[without addressing the systemic problems just giving reperation is self destructive.]
if you strip slavery out of America, if you strip black people out of America, you really don’t have an America.
TA-NEHISI COATES: Yesterday, when asked about reparations, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offered a familiar reply: America should not be held liable for something that happened 150 years ago, since none of us currently alive are responsible.
This rebuttal proffers a strange theory of governance, that American accounts are somehow bound by the lifetime of its generations. But well into this century, the United States was still paying out pensions to the heirs of Civil War soldiers. We honor treaties that date back some 200 years, despite no one being alive who signed those treaties. Many of us would love to be taxed for the things we are solely and individually responsible for. But we are American citizens, and thus bound to a collective enterprise that extends beyond our individual and personal reach. It would seem ridiculous to dispute invocations of the Founders, or the Greatest Generation, on the basis of a lack of membership in either group. We recognize our lineage as a generational trust, as inheritance. And the real dilemma posed by reparations is just that: a dilemma of inheritance.
It is impossible to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery. As historian Ed Baptist has written, enslavement, quote, “shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics” of America, so that by 1836 more than $600 million, or almost half of the economic activity in the United States, derived directly or indirectly from the cotton produced by the million-odd slaves. By the time the enslaved were emancipated, they comprised the largest single asset in America—$3 billion in 1860 dollars, more than all the other assets in the country combined.
The method of cultivating this asset was neither gentle cajoling nor persuasion, but torture, rape and child trafficking. Enslavement reigned for 250 years on these shores. When it ended, this country could have extended its hallowed principles—life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—to all, regardless of color. But America had other principles in mind. And so, for a century after the Civil War, black people were subjected to a relentless campaign of terror, a campaign that extended well into the lifetime of Majority Leader 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 god of bondage was lustful and begat many heirs—coup d’états and convict leasing. vagrancy laws and debt peonage, redlining and racist GI 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.
What they know, what this committee must know, is that while emancipation dead-bolted the door against the bandits of America, Jim Crow wedged the windows wide open. And that is the thing about Senator McConnell’s “something.” It was 150 years ago. And it was right now.
The typical black family in this country has one-tenth the wealth of the typical white family. Black women die in childbirth at four times the rate of white women. And there is, of course, the shame of this land of the free boasting the largest prison population on the planet, of which the descendants of the enslaved make up the largest share.
The matter of reparations is one of making amends and direct redress, but it is also a question of citizenship. In H.R. 40, this body has a chance to both make good on its 2009 apology for enslavement and reject fair-weather patriotism, to say that a nation is both its credits and its debits, that if Thomas Jefferson matters, so does Sally Hemings, that if D-Day matters, so does Black Wall Street, that if Valley Forge matters, so does Fort Pillow, because the question really is not whether we will be tied to the somethings of our past, but whether we are courageous enough to be tied to the whole of them. Thank you.
Ta-Nehisi Coates talking:
I have to be honest, it’s been absolutely fascinating to watch. I think the thing that people need understand about the fight for reparations is precisely how old it is. I mean, this goes back to Belinda Royall, who sued the estate of Isaac Royall back in, you know, postcolonial times, after the American Revolution; up through Callie House in the 19th century; into James Forman Sr., who was a leader at SNCC, making his demand for reparations; up through N’COBRA and people like professor Charles Ogletree. So, this is a long, long fight. And when I published “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic, my hope was to just make my entry into that fight. I didn’t expect it to quite get here. I think this is definitely progress. I don’t think this is anywhere near the end goal, but I think yesterday was progress.
the two great crimes in American history is obviously the destruction of this country’s Native American—the near destruction, I should say, not the destruction—the near destruction of this country’s Native American population, the theft of their land, and on to work that land was brought in native Africans into this country, beginning in 1619. Those twin processes profoundly altered the shape of the world and made this country possible. Obviously, first of all, you know, the land on which America and Americans currently reside was the land of Native Americans, but the people brought in to break that land just transformed it.
The profits derived from slavery are more extreme than I think are commonly acknowledged. As I said yesterday, in 1860, the combined worth of the 4 million enslaved black people in this country was some $3 billion, nearly $75 billion in today’s share of dollars. Cotton, in 1860, was this country’s largest export—not just its largest export, it was the majority of exports out of this country. So, from a financial perspective, just the economics of it, it’s absolutely impossible to imagine America without enslavement.
The onset of the Civil War, the greatest preponderance, the greatest population per capita of millionaires and multimillionaires in this country was in the Mississippi River Valley. It wasn’t in Boston, wasn’t in Chicago, wasn’t in New York. The richest people in this country were slaveholders. Most of our earliest presidents were slaveholders. And the fact that they were presidents is not incidental to the fact that they—to their slaveholding. That was how they built their wealth. That was how Thomas Jefferson built his wealth. That was how George Washington built his wealth. Individual slaves were the equivalent of, say, owning a home today. They were people, but turned into objects of extreme wealth. So, just from the economic perspective, there’s that.
