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.