The Case for Reparations

“In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. ‘Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia,’ the AP reported, as well as ‘oil fields in Mississippi’ and ‘a baseball spring training facility in Florida.’”

Coates argues that the wealth gap between whites and blacks in America occurred partially because whites stole the property of blacks. The value here is reported as “tens of millions of dollars,” yet that comes from just over 400 people. As Coates goes on to explain, the systematic plundering of African Americans involved many more people over hundreds of years (both during and after slavery).

“Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out. This would normally be a homeowner’s responsibility, but in fact, Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He’d bought ‘on contract’: a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting—while offering the benefits of neither. Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself.” 

This quotation explains in detail the predatory contracts that African Americans were forced to accept if they wanted to purchase a home. The purchase price was usually double the market value (or more). The arrangement was really a “rent to own” situation that gave African Americans none of the benefits of real home ownership, like the accumulation of equity.

“In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured private mortgages, causing a drop in interest rates and a decline in the size of the down payment required to buy a house. But an insured mortgage was not a possibility for Clyde Ross. The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated ‘A,’ indicated ‘in demand’ neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked ‘a single foreigner or Negro.’ These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated ‘D’ and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red.” 

The FHA, charged with insuring loans, deliberately excluded African-American neighborhoods from the program through the rating system on its maps. This practice denied African Americans the opportunity to participate in the largest wealth-generating vehicle of the 20th century: home ownership. The federal government itself, an entity meant to protect all citizens, systematically discriminated against African Americans.

“Black families, regardless of income, are significantly less wealthy than white families. The Pew Research Center estimates that white households are worth roughly 20 times as much as black households, and that whereas only 15 percent of whites have zero or negative wealth, more than a third of blacks do. Effectively, the black family in America is working without a safety net. When financial calamity strikes—a medical emergency, divorce, job loss—the fall is precipitous.”

Research from the Pew Center documents the consequences for African Americans of being shut out of home ownership: an enduring wealth gap between whites and blacks. Along with the stolen property in Jim Crow states and forced, unpaid labor of the slavery period, the financial damage done to African Americans forms the backbone of Coates’s argument for reparations.

“As the historian Roy E. Finkenbine has documented, at the dawn of this country, black reparations were actively considered and often effected. Quakers in New York, New England, and Baltimore went so far as to make ‘membership contingent upon compensating one’s former slaves.’ In 1782, the Quaker Robert Pleasants emancipated his 78 slaves, granted them 350 acres, and later built a school on their property and provided for their education. ‘The doing of this justice to the injured Africans,’ wrote Pleasants, ‘would be an acceptable offering to him who ‘Rules in the kingdom of men.’” 

Some people today dismiss the notion of reparations out of hand, but officials and slave owners in the past both entertained the idea and acted upon it. Thus, Coates establishes a historical precedent for reparations.

“Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, ‘Never again.’ But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us.” 

Coates uses figures of speech to present ideas from a different angle or to make them easier to understand. Here, he compares the buildup of crimes and offenses against African Americans, followed by an abrupt promise to put an end to them, to accumulating debt on a credit card. The balance remains and accumulated interest until it’s paid down.

“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. In 1650, Virginia mandated that ‘all persons except Negroes’ were to carry arms. In 1664, Maryland mandated that any Englishwoman who married a slave must live as a slave of her husband’s master. In 1705, the Virginia assembly passed a law allowing for the dismemberment of unruly slaves—but forbidding masters from whipping ‘a Christian white servant naked, without an order from a justice of the peace.’ In that same law, the colony mandated that ‘all horses, cattle, and hogs, now belonging, or that hereafter shall belong to any slave’ be seized and sold off by the local church, the profits used to support ‘the poor of the said parish.’ At that time, there would have still been people alive who could remember blacks and whites joining to burn down Jamestown only 29 years before. But at the beginning of the 18th century, two primary classes were enshrined in America.” 

Coates argues that white supremacy has been a part of American history almost from the start. The reference to Jamestown is about Bacon’s Rebellion, in which black slaves and white indentured servants protested together. Coates writes that the white elites saw the danger in their unity and from then on worked assiduously to divide Americans by race, forever disadvantaging blacks. 

