In sections 4, 5, and 6, Coates gives the readers a history lesson on the struggles and tough times faced by the African American community. He uses an informative style of writing to educate and trigger the reader’s emotions at the same time. In his writing, there is no bias or agenda involved, just facts, which in turn enables him to retain any reader’s attention. He defends every claim he makes with various forms of historical evidence, also helping him get his points across. The evidence he uses varies from testimonials, visuals, statistics, and recorded dialogue. For example, the testimonial from Henry Brown and visuals such as the lynching and the journal, were some forms of evidence which Coates used to trigger the emotions of the reader. By striking the reader’s emotions with his evidence, Coates was able to retain our attention, thus enabling him to continue informing us on his “case”.
Month: November 2020
History Repeats Itself
This just as the article where it compares the incarceration system to the Jim Crow laws relays the message of how these power structures have never disappeared but renamed themselves. Coate makes this case through giving different but interrelated perspectives giving insights from slaves who had to undergo slavery. Through this, we are able to see the pain and anxiety slave families felt of fear of being separated from their family. Coates then leads us to see the rate whites were exploiting blacks, slaves being responsible for millions of the United State’s revenue. Slave trading actually being an industry within itself. Then, Coates brings us to showing us modern day redlining within Chicago while explicitly having the same laws, but the same implications. I thought that redlining has now evolved in Chicago, the strategy of these white home owners aiming to be insufferable to live with. It is surprising that these blatant acts of discrimination are unnoticed and unpunished hence, history repeating itself.
“The Case for Reparations”
Coates makes his case of African Americans always being mistreated unfairly either through law or society by showcasing a timeline of events that especially hindered African American growth and integration into society.
Coates goes as far back to slavery to showcase the unfair start that African Americans had in American society. Coates summed up their situation the best when he said, “Whereas indentured servants were still legal subjects of the English crown and thus entitled to certain protections, African slaves entered the colonies as aliens. Exempted from the protections of the crown, they became early America’s indispensable working class—fit for maximum exploitation, capable of only minimal resistance”. African Americans were thus not given any rights, discriminated against within laws, and were stripped away from basic human necessities/fundamentals, one important one being family ties. African Americans were often separated from their wives and children, thus “the parting of black families was a kind of murder”, due to the lack of telecommunications at the time, especially for African Americans back then.
Coates then takes us to a time when slavery was abolished, but discrimination towards African Americans persisted. This came in the form of African Americans being denied the right to secure any loans from banks and denied the right to own a house. Certain deals and organizations such as “The New Deal” and “The G.I. Bill”, were shaped in a way that prevented African Americans getting the same benefits as white Americans. These dealings were influenced by earlier American sentiment and public guidelines/treatment that painted African Americans as not worthy of being treated the same as White Americans. An example of this being, “The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values””.
The long, lasting effects of these acts can be seen through certain neighborhoods such as when, “By the 1940s, Chicago led the nation in the use of these restrictive covenants, and about half of all residential neighborhoods in the city were effectively off-limits to blacks”. Chicago was able to build “second ghettos” in black neighborhoods and thus enforced even more segregation within the city due to the lack of appeal and quality in them.
Coates thus shows that African Americans were denied equal treatment all throughout American history, thus connotes to the fact that African Americans should be reparated for the wrong doings that have been done to them over the course of American history.
“The Case for Reparation”
Throughout these few parts, Coates discussed the hardships of African Americans in terms of fitting in with the white population in the United States . Coates goes into extraordinary detail about how whites were being hypocritical and colonizing African Americans, when not too long ago, they themselves were being colonized by the British. One quote that I was very saddened to read was one by John Wilkes Booth right before he killed Abe Lincoln. “This country was formed for the white, not for the black man”. This quote doesn’t need any explanation and this is the problem that has continued up until this day. Coates also stresses the fact that an entire war fought just because whites didn’t want to treat African Americans the right way. Another point that is stressed in the article is that the system was meant to put whites to an advantage. This is very wrong and sadly is the case in the world today, which needs to change.
The Multidimensional Nature of Racism: A Crux in Arguing for Reparations.
