivals to America will be persuaded to accept paying reparations as a cost of immigration—or that new Americans can be cajoled to pay a symbolic something because the bulk of the burden will be carried by the dwindling white majority (a majority that already feels ever more culturally insecure and economically beset)—well, that’s a prescript for an even more dangerous political explosion.
2) The question of who qualifies will become ever more contested and embittered.
Under today’s racial preference rules, a nephew of the King of Spain or the daughter of the chairman of the biggest bank in Chile would both qualify for Hispanic preferences if they resided in the United States. Harvard can (and does) meet its African American diversity requirements with the children of recent African immigrants, whose families never experienced slavery or segregation in this country.
The problem of “who qualifies?” is explosive enough with hiring and admissions preferences. As the benefits at stake expand to the vast dimensions urged by Coates, the question will become more explosive yet. Does a mixed race person qualify? How mixed? What about recent immigrants from Africa or the West Indies? What about future immigrants? What about illegal immigrants from Africa who subsequently gain legalization—would amnesty come with a check attached?
3) Side effects will be large and unexpected.
Affirmative action characterizes some parts of the American economy more strongly than others, and in particular the public sector more than the private sector. This pervading fact has shaped the growth of the black middle class. Black Americans are 30 percent more likely than non-blacks to work in the public sector, where they earn higher wages relative to whites than they do in private employment. This strategy brought security to many black families in the years between 1970 and 2008.
But the strategy came at a cost.
First, the strategy tethered black economic advancement to the growth of government. That growth has become ever more fiercely contested in recent years. Since 2008, it has abruptly halted and reversed.
Second, the strategy detoured talented people away from the higher risks and rewards of the private sector, and especially from entrepreneurship. Black Americans are less than half as likely as white to own their own businesses.
A reparations plan is likely to prove even more distorting.
If paid to individuals as an income stream, reparations would dis-incentivize work.
If paid to individuals as a lump sum, reparations would expose one of America’s least financially sophisticated populations to predatory practices that would make subprime lending seem socially responsible by contrast.
If paid to institutions or collective entities … well, let’s look at that under another header.
4) The program will work severe inequities.
Affirmative action’s quirks and injustices are notorious. But they will be nothing compared to the strange consequences of a reparations program. Not all black people are poor. Not all non-black people are rich. Does Oprah have a housecleaner? Who changes the diapers of Beyonce’s baby? Who files Herman J. Russell’s taxes? Will their wages be taxed and the proceeds redirected to their employers?
Within the target population, will all receive the same? Same per person, or same per family? Or will there be adjustment for need? How will need be measured? Will convicted criminals be eligible? If not, the program will exclude perhaps one million African Americans. If yes, the program would potentially tax victims of rape and families of the murdered for the benefit of their assailants.
And if reparations were somehow delivered communally and collectively, disparities of wealth and power and political influence within black America will become even more urgent. Simply put, when government spends money on complex programs, the people who provide the service usually end up with much more sway over the spending than the spending’s intended beneficiaries. The poorer the beneficiaries, the more powerfully this rule holds—and it has held strongest of all in programs intended to aid the black poor. The District of Columbia public schools have excelled at delivering stable jobs to their unionized employees. They have failed their students.
5) The legitimacy of the project will rapidly fade.
Affirmative action ranks among the least popular thing that U.S. governments do. When surveyed, white Americans crushingly reject race preferences, Hispanic Americans object by a margin of 2 to 1, and black Americans are almost evenly divided, with only the slightest plurality in favor.
Now imagine how Americans will feel when what is redistributed by racial calculus is not university admissions or workplace promotions but actual, foldable cash.
Ta-Nehisi Coates anticipates this trouble by suggesting that reparations might be paid not to individuals but collectively to African Americans as a group. He favorably cites the example of German reparations to the state of Israel after World War II.
But the state of Israel was a sovereign, elected by a democratic process. Few in the Jewish world doubted that Israel could and did act for the Jewish people as a whole. Black Americans, however, do not have a state of their own. If reparations are deemed some kind of collective debt to black Americans as a group, rather than to black Americans as individuals, then the question will arise: Who decides how this money will be distributed? Some kind of National Endowment for Black America? Chosen how? Accountable to whom?
Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree suggests widening the concept of reparations even further, into a national "program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.” In that case, reparations would cease to be a new program, but would become instead a new argument in favor of the preexisting policy preferences of the left wing of the Democratic party. Earlier in his article, Coates quotes with seeming disdain the radio host Rush Limbaugh’s disparagement of the Affordable Care Act as a form of “reparations." But aren’t Limbaugh and Ogletree more or less in agreement here?
