A Case Against A Case for Reparations
Ta-Nehisi Coates begins his notorious Atlantic article by arguing that three hundred years of institutional racism in America amounts to a hefty moral debt that can only be paid through reparations. Coates acknowledges that though reparations are often mocked as a “harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties” and dismissed as impossible, he still maintains that America must reconcile “our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.” That is, a history marked by government policies and cultural norms that exploit blacks going back to the personal histories of the founding fathers and only beginning to wane in our lifetime. As a nation we can choose to either continue complacently “scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July” or “reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is.”
Though I agree with Coates that American culture at large must make amends for the nation’s bloody rise to power, I feel his call to action is poorly framed. He penned seventeen thousand words detailing the abuses suffered by blacks under Jim Crow and through racist Housing Authorities. Coates details how intertwined capitalist exploitation and white supremacy have been across America’s history. And yet he doesn’t put forth any concrete suggestions on how to move forward. In his analysis of progressive legislation meant to aid poor blacks but invariably failing, Coates doesn’t acknowledge that these legal attempts to make amends do improve in efficacy. Moreover, Coates denies that America can make amends through pushing forward better laws for the poor because as Coates says this is not a class issue but a race issue. Though America can’t pay its moral debt in full through employing broad social welfare programs for the entire economic underclass regardless of race, surely it would be a decent down payment — a concrete and plausible one at that.
Coates rejects New Deal progressivism as racist and not worthy of resurrection. And yet it’s this brand of politics promoted the welfare of the underclass as a whole, and while it didn’t include all blacks, it marked a stark improvement since the days of Jim Crow proper. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, the long arc of history bends towards justice. Here that means that when Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, “65 percent of African Americans nationally” were ineligible. That leaves about a third of blacks with access to profound social welfare not before available. Surely if we tried to implement class-conscious programs like the New Deal again, with an eye towards broad welfare, it wouldn’t be hampered by the same degree of Jim Crow era racism. Similarly, when discussing the financial pressures escaping redlining — and thereby afford a home in a safe neighborhood — put on a family, Coates quotes two parents as saying that they had to “cut down on the light bill. Cut down on your food bill,” and “cut down on things for your child, that was the main thing.” If poor blacks were buttressed by a firm safety net, ambitious hard-working families like this one wouldn’t need to confine themselves to wage labor at the expense of their children’s development. Perhaps then, blacks could begin to establish generational wealth. If Coates could dilute his idealism enough to advocate for specific calls for such welfare law, his article could stand a chance to catalyze actual change rather than merely stoking the already warm embers of white guilt. Meanwhile his insistence that white poverty is not black poverty, fragments his audience and renders his call to action pointless.
Coates unabashedly proclaims this cognitive dissonance throughout his essay — that while the United States has almost exclusively exploited the black underclass, he yet believes that this institutional white supremacy can be overcome due in part to his essay. He believes that in his lifetime he will see something at least near the reparations he calls for. He at least views reparations as plausible as socialized medicine and robust infrastructure spending, as Coates disavowed Bernie Sanders for choosing to advocate two but not the one. He decried Bernie as a false radical, having hereby “failed in the ancient fight against white supremacy” in a subsequent Atlantic piece. Coates doesn’t submit that the precedent exists for socialized medicine in the UK and for robust infrastructure medicine in America’s New Deal years and yet the only historical precedent for reparations is in the case of Holocaust survivors that had subsequently been gifted by the UN a sovereign nation. The Jews and blacks are incomparable. The blacks and American economic underclass are. Coates’ conflicting pessimism and idealism would do well to acknowledge that.
