Readers of Ta-Nehisi (specifically his pieces here, here, and here) and Conor (here) discuss the relevance of slavery reparations during the Democratic primaries—as well as that controversial issue more generally.
That’s a tricky question, and it was prompted by this reader:
I wanted to chime in on the spat between Bernie Sanders and Ta-Nehisi Coates regarding Bernie’s rejection of reparations. TNC deeply feels that the economic system America has today was deliberately built not just on the backs of slaves, but also on the backs of African-Americans who lived in the days of Jim Crow laws and even since the major civil rights victories of the ‘60s. I find it hard to disagree with this thesis based on the comprehensive evidence he marshaled in his landmark article making the case for reparations.
Who else agreed with TNC that the U.S. economy was engineered for the benefit of rich white people at the expense of African-Americans? A couple of years ago, TNC shared a video [embedded above] where Martin Luther King, Jr. fiercely critiqued the government for rejecting grants of land to African-Americans while officially opening up land in the Midwest to white farmers, funding land grant colleges for their education, and providing subsidies and other funding to prop up their farms. It’s difficult to argue that MLK didn’t believe African-Americans deserved reparations regardless of whether they were the descendants of slaves.
But MLK wasn’t necessarily just in favor of race-based reparations. In his 1967book Where We Go From Here, MLK focused on poverty and explicitly argued against focusing on the plight of African-Americans to the expense of others in poverty:
In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: There are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.
He goes on to unequivocally state his support for a different kind of policy, an ongoing form of reparations to the poor regardless of their race:
I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective -- the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.
Our nation’s adjustment to a new mode of thinking will be facilitated if we realize that for nearly forty years two groups in our society have already been enjoying a guaranteed income. Indeed, it is a symptom of our confused social values that these two groups turn out to be the richest and the poorest. The wealthy who own securities have always had an assured income; and their polar opposite, the relief client, has been guaranteed an income, however miniscule, through welfare benefits.
The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.
The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.
It’s difficult to argue that Sanders is in disagreement with MLK that we need to abolish poverty. The Vermont senator even said as much in response to a question on a Reddit AMA a couple of years ago:
There is no question that when we have today more people living in poverty than at any time in American history and when millions of families are struggling day by day just to keep their heads above water, we need to move aggressively to protect the dignity and well being of the least among us. Tragically, with cuts in food stamps, unemployment compensation and other important benefits, we are moving in exactly the wrong direction. There are a number of ways by which we can make sure that every man, woman and child in our country has at least a minimum standard of living and [unconditional basic income] is certainly something that must be explored.
Words are cheap. Action matters.
In that Ta-Nehisi post the reader referred to, he linked to a New York Times essay written by Michael Eric Dyson in 2000. The most relevant passage to this discussion:
If conservatives were to read and listen to King carefully, they would not only find little basis in King’s writings to justify their assaults in his name, but they would be brought up short by his vision of racial compensation and racial reparation, a vision far more radical than most current views of affirmative action. King wrote in Why We Can't Wait that few “people consider the fact that, in addition to being enslaved for two centuries,” that black folk were also robbed of wages for toil. It is worth quoting King at length:
No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for American Negroes. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law. Such measures would certainly be less expensive than any computation based on two centuries of unpaid wages and accumulated interest. I am proposing, therefore, that, just as we granted a GI Bill of Rights to war veterans, America launch a broad-based and gigantic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, our veterans of the long siege of denial.
King ingeniously anticipated objections to programs of racial compensation on the grounds they discriminated against poor whites who were equally disadvantaged. He knew that conservatives would manipulate racial solidarity through an insincere display of new-found concern for poor whites that pitted their interests against those of blacks. King claimed that “millions of [the] white poor” would benefit from the bill. Although he believed that the “moral justification for special measures for Negroes is rooted in the robberies inherent in the institution of slavery,” many poor whites, he argued, were “the derivative victims” of slavery. He conceded that poor whites are “chained by the weight of discrimination” even if its “badge of degradation does not mark them.”