Coates dismisses all these questions and so many others. He suggests the country first enact Rep. John Conyers’ Reparations Bill and then open a discussion about how reparations would work. But committing yourself to a solution before you have any idea whether such a solution is workable—or, rather, in defiance of pretty strong reasons that your solution is utterly unworkable—is not a responsible reaction to America’s racial dilemmas.
Instead, we’ll be all too likely to repeat once more the sad pattern of so many civil rights initiatives: the bold announcement, the raised hopes, the unexpected difficulties, the suppression of open discussion of those difficulties, the ossifying of the project into bureaucracy, the realization of failure, the discovery of the political impossibility of reforming or repairing the failure.
* * *
In his Lincoln Memorial address of 1963, Martin Luther King spoke of the words of the Declaration of Independence as “promissory note” on which the nation had defaulted. He meant this as a metaphor, not a financial analysis. Ta-Nehisi Coates has taken him literally. King understood, however, that the wrongs of which he spoke could not be redressed with money (or money alone), and that is even more true today than in 1963.
A real-world example:
Young black Americans spend on average 4.5 hours more per day with electronic media (notably television, video games, and other forms of online entertainment) than do their white counterparts, for a total in excess of 13 hours. While all young people spend a lot of time in front of screens, black youth watch far and away the most television: almost 3.5 hours per day, or an hour and a quarter more than young whites. Almost 80 percent of black youth say they "usually" eat meals in front of a TV.
The disparity is growing wider, not narrowing, as more forms of electronic media become available. The disparity shrinks, but does not disappear, with education and income. The best predictor of how much TV a child will watch is not whether he or she lives in a single or two-parent family. It is not family income or wealth. It is race: Even the most advantaged black youth spend 90 minutes more per day with electronic media than do their white contemporaries. It won’t surprise you to hear that heavy use of electronic media correlates with all kinds of bad outcomes, from obesity to poor school performance. (Across all races, only about 16-20 minutes per day of screentime is connected to schoolwork.)
It’s not difficult to draw a chain of causation from the exploitation so stirringly described by Ta-Nehisi Coates to the TV-dependence of black youth in the 2010s. In this case, however, detailing the cause does not reveal the remedy. To realize their full potential, those kids must watch less TV. No plausible government program can shut down their devices for them. That decision—like almost every decision that leads to self- and collective improvement—must come from within families and within individuals.
The great white lie America tells itself is that the passage of civil-rights laws in the 1960s and '70s lifted the burden of the racial past. But racial subjugation imposed over 350 years could not and was not alleviated over a single generation. Today’s white Americans inherit financial assets and human capital accumulated over a long span of time—and very possibly by robbing or cheating victims of color.
In refuting that lie, however, Ta-Nehisi Coates advances an error that also does harm: that black Americans can build their future by debunking white Americans’ illusions about their past. It does not work that way. Racism may have turned the TV set on. Anti-racism won’t turn the TV set off.
The government of the United States could trace the genealogy of every white family and send a massive bill to the descendants of every slaveholder and every slumlord who did business from 1619 through 1968. It could redistribute that money in a princely lump sum. But that money won’t change unhealthy dietary patterns, or enhance language skills, or teach the habits on which thriving communities are built.
Germany and Israel may not be historically exact precedent for Coates’s plan. The more exact precedent may be the sudden surge of oil wealth into the Middle East after 1973. Nations that had always felt themselves cheated of their due suddenly saw their incomes triple and quadruple. Yet the nations did not progress. The wealth of nations is built on their human capital—and the oil income not only failed to enrich them, but oftentimes incentivized behavior that left (or will leave) those nations in many ways worse off than before.
The human qualities that advance a community and a nation were defiantly acquired by black Americans themselves under conditions of horrifying adversity. Their development has accelerated as equality has come nearer to view.
Disparities remain, of course. Coates challenges all Americans to remember where those disparities came from—and to think hard what is owed to those on the wrong end of them.
If “reparations” means remembrance and repentance for the wrongs of the past, then let’s have reparations. Americans tell a too-flattering version of their national story. They treat slavery as ancillary rather than essential. They forget that the work of slaves paid this country’s import bill from the 17th century until 1860. They do not acknowledge that the “freedom” championed by slaveholding Founding Fathers, including the author of the Declaration of Independence, included the freedom to own other human beings as property. They can no longer notice how slavery is stitched into every line of the Constitution and was supported by every single early national institution. The self-reckoning we see in Germany and other European countries does not come easily to Americans—and is still outright rejected by many.
