The Case for American History A reply to National Review's Kevin D. Williamson
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Jun 2 2014, 12:58 PM ET 2
A 1939 Home Owners’ Loan Corporation “Residential Security Map” of Chicago shows discrimination against low-income and minority neighborhoods. The residents of the areas marked in red (representing “hazardous” real-estate markets) were denied FH (Frankie Dintino)
I wanted to take moment to reply to Kevin Williamson's Case Against Reparations. I wanted to do that, primarily, because his piece covers many of the most common objections to my piece, but also because I've always been an admirer of Williamson's writing, if not his ideas. Among those ideas is a kind of historical creationism which holds that "race" is a fixed thing. The problems with this approach are many, and duly apparent from the outset.
Williamson says he is opposed to "converting the liberal Anglo-American tradition of justice into a system of racial apportionment." He then observes that, in fact, that tradition, itself, has always been deeply concerned with "racial apportionment." Thus within the second paragraph, Williamson is undermining his own thesis—if the Anglo-American tradition is what he concedes it to be, no "converting" is required. We reverse polarity for a time, and then we all live happily ever after.
Or probably not. That is because Williamson's entire framing is wrong. Reparations are not due because black people are black, but because black people have been injured. And the Anglo-American tradition has never been a system of "racial apportionment," but of racist apportionment. Like most writers and public intellectuals (liberal and conservative) Williamson's reply is rooted in the idea of "race" as constant—i.e. there is a "black race" that can be traced back to Africa, and a "white race" that can be traced back to Europe. There certainly is such a thing as African and European ancestry, and that ancestry is not entirely irrelevant to our world. But ancestry is tangential, and sometimes wholly unrelated, to racism, injury, and reparations.
We know this because there is no constant idea of "black" or "white" across time or space. We know this because Charlie Patton fathered the blues, and Alessandro de Medici ruled in Venice. Black in America is not black in Brazil, and black in modern America is not even black in 18th-century Louisiana. Nor are people we consider "white" today any sort of constant. Throughout American history it has been common to speak of an "Italian race," an "Irish race," a "Frankish race," a "Jewish race" even a "Southern race." One might take a hard look at Williamson's agreeable portrait, for instance, and note the problem of assigning anyone to a race. "Race," writes the imminent historian Nell Irvin Painter, "is an idea, not a fact."
In this country, at this moment, "African-Americans" are an ethnic group comprised of individuals of varying degrees of direct African ancestry. Nothing about this fact necessitated plunder or injury, and it is the injury—through red-lining, black codes, slaves codes, lynching, ghettoization, fraud, rape, and murder—with which reparations concerns itself. The point is not "racial apportionment," which is to say giving people things because they are black. It is injury apportionment, which is to say restoring things to people who have been plundered.
Racism, and its progeny white supremacy, is concerned with dividing human beings, on the basis of ancestry (which is very real) and slotting them into a hierarchy (which is an invention). "Race" is that hierarchy—and any study of the word across history bears out its relationship to assigning value and scale across humanity. In polite society we've moved past overtly hierarchal ideas about "race," but the problem of imprecise naming remains with us. Let us bypass that imprecision—the Anglo-American tradition which Williamson extolls has, as he concedes, sought to erect and uphold a racist hierarchy. Reparations seeks its total and complete destruction. Williamson believes that reparations must either boil down to a "symbolic political process" or a series of polices that helps America's poor and disproportionately aids African-Americans. How, Williamson asks, can one make a claim on behalf of Sasha and Malia Obama, in a world of poor whites? In much the same way that a factory which pumps toxins into a poor neighborhood is not indemnified because a plaintiff rises to become a millionaire. Taking Williamson's argument to its logical conclusion, a businessman brutalized by the police should never sue the city because, well, homelessness.
People who are injured sometimes achieve great things—this does not obviate the fact of their injury, nor their claim to recompense. Warren Moon achieved more than the vast majority of white quarterbacks. Had racism not forced him into the CFL for the first five crucial years of his career, he might have had more success than any quarterback to ever play the game. Satchel Paige enjoys an honor which the vast majority of white baseball players shall never glimpse—induction in the Hall of Fame. What might Paige achieved had he not been injured by white supremacy for the vast majority of his career? Mr. Clyde Ross is a homeowner, and considerably better off than many of his North Lawndale neighbors. To achieve this he worked three jobs and lost time that he should have been able to invest in his children. What might Mr. Ross have been had he not endured racist plunder from Clarksdale to Chicago?
