Eric Liu: Coates is right, we need a study on reparations

Hear, hear!  For those who didn't bother to read Ta-Nehisi Coates' provocative, thought-provoking essay on reparations in The Atlantic,  Eric Liu underscores Coates' main point [emphasis mine]:

Coates is not quite making a case for reparations. He's making a case for a discussion of reparations. He doesn't pretend to spell out all the operational policy choices that would have to be made to put reparations into effect. The closest he comes to a legislative recommendation is to tout a perennially neglected bill that Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan, introduces every session of Congress, which calls simply for a public study of the possibility of reparations.

This isn't a shortcoming of Coates' argument; it is its purpose. What we need to do is to study the issue in earnest. To have a hearing, in the deepest sense. To listen to the difference between Americanness and whiteness, and to notice the manifold ways that whiteness was (and is) an identity fabricated from the myth of blackness.

To be sure, every ethnic group that's not called white has experienced suffering in American life. But the experience of African-Americans is exceptional in its systematic, multigenerational, reverberating effects.  And it's exceptional in its centrality to the founding and building of our nation.  No experience reveals more than the African-American experience both the hypocrisy and the possibility of our national creed.

I characterized the way most critics have jumped on Coates' essay a case of "leaping from justice to practicalities," as in, some would like to anticipate and dismiss the possible terms of a settlement on reparations, and so doing, dismiss the case for reparations itself.  

Recently on The Colbert Report, Ta-Nehisi Coates half-jokingly told Colbert he would forget about reparations for slavery if the U.S. would seriously study and consider a reckoning for Jim Crow and everything that happened after, including FHA "redlining policies," etc.  Indeed, it's a further injustice to African-Americans to say that the injustices stopped with the emancipation of black slaves. That was just the beginning of a long journey for black equality that continues to this day.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Colbert Report on Facebook

UPDATE:  My conservative friends and family just couldn't let it go, they immediately asked me, "Well, how much would you be willing to pay?"  That was my Uncle T.  So here's what I wrote him:

Oh, please. You want me to name a dollar figure, as if that's the key issue here? OK, fine.  Seventy-two percent of Americans are of European ancestry, let's say 30% of them are adults, that's more than 68 million white adults.  If each of them was asked to give $200, that would be a fund of almost $14 billion.  Put partially in trust, and partially into targeted scholarships, housing loans, job training programs, etc., that money could do a hell of a lot of good.  And that's just me throwing out a dollar figure, since that seems to matter to you more than anything.

Believe it or not, (you'll choose not to), there are very rich families and companies still living well on the money made from slavery. No less than Bloomberg said it, if you recall: 

http://what-is-is.blogspot.com/2012/01/bloomberg-us-economy-powered-by-slavery.html

So I for one would be in favor of companies that made money off slavery that still exist today paying more than I would as an individual.  

I'm aware that a fund of about $14 billion would break down to a bit over $350 for every African-American alive today. That "small" sum is not an argument against reparations, to my mind; rather -- and this is just my opinion -- I think that money would be better spent pooled and targeted to specific programs over which blacks would have significant or total say-so in how it was spent.

And my Republican buddy Rusty asked me, "Do you agree that the only people who should be required to pay them are the descendants of slave owners?"  

To which I replied: "No, I think we all should pay it, everybody except blacks, but that's just my opinion. You're still jumping from the verdict (=reparations are morally warranted) to the settlement terms (= $$??), and then using that hypothetical settlement to determine the justice of of the verdict, which is not the way American justice should or does work in any kind of class-action suit."

To which I should have added that many Northerners and non-slave owners benefited from slavery, including the Lehman Bros. and JP Morgans, et al, of the financial community, as described by Bloomberg. And to a great extent slaves and Jim Crow-era blacks built this country, and so all citizens of the U.S owe them a debt of gratitude.

Rusty thought the idea of asking Mexicans and Asian-Americans to pay reparations was "truly insulting," but I don't necessarily agree, since all Americans today benefit from the country that slaves and Jim-Crow era second-class citizens built for us.  

Why we need to talk about reparations

By Eric Liu

June 27, 2014 | CNN

URL: http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/27/opinion/liu-reparations-slavery/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

Coates: The case for reparations

This landmark essay is long, I know. But so is American history. Maybe not in years, relatively, but in certainly in events -- and in inventive injustices against blacks.

Some of my Republican friends will snap back at me without reading this, or just ignore it,  but really, REALLY, you need to read this. If nothing else, it's a fascinating history lesson that -- no, sorry Common Core -- our lib'rul public education system still doesn't teach us.

To quote Coates's essay selectively to discourage reading it would be a further injustice.  Still I can't resist quoting this, taken out of context, but still wonderful rhetoric:

Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look.