If “reparations” means intensifying the nation’s commitment to equal opportunity for all its people—and most especially for the descendants of those once enslaved—then (again) let’s have reparations. Better schools, more jobs, some form of universal health coverage, an immigration policy that does not exert endless downward pressure on the wages of America’s least skilled workers, improved nutrition especially in early childhood, higher taxes on alcohol, more effective and less punitive enforcement of drug laws—there’s a program of group betterment awaiting the right advocates at the right time.
But if “reparations” means what most Americans reasonably interpret it to mean—cash flowing from some Americans to others in race-conscious ways meant to redress the racial wrongs of the past—then it’s a disastrous idea for all groups in society.
And if, when you advocate reparations, you aren’t sure which of the above things it does mean, then your advocacy should be postponed until you are.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/the-impossibility-of-reparations/372041/
Ta-Nehisi Coates' reply to David Frum's "The Impossibility of Reparations"
The Radical Practicality of Reparations
President Ronald Reagan signs the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. The Act granted
reparations to Japanese-Americans interned during World War II.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/the-radical-practicality-of-reparations/372114/
________________________________________________________
The Radical Practicality of Reparations
President Ronald Reagan signs the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. The Act granted
reparations to Japanese-Americans interned during World War II.
A reply to David Frum
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Atlantic
June 4, 2014
David Frum has posted a rebuttal to my argument in favor of reparations. I appreciate David's engagement with the issue. I often miss the old days when The Atlantic's writers would engage each other in running debate, so I'm happy for the chance to get back into that kind of conversation here.
On y va.
David grounds his rebuttal in The Philadelphia Plan, an affirmative action program that David believes qualifies as reparations. I disagree. The Philadelphia Plan was an attempt to end job discrimination among firms doing business with the federal government. Originally it was isolated to the building trades in Philadelphia. This was not a mistake. "The NAACP wanted a tougher require; the unions hated the whole thing," said White House aide John Ehrlichman. "Before long, the AFL-CIO and the NAACP were locked in combat over one of the passionate issues of the day and the Nixon administration was located in the sweet and reasonable middle."
The Plan's proprietors showed little stomach for any kind of historical reckoning. President Richard Nixon's Assistant Secretary of Labor Arthur Fletcher, who helped create the Plan, targeted not just blacks, but "Orientals, American Indians and persons with Spanish surnames."
More importantly, The Philadelphia Plan was focused on ending present racist discrimination, not compensating for the past. In Philadelphia, a city that was 30 percent black, there were 12 minority unionized ironworkers and three black pipe-fitters. There was no black unionized work among the sheet metal trades, elevator constructors, or the stone-masons. From the perspective of reparations, one might calculate how much this discrimination had cost Philadelphia's black community and then attempt to compensate them. The Philadelphia Plan did not do this. Indeed Fletcher went so far as to declare himself neither interested in compensation nor "a fruitless debate about slavery and its debilitating legacy." The Philadelphia Plan was no more reparations than school busing was reparations.
The White House's appetite for these "reparations" proved short lived. In 1970, Nixon took The Philadelphia Plan national, expanding beyond the trades. In 1972, he ran against his own plan. Fletcher was forced out. The Democrats were tarred as the "quota party." "The zip went out of that integration effort," said then aide William Safire, "after the hard hats marched in support of Nixon on the war." So much for "reparations."
And so much for history. David goes on to assert that reparations for one group must necessarily lead to reparations for all groups:
This argument carries the virus of its own destruction. In fact reparations paid to Japanese-Americans for internment has been American policy for over 20 years. No reparations for African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, or Chinese-Americans followed. Even German-Americans and Italian-Americans who were also interned received no reparations.
The Japanese-American struggle for reparations is significant and important, not just for our present discussion, but because it serves as useful corrective for hagiographers of war. And it is not an obscure episode. Indeed, Japanese-American reparations were in the news this week, with the death of activist Yuri Kochiyama, one of the principal advocates of the cause. David treats Japanese-American reparations as an open question or a thought experiment. But it isn't. It's American history—and people charged with analyzing America should know it.
People who take up reparations arguments should especially know it because it presents us with some provocative questions. The collective ills of housing segregation—block-busting, redlining, segregated public-housing, the G.I. Bill, terrorism—continued long after Japanese-American internment. A serious interlocutor of reparations can not casually muster a melange of historical wrongs, but must directly explain why the Japanese-American case is compelling, but the more recent African-American case is not.
