The Case for Reparations

Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 2014

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Reparations for American Slavery

“The Case for Reparations” concentrates solely on the question of whether or not reparations ought to be paid, and concludes that they should. Coates does not delve into the separate topic of what form those reparations should take. He demonstrates that the idea of reparations has been around a long time, and in some ways they were taken more seriously in the past. He cites a former slave named Belinda Royall, who was granted reparations by an American court around the time of the American Revolution. Royall had been brought to the colonies from Africa and forced into bondage for 50 years. When her owner fled to Britain during the war, she was freed, but she felt she was due more than her freedom and sued for compensation. A Massachusetts court awarded her 15 pounds and 12 shillings out of the estate of her former owner. At that point, Coates writes, slavery had existed for 150 years already and “the idea that [slaves] might be owed something in return was, if not the national consensus, at least not outrageous” (Part III).

As time went on, however, more people did consider reparations outrageous. Though some African Americans continued to seek reparations, those opposed argued that former slaves had gained enough to counteract their enslavement: They had been freed, taught to speak English, and had the ideas of Christianity bestowed upon them, which would not have happened had they stayed in Africa.

For the remainder of the 19th century and much of the 20th century, African Americans were “terrorized” and systematically deprived of multiple means of generating wealth. Put simply, “practically a full century after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the plunder—quiet, systemic, submerged—continued even amidst the aims and achievements of New Deal liberals” (Part V). He refers mainly to the practice of redlining that denied African Americans the opportunity to purchase homes and accumulate wealth. In Coates’s view, slavery would have been bad enough if African Americans had started on a level playing field with other citizens when it ended, but ample evidence shows this was not the case.

White Supremacy in the United States

In Coates’s view, the existence of white supremacy underlies the entire history of the United States. In fact, he argues, it goes hand in hand with democracy. In the section entitled “The Ills that Slavery Frees Us from,” he quotes historian Edmund S. Morgan, who wrote that the Founding Fathers of America “had inherited both their slaves and their attachment to freedom from an earlier generation, and they knew the two were not unconnected” (Part IV). Coates writes that during Bacon’s Rebellion in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1676, poor white indentured servants joined together with black slaves in protest. From then on, white elites worked to harden racial divisions through legal and other means. As Coates puts it, “For the next 250 years, American law worked to reduce black people to a class of untouchables and raise all white men to the level of citizens” (Part IV).

After slavery ended, the system of Jim Crow in the South continued the existence of white supremacy. Legal and extralegal means kept whites in total control of the government and society, while blacks were citizens in name only. However, it didn’t end there. What Coates highlights in his essay is that the system of white supremacy went beyond individual bad actors to include policies of the federal government. The author states,

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. (Part IX)

Federal agencies that promoted home ownership, for example, systematically excluded African Americans. Therefore, discrimination cannot simply be attributed to a few individual outliers.

Racial Discrimination by the United States Government

If the federal government had never engaged in discrimination after 1865, those opposed to reparations could always blame post-Civil War injustices done to African Americans on individual prejudice, something that cannot be legislated out of existence. Coates marshals much evidence to show that even after the legal system of slavery ended, government-sanctioned discrimination continued well into the next century. The primary means for middle class Americans to gain wealth in the 20th century—home ownership, which was made possible by federal agencies set up during the Roosevelt administration—was purposely not made available to African Americans. Instead, the only way African Americans could buy a home was through predatory lending and contracts.

The resulting wealth gap between whites and blacks, as well as the de facto segregation of neighborhoods in many of the nation’s cities, resulted from what Coates refers to as government-enabled “social engineering.” As Coates puts it, “[t]he traditional terminology, white flight, implies a kind of natural expression of preference. In fact, white flight was a triumph of social engineering, orchestrated by the shared racist presumptions of America’s public and private sectors” (Part VI). Since the beginning of slavery in the New World, the plunder of wealth from blacks to whites, combined with the exclusion of blacks from many wealth-producing opportunities by the government, amounted to an astronomical amount of money. Therefore, the cumulative sins of slavery and plunder warrant the payment of reparations.