“Nearly one-fourth of all white Southerners owned slaves, and upon their backs the economic basis of America—and much of the Atlantic world—was erected. In the seven cotton states, one-third of all white income was derived from slavery. By 1840, cotton produced by slave labor constituted 59 percent of the country’s exports. The web of this slave society extended north to the looms of New England, and across the Atlantic to Great Britain, where it powered a great economic transformation and altered the trajectory of world history. ‘Whoever says Industrial Revolution,’ wrote the historian Eric J. Hobsbawm, ‘says cotton.’” 

In much of the essay, Coates uses personal stories to illustrate his ideas, enabling the reader to see events from the perspective of individual people rather than only through aggregate statistics or abstract ideas. Yet Coates makes use of statistics to quantify the scale of the societal wealth generated by slavery, none of which went to the slaves who generated it. This passage provides a snapshot of the American economy in 1860, just before the Civil War broke out. 

“Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy—in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America’s rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy. The labor strife that seeded Bacon’s Rebellion was suppressed. America’s indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values.” 

This quotation focuses on the destruction that slavery caused in the families of African Americans. Slaves were deprived of the wealth generated by their labor and subjected to their families being torn apart for the benefit—and profit—of their owners. Coates argues that American democracy was intertwined (and in some ways dependent on) slavery.

“The only way you were going to buy a home was to do it the way they wanted […] And I was determined to get me a house. If everybody else can have one, I want one too. I had worked for white people in the South. And I saw how these white people were living in the North and I thought, ‘One day I’m going to live just like them.’ I wanted cabinets and all these things these other people have.” 

Coates effectively mixes personal stories with abstract facts, as the former have an emotional quality that the latter cannot convey. Chicago resident Mattie Lewis, like Clyde Ross, was forced to buy a home on contract rather than through a mortgage from a bank. Ms. Lewis expresses the simple wish of virtually all those aspiring to the middle class: to have a home of her own for her family. She resolved to do so even within the disadvantageous method that was the only way available to her. Later in that same section, she tells Coates that to keep up payments, “You cut down on things for your child, that was the main thing.”

“This confusion about affirmative action’s aims, along with our inability to face up to the particular history of white-imposed black disadvantage, dates back to the policy’s origins. ‘There is no fixed and firm definition of affirmative action,’ an appointee in Johnson’s Department of Labor declared. ‘Affirmative action is anything that you have to do to get results. But this does not necessarily include preferential treatment.’

Yet America was built on the preferential treatment of white people—395 years of it. Vaguely endorsing a cuddly, feel-good diversity does very little to redress this.” 

Opponents of reparations often point to affirmative action as evidence that the slate has been wiped clean and any debt owed for slavery has already been paid through programs that ensure more opportunities for African Americans. Coates counters that the aims of affirmative action have always been vague—a watered down goal of diversity more than anything else. He quotes an official from the administration of President Lyndon Johnson, who admitted that their goal was not necessarily preferential treatment for African Americans. Because whites had preferential treatment for centuries, affirmative action did not wipe the slate clean.

“To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy, to pretend that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of unregulated capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with the sin of national lying. The lie ignores the fact that reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same. The lie ignores the fact that closing the ‘achievement gap’ will do nothing to close the ‘injury gap,’ in which black college graduates still suffer higher unemployment rates than white college graduates, and black job applicants without criminal records enjoy roughly the same chance of getting hired as white applicants with criminal records.” 

Opponents of reparations assert that the real division in America is not between racial groups but between rich and poor. Instead of paying reparations to African Americans, money should be put into programs that benefit and lift up the poor of all races. Again, Coates returns to the theme of white supremacy throughout American history, showing how its effects are still felt today. The statistics he quotes cannot be explained simply by poverty.

“What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling ‘patriotism’ while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.” 

Because of the depth and breadth of the wealth stolen and denied to African Americans, Coates does believe money should be paid as part of reparations. He believes, however, that reparations will correct more than economic injustice; they will provide a spiritual cleansing for all Americans, who must reckon with the whole truth of America’s past rather than speaking only about the positive aspects or praising American unconditionally.