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The Case For Reparations [an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates]
ElJeffe
Moderator, ClubPA mod
Moderator, ClubPA mod
So hey, kind of a well-known dude wrote kind of a high-profile article in The Atlantic regarding the state of modern racism and what we should maybe do about it or you know whatevs.
This thread is for talking about that article.
Go!
edit: fixed the link
This thread is for talking about that article.
Go!
edit: fixed the link
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
ElJeffe on
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Disclaimer: I have not yet read the article (though I will at some point), so this might be something Coates addresses, in which case: apologies.
Anyway, I think that many people have difficulty "realizing" (read: admitting) that such a problem exists, specifically because they feel that the answer is going to be presented as "Whitey needs to pay". Similar to how a lot of people have difficulty "realizing" that climate change is a problem because they don't want to have to give up their cushy lifestyle, or how they have difficulty "realizing" that poverty is a problem because they don't want their taxes to increase.
Before you can get a lot of people to sign on with racism as a legitimate problem, I believe you're going to need to come up with a solution that people will find acceptable. Because right now - and I suspect the article's title is not going to help this - people associate "fixing racism" with "I have to personally cut a check to a black guy."
Also, wrong link. This is the correct one. Copied and pasted into Word, it comes to a whopping 44 pages (including pictures).
It's easy to contort it into something ugly if you don't bother delivering it alongside a program that really forces down the throats of people why the reparations are owed. Here in Canada, we have an enormous problem with racism against Native Americans; reparations are paid, but the reparation programs are framed by the media & politicians as some benign gift bestowed upon the ungrateful natives - and oh, how they squander our benign gifts!
I think there should be a deep, detailed and very much uncensored part of the school curriculum that spells out the atrocities - both historical & ongoing - of white / European dominance in North America, how it has corrupted our institutes and exactly what horrible damages we owe payment for. Perhaps then people would see 'treaty money' (and other forms of reparation) in a different light.
this, so much.
The big problem with the whole '"winner" writes the history' architecture of culture is that what happens during colonialism is celebrated as this great triumphant heroic action, rather than the trampling of another society's way of life. We're not so young that we're completely removed from the effects of colonialism, but it really makes me grit my teeth when fat old white people start bitching about "immigrants takin' over MY COUNTRY" without any trace of irony nor awareness of how inaccurately placed that "MY" is.
Uncanny Magazine!
The Mad Writers Union
I can guarantee the textbook lobby in Texas will totally be on board with this.
No matter how you look at it, it really does seem like it'll be an uphill battle.
The dots are cotton plantation in I believe 1850, the blue/red is the 2008 presidential vote by county.
What you linked is a... I'm not sure what to call it. An aside? An introduction?
Edit: wow, way beated
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
On the subject of the long article, I'm only about 20% of the way through, but so far a few things have struck me:
1: He has yet to demonstrate a national issue (several regional ones yes, but not national). There's something like 80% to go though, so I expect he'll get around to it.
2: Really wish I knew what study that was so I could see if that number is a mean or median. Right now, the mean is horrifically distorted by a handful of spectacularly rich white folk. Of course, what I really want is a fairly substantial description of the actual distribution, but I'll take whatever I can get that has more data than the summary the author presents.
3: This immediately follows the other bit I quoted, and my objections to it aren't related to how true it is (it seems pretty likely), but that it's presented as an issue that is in some way unique to black families. Adding a sentence or two between this statement and the one I quoted above would help that, but the way it is phrased the author is taking an issue that a hell of a lot of folks have, and presenting it as something that predominately affects black people. If there's an argument that such really is the case, I'm all for it, but I've never heard it before.
edit: also, the author could use a helping hand with rearranging his tangents so that he doesn't pick up a thread a page or two after dropping it to wander off into some other point.
That and the Picketty book are this year's "I hope this keeps going." (We could probably do a Picketty thread, now that I think about it...)
In any event, I'm still digesting it, but someone in the previous discussion said "The first step is admitting you have a problem." That is I think the absolute spot-on description of what this really is.
The point of the lack of financial safety net is that black families have been systematically denied building generational wealth. I've benefitted greatly from little thing like my parents giving me their old car for college and getting to use my sisters apartment when I went to school. Black families are much less likely to have these types of advantages.
I just want to emphasize that this still happens. Not letter-for-letter, not under the same name, but these same scams operate & do big business. They still profit off of the white supremacy that is baked into our culture (go and read through the Donald Sterling thread for just one example of it).
I may not be personally responsible for slavery. I may not have caused direct harm to black people. That, however, is irrelevant. America as a nation perpetrated these crimes. Americans at all levels reaped the benefits of slavery and the continued theft, brutality, and destruction of African American families. As citizens, it is our duty to see that our government acknowledges and attempts to make amends. Even if "squaring the books" is impossible which, given the apparent size of the debt owed, may well be true.
At the very least, we need to face up to the past.
Median. Here's the Pew article.
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/07/26/wealth-gaps-rise-to-record-highs-between-whites-blacks-hispanics/
Oh, it's certainly not unique to black families.