King understood how many poor whites failed to understand the class dimensions of their exploitation by elite whites who appealed to vicious identity politics to obscure their actions. King held that discrimination was in ways “more evil for [poor whites], because it has confused so many by prejudice that they have supported their own oppressors.” Hence, it was only just that a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, intent on “raising the Negro from backwardness,” would also rescue “a large stratum of the forgotten white poor.” For King, compensatory measures that were truly just — that is, took race into account while also considering class — had the best chance of bringing healing to our nation's minorities and to the white poor. It was never one or the other; both were a moral priority for King.
Any history scholars out there want to chime in? Drop us an email. On a related note, a reader points to one of Dr. King’s most famous associates:
I was looking into the role that Bernie Sanders played in Jesse Jackson’s win in the 1988 Vermont primary, and it turns out Jackson’s platform that year included reparations to descendants of black slaves. I wasn’t able to find any of Sanders’ statements from that time on reparations, but it would at least seem that he is not so hostile to the idea as Mr. Coates (whose work I greatly respect and enjoy) would seem to suggest.
Women work on the Cheyenne reservation at Lame Deer, Montana, on Jan. 24, 1945. (AP)
A reader, Sorn Jessen, responds to an earlier one who invoked Native Americans in his concern about the “very real possibility that white America would simply turn its back” on African Americans if reparations were enacted:
As someone who was raised on two different reservations, who joined the military out of high school, went to college afterward and even got a graduate degree before moving back, I must say I am tired of hearing Native Americans invoked as political footballs in the debate over reparations.
Seriously, I am absolutely tired of this. People mention indigenous poverty on the reservation as if somehow that means that social justice is a zero sum game. It’s not and it never has been. To most Americans, indigenous people are an abstraction, reservations are places they go to gamble, and unless they have a piece of frybread at the American Indian Museum, they wouldn’t ever think of indigenous folks as actual political actors. All of this makes me rather sad. The folks I know, love and care about are actual people. They have voices, they can speak for themselves, and they are still around to tell you about their stories of segregation and civil rights.
Look, for a long time I was rather angry at that line in “The Case for Reparations” where Ta-Nehisi says: “African Americans still remained—by far—the most segregated ethnic group in the country,” when he’s never been to a reservation in his life.
I still wish he had qualified his statement to include native folks living on the reservation, but hey, he didn’t and so that means the story of indigenous segregation still has to be written. Coates said repeatedly that he’d love to read a work on indigenous folks and housing segregation. Maybe someday there’s a story that way.
To be honest, despite the wonderful work of more than two generations of activists, despite Alcatraz and Wounded Knee and all the wonderful work of AIM, of Russell Means and Idle No More and so many others, we still lack a language for indigenous civil rights in these United States. So, in retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have had such a knee-jerk reaction to that line in “The Case for Reparations.” Coates’s amnesia mirrors the amnesia of the rest of the nation as a whole.
Yet with all of that being said, his ignorance of indigenous civil rights in no way excuses other folks who talk about Indians as if their ongoing struggles mean that somehow the nation shouldn’t pay African Americans anything. Justice is not something that the majority of Americans get to deny to one group of people because they can point to another group who had it worse.
The institutionalized racism of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, where BIA police often lack jurisdiction to arrest white folks who commit crimes on the reservation, in no way invalidates the horrors of sharecropping or lynching. Just because a bank used to red-line in Lame Deer in the 1990s doesn’t mean that when it happened on the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s that it was somehow ok. The 90 percent unemployment on the Pine Ridge reservation in no way invalidates the higher-than-average unemployment rates among African Americans.
If anyone wants to have a real discussion how segregation and voting rights on the reservation mirrors the Jim Crow south, send them my way. It’s an important topic and it desperately needs a full exposition.
