More handpicked essays just for you.
The case of reparation coates essay
The case for reparations by ta-nehisi coates purpose for writing
The case of reparations
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Last year, Ta-Nehisis Coates’ Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations” threw a national spotlight on a debate and movement that has been ongoing, yet for the large part unseen, for more than 150 years. Reparations suddenly became a topic of national debate, which like most things today focused on the merits of the idea versus proposing any real solutions to the issues. Coates’ article is no different, offering a litany of offensives without proposing any real solvency to the issues that have oppressed the black community in America for the past several hundred years. In the article, Coates maintains that social, economic, and political injustices against blacks have compounded over the years: “Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy.” He argues that even though slavery and segregation ended, these inequities have crippled many black communities and left them on an uneven playing field—only reparations can even this field. In his 15,000-word treatise, Coates uses many pieces of evidence to validate his case for reparations. Primarily, Coates focuses on three rifts to stake his claim. Initially, Coates highlights the …show more content…
His argument is substantive in outlining the plight of black Americans; however, he is anything but substantive in offering any means by which the current inequities can be truly addressed. Unlike Robin Kelley, who in his article “For Reparations and Transformations” suggests that reparations come in the form of entitlement programs, education and investment in “historically black ghetto communities.” Coates offers the issues and Kelley the possible solutions. However, are these solutions
Coates wrote a 176 page long letter to his 14 years old son to explain what the African American society were going through at the time being. In the book, Coates used himself as an example to demonstrate the unjust treatment that had been cast upon him and many other African Americans. Readers can sense a feeling of pessimism towards African American’s future throughout the entire book although he did not pointed it out directly.
The article “The Case for Reparations” is a point of view that Ta-nehisi Coates looks into the life of Clyde Ross and what he went through in the African American society. Arranging reparations based off of what Clyde Ross lived through and experienced from the time he was a young child to his later adult years. Providing life facts and events comparing them to today and seeking out to present his reparations. Clyde ross explain that we are still living bound down as blacks to the white supremacy and in a new era of racism .Concluding the article the fact that it’s been far too long to live the way we are and it is time for a change to finally be made.
There are many contradictions pertaining to slavery, which lasted for approximately 245 years. In Woody Holton’s “Black Americans in the Revolutionary Era”, Holton points out the multiple instances where one would find discrepancies that lie in the interests of slaveowners, noble figures, and slaves that lived throughout the United States. Holton exemplifies this hostility in forms of documents that further specify and support his claim.
In an article written by Shelby Steele, a black American whose grandfather was born into slavery, he writes about his feelings toward reparations, saying that reparations would be an insult to his heritage. He states, "My first objection to reparation for slavery is that it feels like selling our birthright for a pot of porridge." He feels as though reparations for the past will not change the black American future, saying that today's black Americans problems are failure on their part not on white Americans. What would compensation for black injustices solve?
William Julius Wilson creates a thrilling new systematic framework to three politically tense social problems: “the plight of low-skilled black males, the persistence of the inner-city ghetto, and the fragmentation of the African American family” (Wilson, 36). Though the conversation of racial inequality is classically divided. Wilson challenges the relationship between institutional and cultural factors as reasons of the racial forces, which are inseparably linked, but public policy can only change the racial status quo by reforming the institutions that support it.
Black Power, the seemingly omnipresent term that is ever-so-often referenced when one deals with the topic of Black equality in the U.S. While progress, or at least the illusion of progress, has occurred over the past century, many of the issues that continue to plague the Black (as well as other minority) communities have yet to be truly addressed. The dark cloud of rampant individual racism may have passed from a general perspective, but many sociologists, including Stokely Carmichael; the author of “Black Power: the Politics of Liberation in America”, have and continue to argue that the oppressive hand of “institutional racism” still holds down the Black community from making any true progress.
Racial inequality is a disparity in opportunity and treatment that occurs as a result of someone 's race. Racial inequality has been affecting our country since it was founded. This research paper, however, will be limited to the racial injustice and inequality of African-Americans. Since the start of slavery, African Americans have been racially unequal to the power majority race. It was not until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when African Americans received racial equality under the laws of the United States. Many authors write about racial injustice before and after the Civil Rights Act. In “Sonny’s Blues”, James Baldwin tells a fictional story of an African American who struggles to achieve racial equality and prosper
In “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates sets out a powerful argument for reparations to blacks for having to thrive through horrific inequity, including slavery, Jim Crowism, Northern violence and racist housing policies. By erecting a slave society, America erected the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy. And Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history. Paying such a moral debt is such a great matter of justice served rightfully to those who were suppressed from the fundamental roles, white supremacy played in American history.
Finally, Frazier discusses the result of this displacement on the black middle class. Because the black bourgeoisie buys into the ideals of white America more and is simultaneously more exposed to its hostility, their sense of inferiority is compounded. They seek to fill this void in two ways.
The descendants of the slaves here in America are showered with government aid David Horowitz states that “trillions of dollars in transfer payments have been made to African-Americans in the form of welfare benefits and racial preferences in contracts, job placements and educational admissions”. Since the 60’s, acts and bills have been passed to return justice to the African-American community. For example the passing of the Civil Rights Act presented by President Lyndon B. Johnson. banned the discrimination of race. In addition, Horowitz asks “if trillion-dollar restitutions and the rewriting of American law is not enough to achieve healing, what is?”. Meaning the government has worked to better the social lives of African-Americans as well as economically.
Imagine you’re young, and alone. If your family was taken from you and suffered horribly for your freedom, would you want to be repaid in some form? In the article “The Case for Reparations” Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses a great deal of information about reparations, and if they should be given. Reparations are when a person or people make amends for the wrong they have done. Ta-Nehisi believes that from two hundred years of slavery, ninety years of Jim Crow laws, sixty years of separate but equal, and thirty five years of racist housing policy, that America is shackled. Only if we face the compounding moral debt can America be free. Until we face the reality of what happened together, we will always be bound by the lies that have been told.
From slavery being legal, to its abolishment and the Civil Rights Movement, to where we are now in today’s integrated society, it would seem only obvious that this country has made big steps in the adoption of African Americans into American society. However, writers W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin who have lived and documented in between this timeline of events bringing different perspectives to the surface. Du Bois first introduced an idea that Baldwin would later expand, but both authors’ works provide insight to the underlying problem: even though the law has made African Americans equal, the people still have not.
For as long as I can remember, racial injustice has been the topic of discussion amongst the American nation. A nation commercializing itself as being free and having equality for all, however, one questions how this is true when every other day on the news we hear about the injustices and discriminations of one race over another. Eula Biss published an essay called “White Debt” which unveils her thoughts on discrimination and what she believes white Americans owe, the debt they owe, to a dark past that essentially provided what is out there today. Ta-Nehisi Coates published “Between the World and Me,” offering his perspective about “the Dream” that Americans want, the fear that he faced being black growing up and that black bodies are what
The Reconstruction failed to bring justice, social and economic equality to freed African-American in many ways. For example, “ Education- Separated...”
Coates’ article “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” opens with the story of a man named Daniel Moynihan. Moynihan, born to a broken family in the great depression era, entered politics and developed to become an important political figure in the labor department during the 1960’s. The principal belief of Moynihan was that unemployment was destructive to the potential social mobility of the poor, a lynchpin of the American dream. Once the civil rights movement gained momentum, Moynihan gained interest on how his theory affects black families specifically and began to research this topic. The results of his research showed just how devastating the effects of three hundred of years of slavery and institutionalized racism were on black families and how much worse off they were than white families in general.