However, black families tend to have accumulated significantly less wealth than whites - even at comparable income levels.
And that state of affairs is the result of generations of disenfranchisement.
Home values are a big part - homes in mostly-black neighborhoods are worth less and generate equity more slowly than homes in mostly-white neighborhoods, even after controlling for poverty and crime.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
As a tangent, the geological explanation for that is fascinating. I mean, in the abstract, it makes perfect sense that prehistoric tectonic shifts -> geological features relevant to agriculture and human settlement -> modern-day political patterns, but seeing such a stark example is kind of mind-blowing.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
...which basically fills in the gap saying "Yeah, descendents of emancipated slaves have very low geographic mobility". The fact that African-Americans lean D is a very tangential artefact in terms of racial disparity (especially when you consider the Southern Strategy essentially flipped party roles), and I'm kinda mystified why the authors of the first map decided to go with that correlation.
Edit: To elaborate, two perfectly legitimate conclusions from the information presented in the first map could be "the descendents of slave owners vote D" or "plantations stimulated economic activity, and rich people vote D" - because it doesn't tell you who is voting. There's a hella lot of assumptions in that map.
Edit2: @Syrdon Link to larger versions here.
I would've liked to have seen Coates present a tangible, by-the-numbers policy position if he was going to go through the trouble of proving (and doing an excellent job, too) the ethical underpinnings for doing so. tl;dr: Who gets what, and how much, and how do they qualify for it? I'm guessing that he didn't (and don't blame him) because researching, drafting, and implementing reparations like this would be nearly impossible, and ultimately arbitrary at some point. I don't envy the legislative interns who are going to draft that up, and the army of conflicting historians, sociologists, psychologists, labor and real property statisticians presenting conflicting information and policy positions on the topic.
The West Germany to Israel example is interesting (although I'd like to see a citation for "Only 5 percent of West Germans surveyed reported feeling guilty about the Holocaust"), but I wonder if the parallels are kind of stretched, given that it's one sovereign nation making reparations to another, and the Israeli government presumably distributing it from there. The reparations he mentions paid by the West German government to specific individual persons are maybe more on-point; I wonder what the process for that looked like.
At the same time, the exposition about the West German reparations - how factions of Israelis didn't want them - I'd imagine we'd see the same thing here. It seems to me a similar criticism as one leveled at Affirmative Action - sure, black people had more access to schools and jobs under it, but "affirmative action hire" is now a running gag (on these boards, even) and doing so has devalued the success of people who benefited from those programs (still a net good, though, but it's one of the reasons I wish it was income-based and not race-based, Coates' argument about white poverty vs. black poverty nonwithstanding.)
That guy needs an editor. Badly. He wanders off topic all the time, covers the same ground in basically the same fashion repeatedly, badly mistitled his article and failed to present a case for just about anything that I would say is strong enough (note: that list bit likely says more about what I am willing to accept with regards to argument strength than anything else).
Ignoring the mechanics of the article, his failure to cite sources in some fashion (or at least give me enough that I think the right study will show up in the first 3-4 google results) really undermines a lot of the points he tries to make. On that note, thanks @Feral for the source on the one. He makes a good argument that a large number of individual, nameable people did some fairly reprehensible things. He does not make the case that the nation was aware of those decisions. He specifically mentions a lot of issues related to mortgages, but at no point does he present an argument that anyone outside of the real estate profession and related lending professions knew anything about what was going on.
The thing that really bugs me about this article though? I'm not sure what the author, specifically, would like done. The only actionable thing he mentions is HR 40, and he spends maybe 8 sentences on it at most. I think he made a more concerted effort to quote the bible, and to talk about the DoJ's going after some banks for racially biased loans. He actually presents a pretty good argument for it ... but only by quoting the guy who wrote the bill (who suggests in his quote and on his website that it is not unreasonable to examine how one might, and if one should, pay reparations, particularly in light of the set of other things we commission federal studies for).
Beyond that, most of the article is a glorified list of awful shit people have done. I've got better things to do with my time than read that, particularly since the only national bits he presents are slavery (which I haven't heard anyone say didn't happen) and the mortgage bit (which, I'll admit, I was unaware of). If I want to convince people that we should talk about reparations, he spent 96,000 characters giving me one tiny arrow in that quiver. Which brings me nicely back to how badly this guy needs an editor.
edit: @Archangle is there a larger version of that map anywhere?
That's probably part of it, but I think that a lot of the problem is that the whole idea flies in the face of what we're taught about racism early in life. I can't speak for anyone else, but from a very early age I was told that racism was wrong, and that that meant all races should be treated equally. When I learned in middle school about US history, I learned that non-white people used to be treated differently under the law, and that that kind of state-sponsored racism was especially bad. I was taught that people are individuals regardless of their skin color, and that was pretty much the end of it until college.
As an idea, reparations (and affirmative action) are pretty much the exact opposite of all of that. They both rest on the premise that the law should treat people differently based on their race. That all white people can be seen as the same person and that all black people can be seen as the same person, and that the collective white person has an obligation to make the collective black person whole. Right or wrong, that's fundamentally a very different system of values than the one I was taught about race when growing up.