The address is hello@theatlantic.com. (FYI, I ran this email by Ta-Nehisi and he gave me the go-ahead to post with reply.) For more on the theme of Native Lives Matter, see this previous note from Caty, who served up a lot of statistics in an email from Nolan Hack, an African American activist involved in social justice for Native Americans.
Perhaps I am not familiar enough with the debate, but I rarely see anyone discuss what happens afterreparations are made. Speaking as a white person, my experience tells me that, collectively, the quickest way for us to stop caring is to write a check. I don’t necessarily mean this literally, but simply the act of paying a price in exchange for something is a signal that it’s no longer an issue.
When it comes to issues of race, providing reparations would not and could not be the end of the discussion in this nation. Yet I strongly suspect that for the majority of the white population, the conversation would be over. When protests over some mistreatment were to occur post-reparations, it would not slowly win over voters, as is the case with Black Lives Matter. Instead, I think they would be met with unbridled rage. “We paid reparations! We did what you wanted, now any problems are your issue!”
Think about the Native Americans tribes of this country.
Some effort has been made to make up for their harsh treatment over America’s history. Native Americans may have lost their land, but they receive a degree of autonomy and even a few special privileges—notably gambling, which can actually be quite lucrative if managed well—specifically intended as a form of recompense.
And now their issues are largely ignored. The Indian Health Service provides healthcare on the reservations, so why should non-Native Americans care about substance abuse in the Native-American community? They have legalized gambling, so why should non-Native Americans care about poverty on reservations?
It’s possible that the African-American community might be too large and widespread for the nation’s whites to similarly ignore their issues, but given history, I’d say it’s a very real possibility that white America would simply turn its back on them.
A few readers have already voiced criticism over Ta-Nehisi’s take on Bernie and reparations, and there’s more to come. But first, Conor’s contribution to the debate is countered here by Jim Elliott, a long-time reader:
I found Mr. Friedersdorf’s piece disappointing. He, like so many of Coates’s critics, proceeds from what I see as a false premise. I think Coates is being deliberately—and usefully!—provocative in using the term “reparations” because he knows that would-be naysayers will automatically assume this means payment to black folks—a concept so morally, economically, logistically, and demographically fraught that it provokes all kinds of emotional—and therefore honest, reactions.
Ever since first reading “The Case for Reparations,” though, I immediately grokked what I think is a much more interesting, and even more difficult, argument from Coates:
Reparations—except for those for whom specific monetary harm can be identified, such as through redlining—are not an exchange of silver for our collective moral penitence. Reparations, as Coates reads to me, are a moral, intellectual, and historical exercise. The closest analogy I can think of is South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
This would be a monumental undertaking. It would be immensely painful, because it would involve going to war against our national hagiography, our very own sense of self as Americans and the intrinsic, inherent virtues we attribute to our Founding and the ideals that led to it. Worse, it would demonstrate to us that those still living and we ourselves continue to fail to live up to those ideals.
This is part of what Coates is doing when he repeats, with frequency, that ours is a nation founded upon white supremacy. It slashes through all the meat of our Constitution, of our sense of the United States as the harbinger of liberal democracy and equality, straight to the bone. All of our growth and success hinges upon what came before, the bedrock that was laid by the forced labor of natives, of blacks, of indentured servants, through rape and plunder, through lash and club. Realization of that moral monstrosity, its sheer weight and importance to everything we do and have done that is good—that this moral dichotomy exists in fore-bearers and grandparents that we revere—imperils our sense of self as a people.
Ultimately, this painful process would demonstrate a need for national action on the forces slavery, white supremacy, and westward expansion put in motion and still affect our communities today. And, I think, it would force all Americans to realize that which those of us who do not believe in a redeemer of sins already know: There is no such thing as absolution for what has gone before, only atonement to rectify its effects—and the work of atonement may never be complete.