And this statistic: think about the wealth created, with compound interest, and what it would be worth today!:  "By 1840, cotton produced by slave labor constituted 59 percent of the country’s exports."

And this:

“In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together,” the Yale historian David W. Blight has noted. “Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy.”

Before we leap from justice to practicalities, let's consider Coates' compelling -- I daresay spiritual -- definition of reparations:

Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.

Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

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.

And without quoting, I can guess why Coates spends so much of his essay on the history of Chicago, because our President was a community organizer there. For all you whites who think cities like Chicago and Detroit "just happen," you need to read this.

Additionally, Coates offers us the amazing example of the turnaround effect German reparations had on the economy -- and morale -- of the state of Israel.

Finally, if you'd dismiss Coates's essay because it was written by a black guy, then I'd urge you to read these two articles at Bloomberg and Slate, respectively. 

UPDATE: So my Republican buddy wrote back almost immediately, and predictably, with this:

I actually believe reparations would be just.  But I also know it wouldn't fix our race problems, nor would it fix the wealth gap long term.  The black family has been broken down by leftism.  They abort 40% of their babies, and the left has done everything to teach them they can't help themselves.  They are stuck in schools run by Democrats where they will be lucky to learn to read.

If you give an uneducated person a lot of money, they will blow it.  The white man will convince the people who get the money that they need to spend it on making their ride look phat.  The money will end up back where it started because the only thing they were taught in school was that the glaciers are going to melt and that Obama rides Unicorns and shoots rainbows from his wrists.

To which I replied:

This is what Coates meant, when I said not "to leap from justice to practicalities." Cash payments might not be the only form of reparations.  Read the article. For example, off the top of my head, taking Coates's example of how FHA loans discriminated against blacks while doubling the rate of white home ownership, part of reparations could be for black home ownership -- and not just guaranteed loans, but something more tailored and smart.

Reparations could be for special job training centers, special black enterprise zones, special black small business loans... use your creativity....  

UPDATE (03.06.2014): Ta-Nehisi Coates replies to critic Kevin D. Williaomson at National Review of his essay "The Case for Reparations" with "The Case for American History." Here's my favorite excerpt:

The governments of the United States of America—local, state and federal—are deeply implicated in enslavement, Jim Crow, redlining, New Deal racism, terrorism, ghettoization, housing segregation. The fact that one's ancestors were not slave-traders or that one arrived here in 1980 is irrelevant. I did not live in New York when the city railroaded the Central Park Five. But my tax dollars will pay for the settlement. That is because a state is more than the natural lives, or occupancy, of its citizens. People who object to reparations for African-Americans because they, individually, did nothing should also object to reparations to Japanese-Americans, but they should not stop there. They should object to the Fourth of July, since they, individually, did nothing to aid the American Revolution. They should object to the payment of pensions for the Spanish-American War, a war fought before they were alive. Indeed they should object to government and society itself, because its existence depends on outliving its individual citizens.

A sovereignty that dies with every generation is a failed state. The United States, whatever its problems, is not in that league. The United States' success as a state extends out from several factors, some of them good and others not so much. The mature citizen understands this. The immature citizen claims credit for all national accolades, while disavowing responsibility for all demerits. This specimen of patriotism is at the core of many (not all) arguments against reparations.

And this, Coates's conclusion:

"The people to whom reparations were owed," Williamson concludes. "Are long dead." Only because we need them to be. Mr. Clyde Ross is very much alive—as are many of the victims of redlining. And it is not hard to identify them. We know where redlining took place and where it didn't. We have the maps. We know who lived there and who didn't.

This was American policy. We have never accounted for it, and it is unlikely that we ever will. That is not because of any African-American's life-span but because of a powerful desire to run out the clock. Reparations claims were made within the natural lifetimes of emancipated African-Americans. They were unsuccessful. They were not unsuccessful because they lacked merit. They were unsuccessful because their country lacked the courage to dispense with creationism. 

The Case For Reparations

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014 | The Atlantic

URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

Study: 19th-cent. U.S. wealth vested in slaves

I've said it before: America was a country built by slaves; and that wealth persists. To ignore that, and yet to revere our Founding Fathers who got rich on the backs of slaves, is to deny reason and history.

To wit, let's recall this brief but fascinating Bloomberg analysis last year:

The U.S. won its independence from Britain just as it was becoming possible to imagine a liberal alternative to the mercantilist policies of the colonial era. Those best situated to take advantage of these new opportunities -- those who would soon be called "capitalists" -- rarely started from scratch, but instead drew on wealth generated earlier in the robust Atlantic economy of slaves, sugar and tobacco. [...]

