The Case for Reparations
Reckoning with America’s history of racial plunder
The Case for Reparations
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
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Payton Chung/Flickr How to Steal Things, Exploit People, and Avoid All Responsibility
The case for reparations: a narrative bibliography
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826 PARANORMAL/Flickr The Case For Reparations: The TL;DR Version
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The Conversation
Responses to our June cover story and more.
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AP Home Is Where the Hatred Is
The case for reparations: a narrative bibliography
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Library of Congress Slavery Made America
The case for reparations: a narrative bibliography
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Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons How Racism Invented Race in America
The case for reparations: a narrative bibliography
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Robert W. Howington/Flickr How Dallas County Accidentally Backed Reparations
Commissioners unanimously backed a resolution inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates's Atlantic cover story after they failed to listen to its contents.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates on Not Knowing How Much You Don't Know
"It's really, really important that, you know, if we're going to have this fight, that folks educate themselves on the history," Coates told the audience at an Atlantic event last night.
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Martin Luther King Makes the Case for Reparations
A rare clip of the famed civil-rights leader toward the end of his life
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Ansel Adams/Library of Congress The Elusive Specificity of Reparations
They’re not an abstract notion. They’re particular amounts of money paid to particular people. To atone for America's sins, whom should the government pay, how much, and why?
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Map development by Frankie Dintino The Benefits of Redressing Racism With Race-Neutral Remedies
Doing so needn't interfere with fully confronting crimes against black America.
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Ronald Reagan Presidential Library And Museum The Radical Practicality of Reparations
A reply to David Frum
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Andrea Izzotti/Shutterstock The Impossibility of Reparations
Considering the single most important question about racial restitution: How would it work?
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Josh Begley The Racist Housing Policy That Made Your Neighborhood
The freewheeling opportunity associated with 20th-century California was not available to black residents, and that exclusion reverberates in our neighborhoods and communities today.
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Carlos Javier Ortiz The Case for Reparations: An Intellectual Autopsy
Four years ago, I opposed reparations. Here's the story of how my thinking has evolved since then.
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Carlos Javier Ortiz, for the Atlantic. Coming to Terms With Difficult History: Japan, China, Germany, and the United States
Other countries are distorted by their failure to come to terms with brutal realities of their past. So are we.
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The Guardian of North Lawndale
In a neighborhood where 43 percent of residents live below the poverty line, Billy Lamar Brooks Sr. is trying to help kids build a future.
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Inside the Battle for Fair Housing in 1960s Chicago
Members of the Contract Buyers League recount their fight against racist real-estate practices.
