essay the case for reparations

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The Case for Reparations

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Analysis: “the case for reparations”.

Author Ta-Nehisi Coates covers a lot of historical ground in his essay, from Bacon’s Rebellion in the late 17th century to the Great Recession of the early 21st century. In a dispassionate style heavy on factual evidence, he makes the case that the United States government ought to pay reparations to African Americans for the harm inflicted upon them by slavery and its aftermath. Aside from a few general remarks, he does not address what form such reparations would take, such as dollar amounts and how the recipients would be determined. The question of how to carry out reparations is really a separate issue, and to deal with it here would distract from his goal of making a case that reparations are indeed warranted.

The idea of paying reparations to descendants of American slaves stems from the issue of deprived liberty. People were forcibly taken from one continent to another to serve as slaves against their will, without any legal protection or consent in the matter. This condition was inherited by all the descendants of slaves for some 200 years until the practice was outlawed in 1865. Although the slaves’ lack of free will and inability to control their own lives is central to Coates’s argument that their descendants are owed reparations, he focuses more on the concrete idea of economics than the abstract idea of liberty.

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Because the mid-19th century is a long way from today, people opposed to reparations often argue that slavery happened so long ago. In considering whether reparations should be paid, Coates examines two periods: before 1865, when slavery was legal, and after it was abolished. If anything, Coates spends more time discussing the latter, when African Americans were free, to make his case, concentrating his attention on economics and on the 20th century, particularly related to the story of Clyde Ross .

Early in the essay, when describing Clyde Ross’s life in Mississippi, Coates uses the technique of anaphora , where the beginning of a phrase or sentence is repeated several times in a row, to explain what happened to Ross’s father. Though it can appear as a list within a single sentence, anaphora is often in the form of separate sentences to add a slight pause, giving a stronger effect to each point noted. “The elder Ross could not read. He did not have a lawyer. He did not know anyone at the local courthouse. He could not expect the police to be impartial” (Part I). Three successive sentences begin with the words “He + [verb].” The similar emphasis on each point helps each idea accumulate weight in relation to the ideas that follow and precede it. In this case, anaphora highlights all the disadvantages Ross’s father had that allowed whites to steal his property. To mirror this, Coates uses the same technique to emphasize all the things whites took from the family: “The authorities seized the land. They seized the buggy. They took the cows, hogs, and mules” (Part I).

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Focusing on economics, rather than the emotional toll of lost liberty, which is difficult to put a price on, makes it easier to contemplate a dollar amount for reparations and makes Coates’s argument more concrete. For instance, he discusses how cotton dominated the economy of the South in the early to mid-19th century. The labor for growing, picking, and processing cotton was done by black slaves, so an estimate of the total value of this labor can be made. Also, although African Americans were nominally free post-slavery, Jim Crow laws were swiftly enacted throughout the South to curtail their rights. Initially, these were state laws, but federal laws would soon follow.

Much of Coates’s essay deals with the New Deal legislation under the Roosevelt administration. Though the resulting programs are usually considered progressive, Coates argues that they purposely excluded African Americans. His main example is the set of policies and agencies that led to an explosion of home ownership by the middle class in the mid-20th century. By design and with the force of federal law, these programs were available only to whites.

The author’s emphasis on the 20th century demonstrates that the issue is not just about long-ago history, nor is it something that happened under a former political system that has been largely changed. Instead, the federal government of the United States carried out a system of legal discrimination against a group of its citizens well into the 20th century. The realities of buying a home that he describes for African Americans were not legally addressed until the Fair Housing Act in 1968. Many people today were alive at that time and can remember it, and the effects of this discrimination live on in the present day. The amount of potential wealth from real estate transactions denied to African Americans can be easily estimated.

Coates uses figures of speech to help the reader understand abstract concepts by making them concrete and vivid. In the following paragraph, he uses an extended metaphor:

In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport. ‘It was like people who like to go out and shoot lions in Africa. It was the same thrill,’ a housing attorney told the historian Beryl Satter in her 2009 book, Family Properties . ‘The thrill of the chase and the kill.’ (Part I)

The phrase “herded into the sights” precedes and sets up the quotation that compares the predation of African Americans to hunting lions in Africa. To begin the paragraph that follows, he continues the metaphor by writing “The kill was profitable” (Part I). In another passage that uses figure of speech , the author compares an America that carries out reparations to a reformed alcoholic: “The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans” (Part IX).

The essay presents the author’s own ideas and arguments, but Coates also uses counterargument, anticipating objections or assertions by those who disagree with his ideas. Coates writes how some people may respond to his idea of reparations for slavery: “One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one’s ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time” (Part III). Thus, he acknowledges a common argument against reparations: All those directly harmed (slaves) have been dead for a long time and no one alive today had any direct role in slavery. Then, Coates rebuts this counterargument:

The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte. A nation outlives its generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delaware, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, but we are still paying out the pensions. (Part III)

Coates argues that the distant past is certainly alive and embraced when it concerns something positive, but Americans must also take responsibility for the negative aspects of their past. Coates uses the personal stories of people who experienced these obstacles to make the plight of African Americans concrete and visceral for the reader, but he also uses statistics and other facts to bolster his case. He attempts to show that virtually from its beginnings as a group of colonies, America was founded on a policy of white supremacy. This cultural underpinning outlived the system of slavery and involved the highest levels of government on a national scale. Coates’s focus on these two things—economics and more recent history—are what make his argument distinctive.

Laying a moral foundation based on economics and recency creates a natural base from which to discuss the next step: the actual dollar value of reparations, should the U.S. government decide to pay them. If the amount of wealth stolen from and denied to African Americans can be estimated, it becomes a straightforward issue of providing recompense. After all, in the American legal system, anyone who can prove they were intentionally defrauded can sue for damages.