The Case for Reparations
"The theft of wealth accumulation via property values and rent is far greater than the petty crimes of burglary and mugging that justify the police state." >> "You are going to explain yourself, because this is quite backwards." Source: http://www.npr.org/2015/05/14/406699264/historian-says-dont-... There are lots of other sources for this type of information. Ta-Nehisi Coates has a comprehensive explanation in his Atlantic article "The Case for Reparations." Inflammatory title (also long), but well researched. http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case...
That statement is intellectually lazy at best. It is factually correct, but it wholly misses the context of the fact. And that is the centuries of slavery, the decades of Jim Crow, and other policies that have systematically deprived opportunity and framed/define crime to be an African-American tendency. I'd really recommend you read a couple of pieces by Ta-Nehisi Coates [0] before you make up your mind either way. Regrettably, I've argued your point of view before, but it simply shifts the burden of proof and contextualization to the under-privileged and oppressed. [0]:…
I think Coates' concept of reparations would be for the Jim Crow and later practices that crippled African Americans' ability to build wealth like white people have. Things like housing discrimination, job discrimination, etc. Perhaps also things like the Tulsa Race Riot and other efforts that wiped out black business districts. Consider the problems Jackie Robinson, first black player in Major League Baseball, had in trying to buy a house in the suburbs of Manhattan (Westchester County, NY and in Connecticut) http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/jackie-robinson-b... For these…
I think a lot of people's brains throw an exception on the title, as you can see in replies. There is no point where he calls for reparations! People just won't click through, give it a skim, and see he's only giving an extensive history and suggesting a study to identify and (if needed) correct lingering effects of slavery and ongoing effects of racism. I learned so much about the past and present of racism back when it was published.
The creation of whites-only suburbs was intentional and racist. The Federal Housing Administration started in 1934 and helped back home loans for white Americans. It helped get them out of the cities and invest in home ownership. The FHA explicitly refused to back loans for black people or even people who lived near black people. [1] The result was "redlining," where banks and lenders would draw lines on a map to delineate where blacks were allowed to live and who could get home loans in the white neighborhoods. [2] This is still something that happens now. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution…
True, you don't need that argument to make the case for reparations. But the left still relies heavily on it nonetheless. It's used to justify monetary reparations (as opposed to other kinds) with higher dollar figures. But more importantly, it complements the premise of black Americans as merely an oppressed, victimized, outsider class; ironically, a premise that modern leftist identity politics happens to strongly promote. Identity politics is built around the notion of victimhood and standing outside the dominate (i.e. "white", male) social and economic system, and tuned to bolster the…
> To what would you attribute the racial disparity in poverty rates? It's no secret that blacks and latinos in the US have been the victims of widespread institutional racism. I recommend 'The Case for Reparations' by Ta-Nehisi Coates for a thorough breakdown on the topic.[1] [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...
A quote from the article of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor: "The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today." The salient part being, "further the interest approved today". The U.S. has a long history of dealing with nonwhite in pernicious ways. Part of the remedy has been affirmative action. The claim that affirmative action is no longer necessary because we are all equal is being called into question. If the outcomes of banning affirmative action are worse, in terms of racial disparity, then the…
>My point is simply that living in a segregated society from early on, and the early whispered conversations about Black people as a “they”, set in motion a force very much like compound interest. Ta-Nehisi Coates' landmark Atlantic article, The Case for Reparations [1], helps explain how this segregated society came to be: > The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … any race or…
Gay marriage succeeded as a movement long before the issue of wokeness came to the fore (with the BLM movement). If you actually read the positions of the thought leaders of the latter movement (people like Ta-Nehisi Coates) the argument is exactly what liberal, white, and right-wing people are afraid of: The Case for Reparations [1] People are right to react with vigour to these sorts of large-scale redistribution plans. This is a design of the far-left in academia that has its roots in the communist movements of the early 20th century in Europe and Russia, whose worst excesses led to the…