The Case for Reparations

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, published the essay “The Case for Reparations” in that magazine’s June 2014 issue. It was widely acclaimed and, according to the Washington Post, set a record at the time for the most-viewed article in a single day on The Atlantic website. The essay earned Coates a George Polk Award for commentary in 2014.

In the essay, Coates examines the idea of the United States government paying reparations to African Americans for the harm they sustained due to slavery and subsequent discrimination. He argues it is necessary for three reasons: (1) the loss of free will and destruction of families, (2) the wealth stolen by white people from African Americans, and (3) a kind of spiritual closure for all Americans—what the author calls “America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence” (Part X). Of the three, the essay focuses most on the stolen wealth of African Americans.

Coates begins with the story of a man named Clyde Ross, who was born in Mississippi in 1923. Ross’s family was victimized by the white establishment in that state: A mysterious case of “back taxes” materialized that crippled his family financially; a horse that Ross loved, which his parents gave him, was forcibly taken by whites for minimal compensation; Ross lost a chance to attend a better school because he could not ride the school bus that was available only to white children; and, because they were sharecroppers, the income Ross’s family earned on the cotton they grew depended entirely on the arbitrary price white landowners decided to pay each year.

After serving in the army and fighting in World War II, Ross moved north to Chicago in 1947. He got a steady job, raised a family with his wife, and enjoyed freedoms not available in the Jim Crow South. In 1961, however, when he and his wife wanted to buy a house, only a “contract sale” was available to them. Unlike a mortgage, in which one received a federally backed loan from a bank, contract buyers purchased a home directly from owners—all of whom in this case were white.

Such arrangements were notorious in Chicago for the disadvantageous terms the buyers had. For starters, the purchase price would be wildly inflated. The owner of Ross’s house, for example, had purchased it half a year earlier for $12,000; Ross paid $27,500. African Americans did not have access to traditional mortgages because of “redlining”: Maps drawn up by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in which neighborhoods where African Americans lived—colored on the maps in red—were considered high risk and denied insurance. No bank would issue a mortgage without this insurance. Thus, African Americans were systematically excluded from the greatest means of producing wealth available to the middle class: home ownership. Coates focuses on the resulting “wealth gap” between whites and African Americans when advocating for reparations.

Coates argues that a tremendous transfer of wealth—he uses the word “plunder”—from African Americans to whites has taken place throughout American history. When slavery was legal, the economic value generated by slave labor went entirely to slave owners and the government. Much of this economic value was generated in cotton production during the 19th century: “In 1860, there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the country” (Part IV). Profits from cotton were not confined to the South. The mills that processed the fibers and produced clothing were largely in the North. Beyond stolen labor, whites benefited financially from insurance policies on slaves, and the taxing and notarizing involved in slave sales.

After slavery ended, the plunder continued. In the Jim Crow South, black citizens lived largely outside the protection of the law. Whites could and did take their property at will through means that were shady at best, illegal at worst; the story of Clyde Ross testifies to this. Moreover, these robberies weren’t merely attributable to contemptible individuals. The federal government also aided in the creation of the wealth gap between blacks and whites. Many New Deal programs, often considered some of the most progressive in the nation’s history, explicitly excluded African Americans. Coates focuses on the FHA and the housing market, but he notes similar policies extended to programs like Social Security, unemployment insurance, and the GI Bill.

Coates also argues that the loss of free will imposed on slaves and the destruction of their families warrants reparations. As slaves, African Americans could make no decisions about where or how they lived. Families were split up by selling individual members to owners who lived far way. “In a time when telecommunications were primitive and blacks lacked freedom of movement, the parting of black families was a kind of murder” (Part IV). Not incidentally, this contributed to the economic gain of whites at the expense of blacks, since it was financially beneficial to use each slave’s labor where the most gain could be made.

Again, this continued after slavery ended. Jim Crow laws denied African Americans the full range of citizenship, and the lives of African Americans were in constant danger through lynching and other kinds of assault. What’s more, families could still be split up: One of Clyde Ross’s brothers was detained after having an epileptic seizure, sent to a Mississippi state prison called Parchman Farm, and never seen again. When the family went to take him home, they were told he died; when they asked for the body, they were told he had already been buried.

A third argument for reparations is that it could have a positive effect on the United States to come to terms with its full history, warts and all. Coates argues that “[t]o celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America’s origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte” (Part IX). If Americans claim ownership of the celebrated aspects of their past like democratic institutions, they need to likewise take responsibility for the negative aspects. A model for such a national reckoning is that of West Germany paying reparations to Israel in the 1950s for the crimes committed in the Holocaust, an example of “how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name” (Part X).