The Case For Reparation Analysis

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 the very beginning of time African Americans have been a culture of resistance. That is resistance from slavery, resistance from torture, and resistance from wrongdoing. Families were torn apart, women were raped, and children were tortured. In an article by Atlanta Blackst they list some of the ways African American slaves were tortures, and it’s horrifying. Some slaves were burned alive, lynched by meat hooks, castrated, and even Mutated. This is the easy part, as after being tortured they had many years of psychological suffering. They didn’t have family to turn to because they were most dead or sold to another slave

In an article by ABC news it was written that “there’s no disputing that African American suffered centuries of enslavement. What’s far less certain, however is what kind of debt is owed to the descendants of those slaves.” They also said “many group of influential lawyers and scholars have profited from slavery.” This goes to show that the people responsible for the enslavement of hundreds of people are profiting from slavery, and that if they did want to pay reparations, they’re unsure how to give it. The article then goes to mention other cases of reparation that have been paid like Germany paying $60 billion to holocaust survivors, and the united states paying $20,000 to over 100,000 Japanese Americans sent to internment camp during world war