Coates makes his case regarding a need for reparations towards African American’s on an account of the dehumanizing acts of economic agency, institutionalized racism, and overt mistreatment towards African Americans stemming from a superiority/inferiority complex. However, while Coates uses this space to convey abbreviated narratives that touch on all 3-criterion mentioned above, each component seamlessly bridges together to speak an ominous truth. Racism isn’t simply a “one or another” but rather a multidimensional, and highly layered experience within the United States. While writers such as Michelle Alexander, author of the New Jim Crow, looks to implications of a rebranded, institutionalized racism, Coates speaks to the old, the new, and everything that’s between.
Going into further detail, let’s discuss the implications of economic agency and how it couples with the other monstrosities of racism. Looking objectively at Coate’s argument, economic agency is alone a detriment to African Americans, but it takes more than just the understanding of a race as an economic asset to unearth the full picture of racism. For example, we have many “economic assets” that we treat well in everyday life. We clean our commercial spaces, routinely update the software on our electronic devices, take our vehicles for inspection once every few months, and tend to the soil that grows our crops. In this sense, economic agency does not explain racism alone. However, unlike the inanimate objects or crops that we tend to in order to keep our personal operations afloat, as a society we did not exhibit the same care towards the human beings that served as a greater asset than all of our economic production during the Civil-War era.
Of course, it may seem trivial to compare a car to a human being, but when we understand that as a society, we treated organic assets worse than inorganic assets, red flags should immediately be thrown. Using the example of the Church stealing black assets, John C. Calhoun’s proclamation of Black inferiority, and the origins of rights for white colonists (but not their equally oppressed black counterparts), we can begin to see racism as a process of stacking harmful doctrines upon one another.
The peak of racism’s mountain is the institutionalized racism that ever presently exists in modern society (though geometrically speaking one might state that institutional racism serves as the base). Real estate practices that permanently segregate communities on an account of race, coupled with voter suppression, a high degree of disproportional criminalization, and even the “discolored” language that implies without saying, are the new chains and shackles employed by the white ruling class.
Thinking back to the prompt of this blog post, all criterion for racism in the U.S can in fact serve as grounds for reparations. However, its Coate’s argument, the argument that bridges the criterion together and highlights the multidimensional nature of racism, that hits all the marks, thus facilitating one of the most substantial claims for reparations. By illuminating the multiplicity of mistreatment, one can begin to understand that for every opportunity that a black or BIPOC individual misses out on, there’s a member of the white ruling class pulling the lever to make it so. For every black individual who’s labeled as a Communist, there’s a white mortgage lender that prevented that individuals’ dream of homeownership, which dually seeks to prevent the patriotism that comes with homeownership, excluding African American’s from national sentiments. It’s through understanding this negative and consistent relationship, that we unearth the greatest argument for reparations.
“The Case for Reparations”
Through sections 4-6, Coates makes his claim about how impossible it was for African Americans to assimilate into American culture by presenting a chronological timeline. He begins with writing about the beginnings of America and how the whites, who were once colonized, began to colonize Africans. Coates brought up more historical evidence by referencing specific laws that that dehumanized black people to “untouchables”. For example, “In 1705, the Virginia assembly passed a law allowing for the dismemberment of unruly slaves—but forbidding masters from whipping “a Christian white servant naked, without an order from a justice of the peace.” Slaves were not considered living individuals but were merely treated as property needed for economic gains. He later writes about the countless injustices faced by African Americans, even after slavery was abolished. Using more historical evidence: “Eric Foner recounts incidents of black people being attacked for not removing their hats; for refusing to hand over a whiskey flask; for disobeying church procedures; for “using insolent language”; for disputing labor contracts; for refusing to be “tied like a slave.” and “Black schools and churches were burned to the ground. Black voters and the political candidates who attempted to rally them were intimidated, and some were murdered.” The system was built to favor the white man over the black man: there was no room possible for blacks to grow. That can be seen through all of the evidence presented by Coates, and it is even present in today’s society. Black people were consistently denied privileges, even the most simple ones such as home ownership.