Elliott made a much shorter version of that argument in the comments section, claiming that Conor is “conflating ‘payment’ with Coates’s concept of reparations.” Conor replied:
I discuss payment here, rather than the call for study and unspecified further steps in his 2014 article, because when Bernie Sanders was asked about reparations, the answer he gave––and that Ta-Nehisi critiqued––was presumably aimed at the common understanding of the policy, not the uncommon definition published in one magazine two years ago.
Here’s Ta-Nehisi blogging two years ago about the evolution of his thinking on that reparations essay. (A video that accompanied the essay is embedded above.) After reading the longer, emailed version of Elliott’s criticism, Conor adds:
I want to emphasize that I share Ta-Nehisi’s enthusiasm for the “moral, intellectual, and historical exercise” of grappling with America’s treatment of blacks. I think that his reparations article is justly celebrated as an exceptional instance of doing so. I haven’t seen a single persuasive critique of its informative look at housing discrimination.
And I share Jim Elliott’s notion that it is important to challenge “our national hagiography, our very own sense of self as Americans and the intrinsic, inherent virtues we attribute to our Founding.” There is no greater fan of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, or the Madisonian system of checks and balances than me. But perverted notions of American exceptionalism and delusions of inherent virtue help to explain the inability or unwillingness of so many in this country to fully confront the most immoral U.S. policies, or the amount of damage America inflicted during the Iraq War, at Abu Ghraib, in our drone campaign over Yemen, and elsewhere through our foreign policy.
There are lots of people working to puncture pretty lies about America’s past, to bring more accurate, unvarnished history to the masses. These efforts can be found in bestselling books, blockbuster movies, and platinum albums. It can be found in university classes, the speeches of politicians, and House resolutions like this one. And there are plenty of people writing against racism, civil liberties abuses, and other injustices today. I regard those projects as vital. I try to participate in them.
In my view, scholars, filmmakers, journalists, and other private citizens are far better suited to rigorously examining the past and present and conveying the truth to the masses than the United States Congress. And I’m baffled by the notion that a Congressional inquiry into reparations would produce better, more legitimate, or more persuasive history. It is a political body with incentives to do what is expedient and popular, not to declare what is rigorous and true, and even when its investigations set forth grave sins, as did the torture report, the substance of the inquiry does not appreciably affect public opinion.
In the last part of Elliott’s comment, he writes that “this painful process would demonstrate a need for national action on the forces slavery, white supremacy, and westward expansion put in motion and still affect our communities today. And, I think, it would force all Americans to realize that which those of us who do not believe in a redeemer of sins already know: There is no such thing as absolution for what has gone before, only atonement to rectify its effects—and the work of atonement may never be complete.” But this is wildly implausible.
The notion that “all Americans” will be “forced” to share Jim Elliott’s ideas about our past and what it means for us in the present imagines a degree of consensus that will obviously never exist; and if we excuse it as hyperbole, it nevertheless presumes that differences of opinion on these matters are rooted in historical ignorance or a refusal to face hard truths.
In reality, there are lots of justice-loving people who’ve studied the past more deeply than Conor Friedersdorf or Jim Elliott or Ta-Nehisi Coates, who’ve faced hard truths as fully as we have, and nevertheless come to different conclusions than any of us on matters less complicated than this. Americans will never agree on an ur-theory of race in this country. But lots of Americans with different ur-theories have, I think, at least enough in common to fight lots of injustices together.
In keeping with that analysis: a race-neutral inquiry into housing discrimination would, I think, produce a lot less heat and a lot more light than an inquiry into reparations for African Americans by a body elected to represent a country that opposes reparations by huge margins.
Update from Jim Elliott:
Thank you very much for both including my message in the discussion and for forwarding it on to Mr. Friedersdorf. If you could, please be so kind as to extend my thanks to him for a thoughtful reply. In it, he demonstrates perfectly why that while I frequently disagree with him, I should never stop reading him: He is thoughtful and moves discussions forward on important issues.