Slippery slopes will not do. The "If we give them one, they'll all have one" argument is demonstrably false. This is as it should be. The argument for black reparations is not simply "Hey guys, we did it for the Japanese-Americans so it must be right." A claim must stand on its arguments. Nothing would please me more than to read a 15,000 word "Case for Native American Reparations." I say this because we can't evaluate particular claims without understanding particular history. David, like many who believe reparations to be "impossible," is anxious to skip the history and leap to implementation. But the questions, themselves, prove that we are not prepared.
"Does a mixed-raced person qualify?" David asks. Probably so, given that there are very few "pure raced" black people who were injured by racism. Indeed, the lack of "purity" is parcel to the injury. Perhaps David wants to ask "Do black people with direct 'white' ancestry qualify?" The correct reply to this is "Were black people with direct 'white' ancestry victims of racist housing policy?" The answer to that question is knowable. But it is not the question we ask. Instead we focus on the myth of "race," while ignoring the demonstrable fact of injury.
This species of ignorance—of looking away—is old. In 1884, Harvard scientist Nathaniel Shaler assessed "The Negro Problem" in the pages of this very magazine. Shaler concluded that:
At the very moment that Shaler was disowning American responsibility for enslavement, there were thousands, perhaps millions, of freedmen alive as well as their enslavers. It had barely been 20 years since enslavement was abolished. It had not been ten years since the rout of Reconstruction. In that time, sensible claims for reparations were being made. The black activist Callie House argued that pensions should be paid to freedmen and freedwomen for unpaid toil. The movement garnered Congressional support. But it failed, largely because, the country believed as Shaler did, that "none of the men of this century" were "responsible."
A similar moment finds us now. Even if one feels that slavery was too far into the deep past (and I do not, because I view this as a continuum) the immediate past is with us. Identifying the victims of racist housing policy in this country is not hard. Again, we have the maps. We have the census. We could set up a claims system for black veterans who were frustrated in their attempt to use the G.I. Bill. We could then decide what remedy we might offer these people and their communities. And there is nothing "impractical" about this.
The problem of reparations has never been practicality. It has always been the awesome ghosts of history. A fear of ghosts has sometimes occupied the pages of the magazine for which David and I now write. In other times banishment has been our priority. The mature citizen, the hard student, is now called to choose between finding a reason to confront the past, or finding more reasons to hide from it. David thinks HR-40 commits us to a solution. He is correct. The solution is to study. I submit his own article as proof of why such study is so deeply needed.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Atlantic
June 4, 2014
David Frum has posted a rebuttal to my argument in favor of reparations. I appreciate David's engagement with the issue. I often miss the old days when The Atlantic's writers would engage each other in running debate, so I'm happy for the chance to get back into that kind of conversation here.
On y va.
David grounds his rebuttal in The Philadelphia Plan, an affirmative action program that David believes qualifies as reparations. I disagree. The Philadelphia Plan was an attempt to end job discrimination among firms doing business with the federal government. Originally it was isolated to the building trades in Philadelphia. This was not a mistake. "The NAACP wanted a tougher require; the unions hated the whole thing," said White House aide John Ehrlichman. "Before long, the AFL-CIO and the NAACP were locked in combat over one of the passionate issues of the day and the Nixon administration was located in the sweet and reasonable middle."
The Plan's proprietors showed little stomach for any kind of historical reckoning. President Richard Nixon's Assistant Secretary of Labor Arthur Fletcher, who helped create the Plan, targeted not just blacks, but "Orientals, American Indians and persons with Spanish surnames."
More importantly, The Philadelphia Plan was focused on ending present racist discrimination, not compensating for the past. In Philadelphia, a city that was 30 percent black, there were 12 minority unionized ironworkers and three black pipe-fitters. There was no black unionized work among the sheet metal trades, elevator constructors, or the stone-masons. From the perspective of reparations, one might calculate how much this discrimination had cost Philadelphia's black community and then attempt to compensate them. The Philadelphia Plan did not do this. Indeed Fletcher went so far as to declare himself neither interested in compensation nor "a fruitless debate about slavery and its debilitating legacy." The Philadelphia Plan was no more reparations than school busing was reparations.