The problem of racism is not synonymous with the problem of the poverty line. Indeed, it is often in the fate of the most conventionally successful African-Americans that we see the full horror of a corrupt social contract. The injury of racism means many things, virtually all of them bad. It means making $100,000 a year but living in neighborhoods equivalent to white people who make $30,000 a year. It means belonging to a class whose men comprise some eight percent of the world's entire prison population. It means, if you do go to college, still enjoying lesser employment prospects than white college graduates. It means living in a family with roughly a 20th of the wealth of those who do not suffer your particular ailment. In short, it means quite a bit—and these effects do not merely haunt the poor. My heart bleeds for the white child injured by the departure of parents. But God forbid the injury of racism be added to the burden.
The pervasive effects of the injury should not surprise—the injuring and exploitation of black people regardless of economic class has been one of the dominant themes of American history. It is only the obviation, or ignorance, of history that allows us to escape this. The result must be an especially tortured specimen of reasoning:
Some blacks are born into college-educated, well-off households, and some whites are born to heroin-addicted single mothers, and even the totality of racial crimes throughout American history does not mean that one of these things matters and one does not. Once that fact is acknowledged, then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism.
Williamson's "fact" can not be acknowledged because, even by Williamson's crude measures, it is artifice. There are—at most—1.5 million people who use heroin in this country. The ranks of the African-American poor are roughly eight times that. More importantly, the claim of reparations does not hinge on every individual white person everywhere being wealthy. That is because reparations is not a claim against white Americans, anymore than reparations paid to interned Japanese-Americans was a claim against non-Japanese-Americans. The claim was brought before the multi-ethnic United States of America.
There seems to be great confusion on this point. 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. Everyone claims to love their country, but considerably fewer know their country. This is true even among those charged with analyzing it:
Even assuming that invidious racism were an entirely negligible factor, it is likely that economic development will tend to proceed along broad racial channels if, for example, people of various ethnicities tend to largely marry within their ethnic group, live in neighborhoods largely populated by co-ethnics, and engage in other social-sorting behavior that is racial at its root but not really what we mean by the word “racism.” If that is the case — and it seems that it is — then initial conditions will be very important for a very long period of time.
This works if you believe in history as creationism. It does not work if you value research and evidence. Even at a time when people believed in separate European races, intermarriage rates among European ethnic groups were quite high. It's tough to assess intermarriage rates among blacks and whites in early America, partially because the very racial terms Williamson embrace did not have the same connotation. Nevertheless, the historian Ira Berlin notes that:
On the Eastern shore of Virginia, at least one man from every leading black family—the Johnsons, Paynes, and Drigguses—married a white woman. There seems to have been little stigma attached to such unions: after Francis Payne's death, his white widow remarried, this time to a white man. In like fashion, free black women joined together with white men. William Greensted, a white attorney who represented Elizabeth Key, a woman of color, in her successful suit for freedom, later married her. In 1691 when the Virginia General Assembly ruled against such relationships, some propertied white Virginians found the legislation novel and obnoxious enough to muster a protest have researched the history of American ethnicity.
What we term as "interracial" marriage did not just exist among the "propertied" but among the workers. In her book Sex Among The Rabble, the historian Clare Lyons quotes a Philadelphia minister denouncing "these frequent mixtures." The minister feared that "a particoloured race will soon make a great portion of the population of Philadelphia." The "particoloured race" did indeed come to be. It is us—black people. That unions between blacks and whites in America have historically been driven into the shadows is not a matter of "social sorting that is racial," "primitivism," nor "tribalism." It is a matter of Thomas Jefferson, in 1769, seeking to pass a law banishing any white woman from Virginia who had a child by black man. In short, it is a matter of racist policy pushed by intelligent, and otherwise, sage men.
And racist policy is at the heart of our beloved country. Ignoring this leaves us intellectually poor, and finds us devolving into bizarre thought experiments:
Imagine, for example, that rather than having been brought to the colonies as slaves, the first Africans to arrive in the New World had come as penniless immigrants in 1900.