It is an odd feeling to be taking the position of hope in this case, when I’m so much more comfortable in the role of curmudgeon, and to be doing so against Mr. Friedersdorf’s cynicism when I typically equate him with a much more idealistic point of view.
Mr. Friedersdorf dismisses a commission as a Congressional inquiry, though this is not the correct interpretation of what a “truth and reconciliation” commission would look like. He should look to something more like the 9/11 Commission, rather than, say, the Benghazi committee, as his model. The 9/11 Commission actually performed its duties quite admirably.
Perhaps I have—ironically!—too much faith in intellectual honesty. I think that facts, once given the weight of transparent and rigorous inquiry, gather enough mass and velocity as to become an irresistible force; their arrival and impact can only be delayed. Even were Mr. Friedersdorf correct, would not the process of identifying the effects of those historical forces lead, rather inevitably, to, as Mr. Friedersdorf puts it, identifying common injustices that need remedy?
I agree with many of Mr. Coates’s critics that dismissing Senator Sanders’s approach because it is class-based would be foolhardy, because the practical effects would be worthwhile for addressing some of the ills and injustices that exist today, whatever their root causes (many diseases have similar symptoms, and similar cures, to use an imprecise analogy).
By the way, Elliott informs me that he and other members of Ta-Nehisi’s old commenting community are “resurrecting the mini-Horde” via Disqus’s discussion channels—for example, this one addressing TNC’s latest post, “Hillary Clinton Goes Back to the Dunning School.” Check it out if you’re interested in a taste of what his comment section used to be like, before it closed last fall.
On that question, Ta-Nehisi has written two pieces so far—here and here. A reader responds via hello@:
It is not necessary to debate the merits of reparations to know that black people in the U.S. will be the primary (statistically very over-represented) beneficiaries of any significant class-based redistribution of wealth and income, and therefore that their interests will be vastly better served by a Sanders victory than by that of any other presidential contender.
At this particular historical conjecture, one of the responsibilities of anti-racists is to make those facts known in black America so that black voters might be persuaded to switch their allegiance from Clinton (who offers no hope for a change in the status quo) to Sanders (who calls for a political revolution that will transfer wealth and power from those at the top to those at the bottom).
Unfortunately, Coates, in attacking Sanders, undermines that effort and thereby objectively works against the empowerment and enrichment of black Americans that would result from the political revolution for which Sanders is calling.
Another reader also thinks any talk of reparations from Sanders would be deeply counterproductive to his goals of social justice:
I really like Coates, and like many people, consider him an invaluable voice on race in America. I’m struggling with his views on Sanders, though.
TNC seems to imply that because single payer and reparations are both not feasible, that Sanders arguing against reparations from a point of feasibility is disingenuous. I don’t see that at all, and it strikes me as far too simplistic.
Single payer is not feasible due to the fact that getting it passed is unlikely. Reparations isn’t just not feasible for the time being, but a complete non-starter. And yes, this is due to the fact that a lot of white people, non-black minorities, and yes, even some black people, simply don’t understand the full scope of the real, tangible, financial damage done to black people in this country through state-allowed and even state-sponsored white supremacy.
That said, I doubt very much that Sanders doesn’t understand the scope of this damage done. Rather, he believes that the best way to currently help the largest amount of black people is through race-neutral economic policies. I think he’s likely correct.
TNC states that economic policies have generally not solved the economic impact of racism, and I think he’s correct about that, but better isn’t the opposite of perfect. It seems TNC would prefer that Sanders torpedo his own campaign (and believe me, he would if he came out in favor of reparations) so he can remain ideologically pure. I disagree with that. And yes, I know this is much easier for me to say as a white man.
So, does it say something depressing about America that we’re still unable to come to grips with this legacy of ours? Of course! But when it comes to politics, results are what matters, and the fact remains that it would be electoral suicide for Sanders to come out on the side of reparations. And if you think that Sanders is the best person for the job, that matters. It has to matter.
