Between the World and Reparations

Ta-Nehisi Coates, the R-word, and what comes next

People love to hate Ta-Nehisi Coates these days for daring to utter the R-word, and to do it so often, and with a straight face.

“But it’d be so haaaaarrrrrrd, y’all! And like, who even is Black anyways?”

(This is how people talk, when they talk, in my head.)

But that’s totally fair! It is totally fair to hear the R-word and flip out because but how even, and who even is explaining how even.

And the above’s probably in part because it’s, like, super hard to read a 16,000 word article on an iPhone. People hear Coates say he has a case for reparations and they think he wants every Black person in the United States to get cut a sweet, fat check, and maybe also a little postcard that says:

“Our bad! Sincerely, White People.”

But that’s part of what Coates attacks when he attacks, for example, Bernie Sanders for not supporting reparations. He’s attacking an ahistorical public that understands what white folks’ve done to Black folks only as a nebulous, malformed ill of the past for which the repair is, so say its supporters:

“$$$ for everyone!”

He’s challenging the pervasive, persistent idea that racism is a thing we think rather than a thing we do and legislate and enact and enforce.

The ill for which Coates seeks repair is not nebulous, nor is it malformed. It is as specific and targeted as would be its cure.

Beyond Coates

In “The Case for Reparations,” Coates doesn’t just lay out a bunch of evidence that Black Americans were, like, hella wronged over the course of this country’s entire history. We already get that in our U.S. History classes — assuming your professor’s woke, of course — or at least the reduced fat/low sodium version that makes those wrongs look like… well, makes them look like a big nebulous, malformed ill of the past.

In “The Case for Reparations” (and elsewhere), Coates outlines specific bullshit (read: policies, laws, corporate decisionmaking, tangible actions) that had specific effects on specific Black folks, the legacy of which continue to be felt today. For those Black folks.

And, arguably, for Black folks at large — but (and here’s where your goddamn pragmatism comes in) Coates is suggesting we begin here. Where we know what went wrong, and how. And to determine exactly how much. (As they did in Chicago and North Carolina, for example.)

Coates does not simply want a rising economic tide to lift all Black boats.

He demands, most of all, that the water level be raised beneath those Black boats left long ago to sink and settle.

But not that Coates is the authority on all this! If anything, reading Coates’s work is like that survey course where day one the professor’s like:

“I know y’all’re all here ‘cause you’re super down with X, Y, or Z, but this class is called ‘The History of X, Y, Z, A, B, C, and D’ and, dudes, there’s only 18 weeks in the semester, and we could spend the entirety of your college career talking only about any one of these hypothetical letters, so best to chill and, like, go major in this shit if you are so compelled.”

I.e., don’t just read Coates! Don’t just read “The Case for Reparations”!

Listen to Michelle Alexander! Check out Nikole Hannah-Jones! Read Cedric Johnson!

Better yet, read The Half Has Never Been Told, and The American Slave Coast, and Empire of Cotton! Read Making the Second Ghetto, and Family Properties, and The Warmth of Other Suns!

To read Coates is to see a veritable library of heavy reading heaving against his paragraphs, begging you to read — and consider, and criticize, and debate, pitting historian against historian, critic against critic — so to better understand exactly why what he’s writing is important and indubitable and inevitably incomplete.

Beyond Restitution

Coates takes this everything we’re talking about just one small step/giant leap further, by talking about what we talk about when we talk about reparations — and if anything about Coates’s R-word is potentially implausible, it’s this root at which he hopes to strike.

Because the reparations Coates really calls for is, he tells us, “not a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe.” People in this country say, often, when shit gets real, that we need to have a national conversation about said shit. Reparations, for Coates, would be that national conversation. It would be medicinal, therapeutic — for a rabid, rotten, rotting nation.

Coates targets a hell of a lot when he wields his words as weapons, but one of my favorite of these targets has been “the liberal imagination.”

In “The Case for Reparations”, Coates points at HR 40, a bill meant simply to study what we’re talking about. Not carry it out. Study it. For 25 years, Congress has refused to seriously consider the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. They have failed to seriously consider even potentially studying reparation proposals. To study them.

Coates writes:

“No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as — if not more than — the specific answers that might be produced.”

The limit of the liberal imagination, here, is this: in response to the question of how do we broach reparations, the answer is but how even do we broach reparations.

This, instead of imagining (and it’s not that goddamn hard to imagine this) that we examine it, discuss it, outline possibilities, fight for and over the adequate one, and then carry it out. And along the way, grapple with economic inequality not only as a broad, nationwide/global pandemic but also as a highly targeted racist strategy for upholding white supremacy. Because in the sprint to call out the former, politicians (whether Sanders or no) end up eliding/evading the latter.

Pragmatically, some might say.

Tragically, I would say.

Beyond Reparations

Coates and others often cite the precedent set by post-Holocaust reparations as a signal of what might be to come.

Beyond the nation-to-nation reparations most of us know about, Jews actually began to file individual claims for specific injuries: the examples Coates gives in “The Case for Reparations” are psychological trauma, interruptions of people’s careers, time spent in concentration camps — even offense to one’s honor.

I think the idea that, in this vein, Black folks would have the forum to voice these specific injuries, have them seriously considered, and then actually accrue some kind of (ostensibly monetary, but also certainly emotional) gain from that process, is terribly exciting, and long overdue, and obviously also embarrassing for a nation-state that would like to think itself not-Hitler’s-Germany.

So when Coates criticizes the kind of universalist let’s-help-everyone-all-at-once social welfare wand, what he’s really criticizing the absence of an opportunity to grant those specific folks not only the redress they deserve but also the catharsis that comes from the process towards that redress.

And then, of course, the type of profound, public reckoning that can actually start to undo what we call white supremacy.

But the thing that’s really cool about this kind of logic — the thing which, as far as I know, goes unspoken in Coates’s work — is this really does open the floodgates.

If Black folks can demand restitution for specific injuries based on institutionalized discrimination, so should other groups of marginalized people. Black folks may have historically borne the brunt of white supremacy’s weaponry, but plenty of other people suffered — and died — en masse too.

Coates never goes as far as saying let’s have reparations for everyone, but I think that’s where his logic leads. And I’m cool with that.

Coates is a Black man, and as such, his inquiries focus on the community from which he comes; it’s just as crucial that we, as members of different (but similarly injured) communities, demand redress for ours as Coates has for his.

Historically, non-Black folks have stood in solidarity with the plights of Black folks because it is — or one hopes it would be — so transparently clear that the legacy of slavery, and specifically anti-Black policy/sentiment in the U.S., is so massive and unceasing and lethal. And if you can get everyone there, to something pretty damn obvious, you can then reach even further, that much closer to the total erosion of white supremacy (or even/at least the nation-state — but that’s a discussion for another time).

There’s a quote floating around somewhere about how the liberation of Black folks is the key to the liberation of us all. I firmly believe that.

(And I think that’s distinct from establishing a hierarchy of oppression, which one always has to watch out for.)

I think the universalist approach is well-intentioned, but simply (and crucially) denies grappling with the specific and individual injuries enacted on specific and individual people/communities that make that universalist policy desirable.

I think this is what Coates ultimately means when he says reparations is the repair of a particular ill.

It is the ill that allows so many to divorce class from race. It is the ill that allows so many to think of white supremacy only as deitic demon rather than devised through decisionmaking by real individuals. It is the ill for which a coming-to-terms, cards-on-the-table, painful, truth-fueled, national psychic reckoning might be the cure.

Because without that revelatory national conversation, and without that revitalized liberal imagination, this particular ill will persist like a plague — particularly incurable and unbearably irreparable.