Williamson then posits that black people would still be poor because they'd be far behind the native white population. Williamson never considers that the two groups might intermarry—because he believes in "race," which is to say creationism. For that same reason he ignores the fact there was no "New World" with "native whites" to come to without the labor of African-Americans. Europeans did not purchase enslaved Africans because they disliked the cut of their jib. They did it because they had taken a great deal of land and needed bonded labor to extract resources from it. Africans—aliens to society, existing beyond the protections of the crown—fit the bill.
"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.
posted
This paper is an important discussion of the fact that much of the lack of opportunity afforded Blacks is the result of "racist policies". It is these racist policies which have made it almost impossible for the Black masses to become highly successful.
As a result, even when segregation is not apparent, the "racist policies" are being used to keep Black people down.
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-------------------- C. A. Winters Posts: 13012 | From: Chicago | Registered: Jan 2006
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posted
The case for reparations seems all wrong to me on many levels. First it is a complete impossibility, a pipe dream not based in what is actually possible. That so many people talk about this fantasy, as if it could be a reality is troubling. To be clear, such a thing is not logistically or politically possible.
Secondly it violates the rules of power and acquisition, not to mention the rule of ascension of the fittest.
Blacks in Europe, having already been weakened and "Diluted" by Albino invaders a thousand years earlier. And now having become decadent and stupid: fell prey to their Albino underlings. They finally succumbed after hundreds of wars against new encroaching Albinos from Central Asia. They were defeated, killed, and the survivors and prisoners sent to the Caribbean and then to mainland America.
With Blacks out of the way, freedom, and Black infrastructure and Black technology to work with: the Albino people went on to attain heights of achievement that they hand never even imagined before.
(The Steam Engine provided the power for Europe's factories and Transportation).
In about 60 A.D. the Egyptian "Heron of Alexandria" invented the first "Steam Engine" his steam-powered device was called the “Aeolipile”. He also invented the Windwheel or Windmill, which was also very important to Europe's economy.
The Windmill:
Windmill machinery was adapted to supply power for many industrial and agricultural needs other than milling grain. The majority of modern windmills take the form of wind turbines used to generate electricity, or windpumps used to pump water, either for land drainage or to extract groundwater.
The Gun:
(The Gun gave Europe's Albinos a weapons advantage that could not be overcome except with large losses).
The first "Gun" was invented by an Egyptian, and used by their Turkic occupiers, the Mamluks, against the Moguls in the 1260 battle of Ain Jalute. These cannon were later described in Arabic chemical and military manuals in the early 1300s.
Gunpowder:
Both China and India had gunpowder by the 9th. century. No one knows which actually invented it.
With the money gained from the Slave trade trade and the Industrial Revolution (the period from about 1760 to 1840), the Albino Europeans were able to launch a "Weapons Race" which resulted in the development and manufacture of even more advanced weapons. With these new and better Weapons that they developed with the money from the Slave trade and the Industrial Revolution, Europe's Albinos were able to conquer most of the World, and then absorb and concentrate all of the worlds knowledge in their own hands.
Clearly if the Albinos had remained under Black hegemony, they would never attained their own self actualization. Thus natures rules work: the weak or decadent (having nothing to do with sexuality) are displaced by the fit and the strong.
The same holds true for those Black Americans from Africa. They were weak and unable to defend themselves in Africa, the laws of nature says that the strong will use and abuse them.
But the laws of nature also says that those who survive will be stronger, which also seems to be true. Are you sure you want to try and interfere with nature?
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posted
^Addendum - I suspect that the people pushing this reparations thing, do so to gain favor with those Blacks downtrodden and unable to compete. It seems a cruel thing to offer them pie-in-the-sky fantasy, rather than concrete steps to improve their condition.
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With the money gained from the Slave trade trade and the Industrial Revolution (the period from about 1760 to 1840), the Albino Europeans were able to launch a "Weapons Race" which resulted in the development and manufacture of even more advanced weapons. With these new and better Weapons that they developed with the money from the Slave trade and the Industrial Revolution, Europe's Albinos were able to conquer most of the World, and then absorb and concentrate all of the worlds knowledge in their own hands.
