Photo courtesy of good ole Salon.com.
Journalist and educator Ta-Nehisi Coates visited Cornell last week and delivered a highly anticipated lecture entitled “The Case for Reparations.”
Coates, whose article of the same name published in May’s issue of The Atlantic garnered him critical acclaim, spoke to an overflowing Lewis Auditorium Thursday evening. An auditorium with approximately 160 seats had roughly 300 people crammed into it, with many standing in the back, in the doorway to the hallway, sitting in the aisles, and even some sitting outside a window (the auditorium is half-underground, so windows near the ceiling are at ground level). Coates delivered the American Studies Program’s Daniel W. Kops Freedom of the Press Lecture.
Coates’ speech was basically a summarized version of his Atlantic article, whose main argument is that black Americans deserve monetary reparations from the U.S. government because they have been “systematically plundered” from ever since being brought over from Africa in the early 17th century. One must admit, Coates is well-versed in his history, referencing at east copious statistics and historical anecdotes that prove beyond doubt the daunting and sometimes purposely designed economic hardships black Americans have faced since emancipation.
His strongest point was his rejection of the oft-heard claim “I wasn’t alive then so it isn’t my responsibility today.” Coates remarked “[If this is how you think], then don’t celebrate the Fourth of July. You weren’t there when that happened either.” One cannot, as Coates suggests, selectively filter out only the positive from the past and attach onself to those actions and ideas, while ignoring the blemishes and atrocities.
While it is certainly true not every white person in the history and current day of the U.S. has actively tried to “plunder” from black people, Coates’ rhetoric certainly insinuates this underlying assumption. Like his Howard University classmate and Cornell history professor Rick Rickford (whom some readers might remember from the “Stop Police Brutality” protest), Coates was all too eager to call the U.S. of today a “racist” and “white supremacist” state because of its past mistakes.
Coates also remarked during the Q&A session that his case is morally unobjectionable and that he could not think of a single viable retort to his claims.
While Coates’ speech was about the “case” for reparations, and not the nature of them, it was rather odd when he glossed at high-speed over the logistics of making this desire of his become reality. When a student asked a question about what the reparations would consist of and how much they would be Coates gave no specifics other than saying that they could come in the form of direct checks or tax breaks. Of course, Coates is not a economist, and even economists would be hard-pressed to even begin to arrive at some sort of number or formula to determine how much the reparations should be. Yet his apparent disinterest in this highly important aspect of his platform is bewildering, and revealing of his desire to only identify problems, not answer them.
If every black American were to receive a check for, say, $100,000, what would the result be, other than the obvious individual increases in wealth? It would certainly help alleviate the poverty of many black Americans, but, as with the $20,000 reparations to interned Japanese Americans, it doesn’t change history. Most importantly, it doesn’t solve the systemic problems and institutions oppressing black Americans that Coates, Rickford, and the like claim in earnest still exist today.
As per usual, identifying and exhaustively sourcing problems are the social visionary’s skills, but nary a practical or meaningful solution is within sight.