As far as the article, for having so many words it didn't seem to have a lot to say. The only practical policy I saw in there is that we should have Congress commission a study to find out more about reparations. Okay, I guess? I was hoping it would have more to say than that, but I guess that's it? The idea that this bill hasn't made it to the house floor is supposed to represent some existential crisis, but to me it just sounds like business as usual on the house floor. Bills to study people's pet causes get shot down all the time, liberal bills especially since and it's not like there's some huge lack of studies on this particular issue. I found over a dozen just looking around for 5 minutes on Google. What is he thinking that the study will accomplish?
He explicitly notes how the federal government (the FHA is a federal agency) was specifically involved in redlining. I don't see how much more involved you need the government to be.
I can't fathom why, in 2014, in the future, the hammer hasn't come down on these predators. I read about this happening to Jurgis Rudkus in The Jungle for God's sake and that was a book written over a hundred years ago.
Yes, the collective white person has an obligation to make the collective back person whole in the US.
This is because in the US, for the past 350 years (and counting), the collective white person has been robbing the collective black person blind.
The point is that "system of values" you were taught as a child is pretty much a lie. Non-white people didn't just used to be treated differently under the law - they still are treated differently under the law. It's just that it's become less explicit - we've gone from "you are property" to "you are clearly defined second class citizens" to "we might say you're equals, but you'll still be treated as lesser where it counts" (which, to be fair, is an improvement.) As I've pointed out in prior threads, trying to say "we're all equal" without resolving those structural inequalities will only entrench them.
Plus, a lot of black Americans have white ancestors. Do mixed-race families have to write a check to themselves? How about recent African-American immigrants who didn't move here until the 1990s?
And it seems like, if we all really wanted to get serious about this business, we'd have to give everything back to the Native Americans and we'd all have to move back to Europe, Africa and Asia.
If we want to improve the state of African Americans, it seems to me there's gotta be a thousand better ways to do it.
As far as the bit on Germany and Israel, it's really easy not to choke up a bit when he's quoting people making sweeping declarations that are patently false. Or when he talks about people using violence in an attempt to prevent them. Or the bit where someone suggests that their only real issue with going to war is logistical. It's even easier to think this might not be worthwhile, given that the author spends more than half his time on the subject discussing just how against them the people getting them were.
If there's anyone we've truly fucked over it's the Native American tribes. Almost 20% of homes on reservations lack refrigeration, a stove, plumbing, or running water. On many reservations less than 30% have a high school education. There's a million people living in Third-world conditions right here in America, and nobody gives a shit.
I'll grant that it's much easier to argue in favor of reparations if you pretend that the only valid counterarguments against reparations are some kind of mass-denial of Jim Crow, but I guess I expected better than that from such a hyped up article.
All of the fundamental components of the culture & society that you have the opportunity to take full advantage are built on top of the raped & pillaged corpses of African Americans. And this is not some distant past - it's something still ongoing, something still fundamental to the culture. You benefit from the inherent racism of the system, whether you want to or not.
Damages are clearly owed, and they are plainly owed from the state that caused the damages in order to foster the creation of the lifestyle you currently enjoy.
I trust the government to not be awful as well. But when the government is awful, I pin the blame there. It doesn't matter who was enacting the policy, the fact remains that the government was enforcing a viciously racist policy that benefitted whites at the expense of minorities, especially blacks. Just because I didn't know doesn't mean I should get to keep stolen goods.
But the government doesn't pay. Taxpayers do. Are you going to fine them for, effectively, not knowing enough about what their government is doing to be able to attempt to change it?
And can we also add Amerindians to the deal?
Expecting everybody who describes a problem of great magnitude to be able to policycraft a solution is not reasonable; in particular, Coates is a journalist and a historian, not a policy wonk or an economist. I may know a problem exists but not know the best way to fix it; that doesn't mean I shouldn't draw attention to the problem.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
In his view, a pure money transfer wouldn't work because the systemic racism remaining in the system would just take it all back within a few generations. Which I'm not entirely sure I agree with, but there's a reasonable case to be made for it. Especially when the studies about racial impacts of the Great Recession start appearing with more and more frequency.
About 2500 dollars yearly, paid to any particular black person you want.
So wait... did you read the article?
I mean, fuck whatever everybody's ancestors did. The point is not to establish who exactly did what and for you to pay back what your grandfather owed my grandfather and vice versa. We already moved past that. That is so hard not even the issue. It's not a thing any more. You're not responsible for the debt of your brother like that.
The point is that society owes. The fact that your family only got to benefit from the many advantages given to white people over black people and not directly from slavery is besides the point. Society can not be boiled down to individual pieces that then somehow lose all connection to the structure of society.
Coates:
He repeatedly mentions HR 40 throughout the article - a bill that is implicitly about finding those answers, and a bill that for some odd reason has never been passed.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
There is no conclusion to the case for reparations, the case grows with every passing day.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".