And just forgive me for extending a little bit, but there’s also the fact of what America actually is culturally. Our greatest export today is our entertainment, and it is our culture. It is impossible to imagine American culture without jazz, without the blues, without hip-hop. It’s impossible to imagine American cinema without, regrettably, Birth of a Nation. It’s impossible to imagine American literature at this point without James Baldwin, without Toni Morrison. All of these are the primary, secondary, tertiary fruits of slavery. And so, if you strip slavery out of America, if you strip black people out of America, you really don’t have an America.
It’s been said, I think, or alluded to, repeatedly throughout this conversation, that somehow wealthy African Americans are immune to these effects. But in addition to the wealth gap that’s cited, one thing that folks should keep in mind is that, quote-unquote, “wealthy African Americans” are not the equivalent of, quote-unquote, “wealthy white Americans” in this country. The average—the average African-American family in this country making $100,000, which is, you know, decent money, actually lives in the same kind of neighborhood that the average white family making $35,000 a year lives in. That is totally tied to the legacy of enslavement and Jim Crow and the input and the idea in the mind that white people and black people are somehow deserving of different things.
If I injure you, the injury persists even after I actually commit the act. If I stab you, you may suffer complications long after that initial actual stabbing. If I shoot you, you may suffer complications long after that initial shooting. That’s the case with African Americans. There are people well within the living memory of this country that are still suffering from the after-effects of that.
to be honest with you, for instance, the previous answer I just gave you on, A, the economics of enslavement and its relationship to this country, I would not have been able to give you that answer. I think—so, when I started in 2014, I actually was, at that point, for reparations, but you’re referring back to something I wrote in 2012, when I was against. I wouldn’t have been able to give you that answer. I didn’t have that level of knowledge. And beyond that, I didn’t have the level of knowledge on how it persisted. I mean, I had a vague sense of segregation, Jim Crow, etc., in the hundred years after, but I didn’t know about redlining, not in that degree of detail. And I didn’t know how this extraction, as I call it, of wealth from the African-American community laundered through the state into the white community through redlining, through the FHA loan program, through the GI Bill. I just didn’t have knowledge of that. And once I saw that, it’s like, wow, this is a persistent pattern of extraction that needs a really, really radical answer. At that point, reparations made total, total sense to me. But I will add that it made sense to plenty of people long before it made sense to me.
– when Abraham Lincoln signed a bill emancipating enslaved people, the slave owners around Washington, D.C., being given reparations for each enslaved person that they freed. $300 a person?
I can’t remember the number, but, yeah, you’re exactly correct. And in fact, Lincoln offered that to several—this idea of—it was called “compensated emancipation” at the time. And he offered it to several of the border slave states—Delaware, I believe, Maryland, Kentucky also. That was a plan to compensate the actual slaveholders.
And I should say, that’s a global pattern throughout history. The country of Haiti, for having the temerity to actually liberate itself from enslavement, was forced to pay reparations to France, the country that had actually enslaved the people there. So this is a global pattern with people enslaved.
It is only for questions of power that we find ourselves able to countenance the idea that people who have done the enslaving should have been compensated, and that was fine, and not just people who were enslaved, but people who were suffering the effects of that afterwards, should not be compensated.
This whole thing about who should get a check, and should we cut checks, you know, I understand those questions. That’s great. Those people should support H.R. 40, though, because that’s what H.R. 40 does. It tries to get that figured out, and get that math figured out, and figure out the best way to do it. But if we don’t actually have a study, we can’t actually answer those questions. You can’t ask a doctor to make a diagnosis before there’s an actual examination. Those people who have all of those questions should support H.R. 40. They should be its biggest supporters.
all of these questions, that may have been off of the table in 2016 or off the table in 2008, it’s not that people weren’t raising them. You know, it’s not that people weren’t making the point. But I just think, you know, in reaction to what’s going on to this country, in this country right now, people are just much, much more open, you know?
And in terms of poverty and race in this country, again, you know, one of the things that I really, really wanted to stress is, the level of poverty specifically that you see in the African-American community is not accidental. It’s not accidental. This is part of the process. The process of enslavement involves stealing something from someone. It involves taking something from someone. Jim Crow was theft. First and foremost, it was theft. If I tax you or if tell you you have to be loyal to this country and pledge fealty to its laws, but then I don’t give you the same degree of protection, I don’t give you the same access to resources that I give to another group of people, I have effectively stolen something from you. I have stolen your tax money. I have stolen your fealty. I have stolen your loyalty. So, when the state of Mississippi, for instance, taxes black people and then builds one facility for education and another for—one facility for education for whites and then an inferior facility for blacks, that’s theft. That’s theft. If I build a public pool system and then tell you you can’t use that public pool system, that’s theft.
