The cover story in the June issue of The Atlantic, an impassioned essay by Ta-Nahesi Coates titled "The Case for Reparations," generates a remarkable amount of discussion among commentators at the big and small media outlets between Boston and Washington.
The 15,000-plus word article argues that American society has plundered black Americans since their forced arrival in the country four centuries ago through laws, customs, finances and politics, and the nation needs to come to grips with its past. Coates says the way to do that is to consider the bill introduced annually by U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr., the Detroit Democrat whose measure calls for a deep study of the effects of slavery and possible solutions.
Coates writes:
Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution. For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for “appropriate remedies.”
A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions. But we are not interested.
That HR 40 has never—under either Democrats or Republicans—made it to the House floor suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential. If we conclude that the conditions in North Lawndale and black America are not inexplicable but are instead precisely what you’d expect of a community that for centuries has lived in America’s crosshairs, then what are we to make of the world’s oldest democracy?
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. 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. If Thomas Jefferson’s genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally Hemings’s body. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.
The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.
John Conyers’s HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. 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. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.
Examples of the outpouring of reaction:
In Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilley wrote:
Last night the Atlantic posted a 15,000-word piece by writer Ta-Nehisi Coates that frames 400 years of black experience in the United States as a case for reparations. Given Coates' reputation and the explosiveness of the subject—and the way that the Atlantic teased the piece in past days like it was a blockbuster movie—expectations were high, and the piece, by most accounts so far, fulfills them.
The New York Observer's Jordan Michael Smith said:
At 37, Mr. Coates is the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States. His Atlantic essays, guest columns for The New York Times and blog posts are defined by a distinct blend of eloquence, authenticity and nuance. And he has been picking up fans in very high places.
In The Washington Post, Alyssa Rosenbeg wondered:
Reading “The Case for Reparations,” I found myself thinking about another question that haunts Coates’s history. How might culture have to change in order to make the sort of reckoning he calls for possible? And what sorts of cultural forces might it take to make these enormous shifts?