The gun has not been the reason why Europeans dominate the world today. The reason is tribalism. When the Europeans took America, they used Native American discord to side with one side and eliminate the other. This policy allowed them to slowly take over the U.S. You , have already discussed how the Spanish with the cooperation of other Mexican tribes conquered the Aztecs. Better weapons have never been the sole reason for the successful conquest of a people you need the man power to hold the new lands you take. This is why first the Romans, next the British in the 19th Century and the U.S. today have failed to conquer Afghanistan.
Europeans took over African countries in the 1890’s and by the 1960’s they were becoming independent. The only reason these countries continue to be weak is because the leaders are lazy and want the material goods the European can provide.
quote: Mike
Clearly if the Albinos had remained under Black hegemony, they would never attained their own self actualization. Thus natures rules work: the weak or decadent (having nothing to do with sexuality) are displaced by the fit and the strong.
You are right that Europeans would not have attained their own self-actualization under the hegemony of Blacks. Yet, Europeans love to have their Blacks held “captive” because they depend on us to provide them with the ideas, and creations to make them more wealthy. You see they need us to make the inventions that make them rich. Up until today Europeans could bet they would remain on top because of the knowledge they could control by having their Blacks. Britain began to decline after they lost India. America remained on top until they perpetuated this “Rap Culture” promoting idleness and bling. This had made many of the possible great minds among our youth lost in the persuit of wealth and gain. As a result, no new inventions are coming out of America.
It has not been human nature that made Europeans rule us. It was not their strength it was our genetic culture. Due to being a product of the Southern Cradle of Civilization we love mankind and feel that we should only punish those who have directly mistreated us. That’s why we had few slave rebellions and slaves poisoning their masters. You won’t believe this but Europeans need us. If all of us wanted to leave America today they wouldn’t let us.
-------------------- C. A. Winters Posts: 13012 | From: Chicago | Registered: Jan 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: This paper is an important discussion of the fact that much of the lack of opportunity afforded Blacks is the result of "racist policies". It is these racist policies which have made it almost impossible for the Black masses to become highly successful.
As a result, even when segregation is not apparent, the "racist policies" are being used to keep Black people down.
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Do the racist policies still exist? If so what are they?
Posts: 42935 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
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posted
Clyde, who the heck is stopping you from going back to Africa or some other country (Preferably not in Europe)??? If us Non-human, inferior Whites are soo bad & are such White devils, why don't you go as far away from us as you can get no one will stop you.
Posts: 3257 | From: Madisonville, KY USA | Registered: Nov 2011
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quote:Originally posted by DHDoxies: Clyde, who the heck is stopping you from going back to Africa or some other country (Preferably not in Europe)??? If us Non-human, inferior Whites are soo bad & are such White devils, why don't you go as far away from us as you can get no one will stop you.
Why should I go back to Africa. This is my country. I have a Choctaw and African heritage. My people were here before the Europeans came. And we will be here when North America returns to the way it was when Europeans arrived here from Europe: Black nations along the East Coast and much of the South and Midwest; and Mexicans in the Southwest and California. In the future white tribes may dominate New England.
quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: This paper is an important discussion of the fact that much of the lack of opportunity afforded Blacks is the result of "racist policies". It is these racist policies which have made it almost impossible for the Black masses to become highly successful.
As a result, even when segregation is not apparent, the "racist policies" are being used to keep Black people down.
.
.
Do the racist policies still exist? If so what are they?
LOL. If you were Black you wouldn't ask such a silly question.
quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: This paper is an important discussion of the fact that much of the lack of opportunity afforded Blacks is the result of "racist policies". It is these racist policies which have made it almost impossible for the Black masses to become highly successful.
As a result, even when segregation is not apparent, the "racist policies" are being used to keep Black people down.
.
.
Do the racist policies still exist? If so what are they?
LOL. If you were Black you wouldn't ask such a silly question.
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Cylde I'm not a mind reader. Either you thing we are living in the aftermath of a legacy of racist policies that are no longer in place on paper but the legacy nevertheless still influences society
or you think there are racist policies being legislated currently in a formal official
This is actually a deep question and if you believe the later you would need to give some examples
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posted
The Ta-Nehisi Coates piece is well written Also I would like to know in what form would reparations be best carried out?
Posts: 42935 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
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