And so, that is the long history of this country, that doesn’t end, again, conservatively, until 1968. And so, there are people who are very, very much alive who have experienced that, who are suffering the after-effects and effects of that. And that’s what, you know, as far as I’m concerned, the whole movement around reparations is about. And I suspect—I didn’t hear Dr. Reverend Barber’s comments, but I suspect there’s quite a bit of overlap there, too.
I think people are very, very uncomfortable when we start talking about the things in America’s past that do not credit us. Again, we have no problem at all taking credit for the things that people who are no longer here, who were in our past—we have no problem taking credit for their efforts. You know, you take somebody like Mitch McConnell, who does not want to be responsible for enslavement that happened 150 years ago, but, yet and still, wants the right to operate his business or operate his career in a building that was built by enslaved people. And so, we have no problem taking the credit, the benefits for what was done in our past. But when you start talking to people about actually paying that back or actually some sort of evenness around that, you know, a lot of discomfort comes up.
I understand that. I would like to also take only my paycheck and not have to pay my bills. I would like that, too. That would be great, you know? But I think if this idea of patriotism and citizenship is to mean anything, you know, you can’t, as I say, be a fair-weather friend to your country. You can’t decide that your past only matters, you know, that you want to invoke your country as a land of the free, when you want to go invade Iraq, for instance, and then, when you’re being called to be responsible for what made it possible for that country to be called “land of the free” in the first place, to act like you don’t owe anybody anything or you’re not part of it, especially, as I said yesterday, when a lot of this happened in your own lifetime. It isn’t the past. It happened while you were alive. Mitch McConnell was 26 years old by the time the Voting Rights Act was passed. You know, so this is very well within the lifetime of living people today.
I think the testimony was that one should not receive payment that would properly be due to the enslaved. But this country is, to this very day, receiving payment that was due to its enslavers. That’s the way inheritance works in this country, however one might feel about that. If I assemble a mass of money, I have the right to pass that on to my kid. My kid has the right to do whatever and then pass it on to their kid. And so, there’s something fundamentally injust if I have secured that money by taking it from one group, and then I pass that money on to my kid. My kid, by the way, continues—continues—to do injustice to the descendants of that other group, and we’re allowed to continually collect.
I don’t want to fall into this trap, and I really, really tried to make this clear yesterday. This didn’t end with enslavement. Reparations isn’t just about enslavement. There was the 250 years of enslavement, that period of theft. After that, there was a hundred years of terror, that period of theft. And, you know, I would argue, in fact, our present system of mass incarceration emerges right out of that.
And so, you know, this notion that a nation somehow only—especially when we’re talking about its damage, that it only lasts through the lifetime of its present generation is clearly ridiculous. The state itself would fall apart if that were true, if all of our treaties were broken when this generation died, if all of our taxes and responsibilities. If we said to pensionnaires, you know, “We will no longer pay you, because the people that made the decisions about those wars are no longer alive,” we would have a huge problem. As I said yesterday, to this very day, or at least, I should say, as recently as 2017, we were paying pensions to the heirs of Civil War widows. I mean, this is tremendous that we would recognize our ties to the past when it comes to certain things, but not other things.
I think I should say before I say that, my understanding is that Senator Sanders now supports H.R. 40. I think that’s where we are now. So I’m obviously pretty pleased about that.
You know, listen, when we had this dust-up a few years ago, what I was repeatedly told was, you know, it’s not class or race, it’s both. And I agree. So, I think all of the things that Bernie Sanders just listed about paying attention to distressed communities should be done. And we should also have reparations. So, I don’t see those two things as in conflict. It’s not clear to me why both can’t be on the agenda. In fact, it was never clear to me why both can’t be on the agenda, why one can’t associate themselves with the massive gaps in the wealth, that don’t just exist in the African-American community, but exist in communities across the country, and at the same time recognize that there’s something specific about the gap in the African-American community that’s tied to the specificity of American history. But, you know, as I said, I’m happy Senator Sanders now supports H.R. 40. I think that’s progress.
H.R. 40 it comes from the field order given by General Sherman, the whole 40 acres and a mule. This is a reference back to that.
I don’t know where this goes. I don’t know where this goes. I’m shocked we’re here. I’ve said that repeatedly. I’m surprised we’re even here. I am a writer and a journalist, you know, soon-to-be novelist. Those are my preoccupations. That’s my disposition. I’m not a very good prognosticator. I would not have told you that you would have had a black president in 2008. I would not have told you that there would have been hearings on the House floor on reparations, on H.R. 40. I would not have predicted any of that. So, I don’t know where we go. I think, you know, in my mind, I try not to get too high and try not to get too low, as it’s said. In my mind, this is still a generational struggle. And that’s how I’m seeing it. I expect that generations after I’m gone will continue to fight this battle, because it’s always been a generational struggle.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
critically acclaimed writer. He is the author of several books, including We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy.
— source democracynow.org | Jun 20, 2019