The White House's appetite for these "reparations" proved short lived. In 1970, Nixon took The Philadelphia Plan national, expanding beyond the trades. In 1972, he ran against his own plan. Fletcher was forced out. The Democrats were tarred as the "quota party." "The zip went out of that integration effort," said then aide William Safire, "after the hard hats marched in support of Nixon on the war." So much for "reparations."
And so much for history. David goes on to assert that reparations for one group must necessarily lead to reparations for all groups:
This argument carries the virus of its own destruction. In fact reparations paid to Japanese-Americans for internment has been American policy for over 20 years. No reparations for African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, or Chinese-Americans followed. Even German-Americans and Italian-Americans who were also interned received no reparations.
The Japanese-American struggle for reparations is significant and important, not just for our present discussion, but because it serves as useful corrective for hagiographers of war. And it is not an obscure episode. Indeed, Japanese-American reparations were in the news this week, with the death of activist Yuri Kochiyama, one of the principal advocates of the cause. David treats Japanese-American reparations as an open question or a thought experiment. But it isn't. It's American history—and people charged with analyzing America should know it.
People who take up reparations arguments should especially know it because it presents us with some provocative questions. The collective ills of housing segregation—block-busting, redlining, segregated public-housing, the G.I. Bill, terrorism—continued long after Japanese-American internment. A serious interlocutor of reparations can not casually muster a melange of historical wrongs, but must directly explain why the Japanese-American case is compelling, but the more recent African-American case is not.
Slippery slopes will not do. The "If we give them one, they'll all have one" argument is demonstrably false. This is as it should be. The argument for black reparations is not simply "Hey guys, we did it for the Japanese-Americans so it must be right." A claim must stand on its arguments. Nothing would please me more than to read a 15,000 word "Case for Native American Reparations." I say this because we can't evaluate particular claims without understanding particular history. David, like many who believe reparations to be "impossible," is anxious to skip the history and leap to implementation. But the questions, themselves, prove that we are not prepared.
"Does a mixed-raced person qualify?" David asks. Probably so, given that there are very few "pure raced" black people who were injured by racism. Indeed, the lack of "purity" is parcel to the injury. Perhaps David wants to ask "Do black people with direct 'white' ancestry qualify?" The correct reply to this is "Were black people with direct 'white' ancestry victims of racist housing policy?" The answer to that question is knowable. But it is not the question we ask. Instead we focus on the myth of "race," while ignoring the demonstrable fact of injury.
This species of ignorance—of looking away—is old. In 1884, Harvard scientist Nathaniel Shaler assessed "The Negro Problem" in the pages of this very magazine. Shaler concluded that:
At the very moment that Shaler was disowning American responsibility for enslavement, there were thousands, perhaps millions, of freedmen alive as well as their enslavers. It had barely been 20 years since enslavement was abolished. It had not been ten years since the rout of Reconstruction. In that time, sensible claims for reparations were being made. The black activist Callie House argued that pensions should be paid to freedmen and freedwomen for unpaid toil. The movement garnered Congressional support. But it failed, largely because, the country believed as Shaler did, that "none of the men of this century" were "responsible."
A similar moment finds us now. Even if one feels that slavery was too far into the deep past (and I do not, because I view this as a continuum) the immediate past is with us. Identifying the victims of racist housing policy in this country is not hard. Again, we have the maps. We have the census. We could set up a claims system for black veterans who were frustrated in their attempt to use the G.I. Bill. We could then decide what remedy we might offer these people and their communities. And there is nothing "impractical" about this.
The problem of reparations has never been practicality. It has always been the awesome ghosts of history. A fear of ghosts has sometimes occupied the pages of the magazine for which David and I now write. In other times banishment has been our priority. The mature citizen, the hard student, is now called to choose between finding a reason to confront the past, or finding more reasons to hide from it. David thinks HR-40 commits us to a solution. He is correct. The solution is to study. I submit his own article as proof of why such study is so deeply needed.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/the-radical-practicality-of-reparations/372114/
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The following books were essential to this piece:
- Terry Anderson's The Pursuit of Fairness is a thorough review of the history affirmative action, a policy that many people talk about but fail to understand. Quotes of Fletcher and Ehrlichman are taken from Anderson's book.
- Mary Francis Berry's My Face Is Black Is True, is a chronicle of one of the earliest efforts, post-enslavement, for reparations led by the remarkable Callie House.
- Khalil Gibran Muhammad's The Condemnation of Blackness, is a useful corrective to the deceptive invocations of "black on black crime." Muhammad demonstrates that much of rhetoric around "black crime" is old and has its roots in our racist past.
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