dagblog - Comments for "Should America pay reparations for slavery? Ta-Nehisi Coates v Coleman Hughes"

Here is a link to Coates

rmrd0000 — Thu, 20 Jun 2019 15:08:58 +0000

In reply to Should America pay reparations for slavery? Ta-Nehisi Coates v Coleman Hughes

Here is a link to Coates classic article on reparations

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

Interesting take from the

rmrd0000 — Thu, 20 Jun 2019 15:04:37 +0000

In reply to Should America pay reparations for slavery? Ta-Nehisi Coates v Coleman Hughes

Interesting take from the Atlantic

On December 1, 1862—a month before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation—President Abraham Lincoln wrote to Congress. He was not yet the Great Emancipator. Instead, he proposed to become the Great Compensator.

Lincoln proposed a Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: the most expansive and expensive slavery-reparations plan ever put forth by a U.S. president. “Every State wherein slavery now exists shall abolish the same therein at any time or times before” January 1, 1900, and slaveholders “shall receive compensation from the United States” for emancipating the enslaved.

Lincoln stressed to his fellow citizens that “we cannot escape history.” Pursuing gradual emancipation, and compensating the enslavers for their lost labor and wealth—and not the enslaved for their lost labor and wealth—would repair a broken America once and for all. “Other means may succeed,” he said in closing; “this could not fail.”

Indeed, Lincoln’s proposal did not fail to escape history. His politically expedient plan made and portended history, projecting a middle ground for Americans to stand between permanent slavery and inequality, and immediate emancipation and equality.

Today, many Americans who oppose reparations, including a slight majority of Democrats, stand on this middle ground. These Americans self-identify as “not racist,” but do nothing in the face of the racial wealth gap that grows as white people are compensated by past and present racist policies. Or they support small-scale solutions that barely keep up with this growth. Or they support class-based solutions that are bound to partially fail in solving this class- and race-based problem. Or they oppose reparations because they’ve consumed the racist idea that black people will waste the “handouts,” that the reparations bill will be too expensive, or that black America is not too big to fail.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/ibram-x-kendi-opposing-reparations-racist/592060/

Portion of Coates’ remarks

rmrd0000 — Thu, 20 Jun 2019 14:05:45 +0000

In reply to Should America pay reparations for slavery? Ta-Nehisi Coates v Coleman Hughes

Portion of Coates’ remarks addressed to Senator McConnell

It is tempting to divorce this modern campaign of terror, of plunder, from enslavement, but the logic of enslavement, of white supremacy, respects no such borders and the guard of bondage was lustful and begat many heirs. Coup d-états and convict leasing. Vagrancy laws and debt peonage. Redlining and racist G.I. bills. Poll taxes and state-sponsored terrorism. We grant that Mr. McConnell was not alive for Appomattox. But he was alive for the electrocution of George Stinney. He was alive for the blinding of Isaac Woodard. He was alive to witness kleptocracy in his native Alabama and a regime premised on electoral theft. Majority Leader McConnell cited civil-rights legislation yesterday, as well he should, because he was alive to witness the harassment, jailing, and betrayal of those responsible for that legislation by a government sworn to protect them. He was alive for the redlining of Chicago and the looting of black homeowners of some $4 billion. Victims of that plunder are very much alive today. I am sure they’d love a word with the majority leader