This recognizably modern capitalist economy was no less reliant on slavery than the mercantilist economy of the preceding century. Rather, it offered a wider range of opportunities to profit from the remote labor of slaves, especially as cotton emerged as the indispensable commodity of the age of industry.

In the North, where slavery had been abolished and cotton failed to grow, the enterprising might transform slave-grown cotton into clothing; market other manufactured goods, such as hoes and hats, to plantation owners; or invest in securities tied to next year's crop prices in places such as Liverpool and Le Havre. This network linked Mississippi planters and Massachusetts manufacturers to the era's great financial firms: the Barings, Browns and Rothschilds.

But you know... maybe that is indeed what the Tea Parties and far-right conservatives really want: a return to late 18th and early 19th-century America, when a white elite got rich on the backs of dark-skinned slaves?  What else can we infer from the Republicans' recent "work or starve" political economy?

America's Slaves Were More Valuable Than All Its Industrial Capital Combined  

By Matthew Yglesias

July 18, 2013 | Slate

Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman have a new paper out (PDF) about the historical evolution of wealth in a number of different prominent countries, and it features this chart for the United States that really drives home the amazing reality of America's antebellum slave economy. The "human capital" consisting of black men and women held as chattel in the states of the south was more valuable than all the industrial and transportation capital ("other domestic capital") of the country in the first half of the nineteenth century. When you consider that the institution of slavery was limited to specific subset of the country, you can see that in the region where it held sway slave wealth was wealth.

In their discussion, the point Piketty and Zucman make about this is that slave wealth was the functional equivalent of land wealth in a country where agricultural land was abundant. The typical European wealth-holding pattern was of an economic elite composed of wealthy landowners in a environment of scarce usable land. In America, land was plentiful since you could steal it from Native Americans. That should could have led to an egalitarian distribution of wealth, but instead an alternative agrarian elite emerged that did happen to own large stocks of land but whose wealthy was primarily composed of owning the human beings who worked the land rather than owning the land itself.

Was American Revolution worth it? Revisiting the 'American Dream'

This July 4th we can stop and ponder: was the American Revolution worth it? Here's what NPR had to say about the "American Dream," i.e. social and economic upward mobility:

So, in the 19th century in the U.S., there's unbelievable economic mobility. If your father, for example, was an unskilled laborer, sort of the lowest end of the working hierarchy, then you had an 80 percent chance of doing some more skilled, more highly paid job than your father. At the same time, in the U.K., you had about a 50 percent chance. Half the children of unskilled laborers were unskilled laborers themselves. But by just after World War II, the U.S. and U.K. are converging and the differences start to disappear. And by 1970, the U.K. has pulled ahead. So, by the 1970s, the children of unskilled laborers are more likely to do be doing something higher paying in the U.K. than in the U.S.

Why is that so?  Why is the "American Dream" more alive in Britain today than in America?  There are two basic theories, according to NPR:

• By the 20th century, the U.S. was a mature economy like Britain, without all the exceptional opportunities for growth that exist in a young, expanding nation.

• In early-mid 20th century, the welfare state and education in Britain grew at a faster pace.

These two theories are not mutually exclusive.  I would also point out the respective rates of unionization in the U.S. and UK: 11.1 percent vs. 25.8 percent.  The average in OECD countries for trade union density is 17 percent.  Nordic socialist paradises Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, which top almost every global indicator of economic and social well-being, have well over 50 percent of their workers in trade unions.  In the U.S. we blame falling wages all on globalization, but then we should ask why wages aren't falling elsewhere in G-8 countries?  Unions have a lot to do with it.

And then there is the U.S. tax system, which for the past 30 years has discriminated against wages in favor of income earned through interest and financial securities, thereby inflating inequality and crushing the "American Dream."  Remember this chart?:

Paul Pirie for WaPo  gives us more socio-economic data to ponder:

Most Americans work longer hours and have fewer paid vacations and benefits — including health care — than their counterparts in most advanced countries. Consider also that in the CIA World Factbook, the United States ranks 51st in life expectancy at birth. Working oneself into an early grave does not do much for one’s happiness quotient. This year the United States tied for 14th in “life satisfaction” on an annual quality-of-life study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That puts the United States behind Canada (eighth) and Australia (12th). A report co-authored last year by the economist Jeffrey Sachs ranked the United States 10th in the world for happiness — again behind Canada and Australia. The Sachs study found that the United States has made “striking economic and technological progress over the past half century without gains in the self-reported happiness of the citizenry. Instead, uncertainties and anxieties are high, social and economic inequalities have widened considerably, social trust is in decline, and confidence in government is at an all-time low.”

