Why We as Americans are Responsible for Our Past

I think that perhaps the most powerful point that Ta’Nehisi Coates makes in  “The Case for Reparations” is that reparations have been successfully made in the past. His example came from German reparations being paid to Israel as a way of making amends after the Second World War. Not only does the case show that reparations can be used efficiently to make lasting economic change for a people group, but it shows something else that is important as well: the reason that reparations are so important. The German government chose to pay reparations because they massacred a people with explicit intent to target their ethnic group. Reparations were not just an apology, but a way of trying to keep the past in the past. They recognized that for the past to truly remain there; for there to be any way to truly “move on” from the wrongs, there had to be some sort of repayment, because just saying sorry wasn’t enough. Now, the parallels between this instance and the case being made for reparations in the United States have an important distinction: the German reparations were paid 7 years after World War 2, meaning most of the people who directly experienced the war and the Holocaust would still be alive to accept the reparations; however, in the United States, there is a very common argument against reparations, saying that those affected by it died over a hundred years ago, and thus need not be paid back. While I could go off explaining the inherent falseness of this statement, I will take a different route. Rather than explaining how it is not in the past, I will explore why we are still responsible for wrongs made in the past that we did not commit. When I say we, like Ta’Nehisi Coates, I mean the American people. The American people must pay back the black community, not because the problems caused by racism and slavery still exist today (though they do), but because there is something important to be taken from the lesson from the German reparations. Reparations are an official way of making amends. They are a way of truly saying that “we are equal”. They are a way of putting things right. The American people must make amends, because whether they want to admit it or not, the racial tension in our country is not going anywhere, but the only possible way for it to do that is something that says, “we are equal”. Just saying sorry doesn’t cut it. We, the American people, must recognize that the problems of the past are our problems, because they have left deep rooted scars with a very slim option of cures.