Summary: The Case For Reparations

There are few modern texts that rival Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” in sheer pathos. Coates is a writer of incomparable skill and incredible impact; in his hands English is a powerful and indefatigable tool. “The Case,” as an argument for the deeply controversial policy of reparations for black Americans for slavery and Jim Crow, is extremely persuasive. It lays out, as no other work I know of does, the centuries of dishonor (to borrow a term from Helen Hunt Jackson) experienced by black Americans. It convinced me, someone who once opposed reparations, to support them. Before reading Coates’s article in mid-2014, I, like most non-black Americans, opposed reparations. I had knowledge of the black experience in America, of …show more content…
It made abundantly clear that there was a direct connection between the state-sanctioned abuse, discrimination, and evil directed at black Americans in centuries past and the poverty of today. It followed Clyde Ross, the inheritor of innumerable tragedies, a man whose life had been shaped by Jim Crow in the South and discrimination in the North. Ross’ words struck me like a stone to the face: “the reason black people are so far behind now is not because of now,” he said, “it’s because of then.” For me, this solved the great mystery of why there was such a stark racial divide in wealth. The statement was direct and unequivocal: it was the utterance of a simple truth. There is a value to subtlety, of course, but there is also a value to bluntness. It is impossible to pick a year and call it a clean break from the past; the stabs of today are the wounds of tomorrow, I realized. This realization reshaped my thinking about the legacy of injustice, and showed me that historical wrongs were the cause of the current …show more content…
It showed me that oppression of black Americans was inherited by each successive generation: it is not America’s “original sin,” as is so often said, but rather America’s “bloody heirloom,” as Coates said in another essay—something carried on by each successive generation, something that is at the very core of what America is. “White supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it,” he wrote. I had once absorbed the “Schoolhouse Rock” view of history, the simplistic rendering of America as a fundamentally noble nation with kinks and flaws, a nation blessed by Providence and given a divine mission. How then could America pay reparations for some minor mistake? Coates shattered this view. The line I quoted was not a one-off declaration: it was something he supported through historical evidence, through relating how slave labor built the American economy and how oppression of black people was long seen as an integral part of America. Coates summarized, in essence, an alternative history of America, an oft-monstrous nation that was had a great evil as one of its