But the difference is not just in economics or happiness, but also liberty.  Pirie points out that the British Empire (including Canada) abolished slavery in 1833, a full 32 years befoe the U.S. ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. Today's slavery is the U.S. prison-industrial complex that incarcerates more adults, in both absolute and relative terms, than any other country by a wide margin, including Red China and Russia.  

And speaking of Americans' liberty, I have three words for you: N-S-A.  Do I really need to say more?  It doesn't matter, the spooks are archiving this post anyway.

Today, having mentioned some of these factoids to a Brit, I joked about our reneging the Declaration of Independence.  He said Britons are glad America is no longer their problem; they can't imagine trying to govern the U.S.  I joked back, "Yeah, we have enough trouble dealing with places like Texas!"  Can you imagine British PM David Cameron trying to talk sense to the folks in U.S. flyover country? You start to wonder who got the better end of the deal when the U.S. declared its independence....   

Happy 4th of July, everybody!  Have a hotdog and light off a roman candle for me.

UPDATE: If you think I'm unpatriotic, here's a guy who really can't stand the 4th of July: "Hatetriot's Day: July 4th Is America's Crappiest Holiday."

Today's racial parallels to Reconstruction era

This is worth reading, especially if you are a white Republican.  The 1865 parallel to Obamacare is especially interesting.  It's absurd and sad at the same time that freed blacks were accused of relying on handouts only a year after their emancipation: the 19th century version of Reagan's "welfare queen" myth.  

The more things change....

Parallels to country's racist past haunt age of Obama

By John Blake

November 1, 2012 | CNN

URL: http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2012/11/01/parallels-to-countrys-racist-past-haunt-age-of-obama/?hpt=hp_bn13

Taxpayers pay twice for prison slave labor

[HT: Colbert Report, citing FoxNews].  Prison labor costs only 23 cents an hour, but this government-owned slaveholder company, UNICOR, still sells its uniforms to the U.S. military for more than its private-sector competitors, thanks to its quota from Congress, and it pockets the difference.  Nice work if you can get it.

UNICOR (previously Federal Prison Industries) even makes Patriot missiles!

All it takes to keep this Military-Industrial Slave Complex running is a perverse justice system that throws 1 out of every 31 U.S. adults -- 70 percent of them minorities -- in for-profit prisons, about 20 percent on harmless drugs convictions, costing taxpayers an average of $32,000 per inmate a year, and a Congressional quota. (And before my teabagger friends even ask, the answer is yes: $32 K is way more than inmates would get on welfare, not to mention the cost of police, interdiction, courts, etc.).

American prison labor means longer unemployment lines

By Elizabeth Prann

September 16, 2012 | FoxNews

URL: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/09/16/american-prison-labor-means-longer-unemployment-lines/#ixzz28DKCcsHN

Gulag USA

Those socialist regimes of the past were so brutal and awful.  In the U.S. we have the 13th Amendment that would never allow us to force our citizens into slave labor camps....  Oops:

All told, nearly a million [U.S.] prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses or manufacturing textiles, shoes and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between ninety-three cents and $4.73 per day.

Well, at least they're privately-run slave labor camps.  With private outsourcing, I'm sure we can improve on the efficiency of socialist gulags.

Locking Down an American Workforce

By Steve Fraser and Joshua Freeman

April 19, 2012 | The Nation

URL:  http://www.thenation.com/article/167473/locking-down-american-workforce

Bloomberg: U.S. economy powered by slavery

Just keep this in mind when folks talk about going back to the "good old days" of the 18th and 19th centuries.

America's economy was powered by slavery, and the wealth generated by slavery reverberates in today's companies like Lehman Bros., Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase.

How Slavery Led to Modern Capitalism: Echoes

By Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman

January 24, 2012 | Bloomberg

URL: http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-24/how-slavery-led-to-modern-capitalism-echoes.html

Welfare abuse by Negroes goes back to 1866?

I stumbled upon this picture here. To see it is fascinating, sad, and in an odd way encouraging for my convictions, because it just confirmed for me that ignorant or just plain racist whites have always found excuses to call blacks lazy welfare moochers.

Think about it: Some whites back then had the gall to complain that Negroes were enjoying idleness at the expense of taxpayers, when only one year earlier almost all 4 million African-Americans had been slaves, working for nothing! And work for nothing they did -- for 240 years!

Jesus, I thought the annoying phrase "Get over it," was a recent invention, but it seems the sentiment behind it is very American and very old. Whites were telling freed slaves to "Get over it" only months after slavery had ended. Imagine!

You can read more about the Freedmen's Bureau, initiated by President Lincoln before his assassination, here.