The Case for Reparations: Part Two

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Over the years, I have viewed the debate about monetary reparations for the African American descendants of slaves with a great deal of skepticism.  After all, according to my math, with the year 2015, slavery ostensibly ended 150 years ago.  So it seemed to me that there must be a statute of limitations that applies.  

However, over the weekend, I did read The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates and at the conclusion of the article, I was persuaded that a case had been made for a certain kind of reparations. This is no small triumph.  But what I really became persuaded about is that The Case for Reparations is the best articulation of the post-slavery actions which warrant redress that I have ever read.    Indeed, after having read it, I would recommend that every high school and college student be required to read and discuss this article.  

Of course, that is not likely to happen anytime soon.  So allow me to discuss it now.

Peace.

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"When Clyde Ross was still a child, Mississippi authorities claimed his father owed $3,000 in back taxes.  The elder Ross could not read.  He did not have a lawyer.  He did not know anyone at the local courthouse.  He could not expect the police to be impartial.  Effectively, the Ross family had no way to contest the claim and no protection under the law.  The authorities seized the land.  They seized the buggy.  They took the cows, hogs, and mules.  And so for the upkeep of separate but equal, the entire Ross family was reduced to sharecropping.

"This was hardly unusual.  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."  (pg. 4 of 47)

***

"From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home - mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal.  Chicago whites employed every measure, from "restrictive covenants" to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated."

***

"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 red.  Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered.  Black people were viewed as a contagion.  Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage."