I have bad news for Coates. I just checked by white-guilt bank account. It is empty. Zero balance. Sorry.
Reparations would amount to nothing less than economic slavery. Do two wrongs make a right? Or is it only wrong for someone of one skin color to do, but not another?
You want reparations? It comes with repatriation!
Culture change and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘The Case For Reparations’ "In “The Case for Reparations,” the long-brewing cover story of the June issue of the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates makes a painstaking argument that the gap in wealth, achievement, and a wide range of health and wellbeing outcomes between black and white Americans is the result of deliberate policy decisions. Those decisions, he says, lead to an inevitable conclusion: “An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future,” Coates writes. “More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.”........
....But reading “The Case for Reparations,” I found myself thinking about another question that haunts Coates’s history. How might culture have to change in order to make the sort of reckoning he calls for possible? And what sorts of cultural forces might it take to make these enormous shifts?
“The Case for Reparations” is deeply focused on economic injuries and recompenses. But in imagining solutions, the piece repeatedly returns to the importance of images and cultural narratives. “A nation outlives its generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delaware, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s rendering has meaning to us,” Coates writes. He imagines changes to traditions both wide-spread and particular: “Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling ‘patriotism’ while waving a Confederate flag.” ........
Hand Coates the bill for the treasury cost of the Civil War, including Reformation, adjusted for inflation, while asking how much additional value is to be put on each life lost, on both sides, to erradicate slavery from one of the few places on earth it actually remains eradicated. Debt paid in full.
"What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt."
Really, Mr. Coates. If you feel so strongly about the matter, I will personally pay for you and your family to be re-settled in the African nation of your choice. I will do this not to banish any sense of "white guilt", but simply to rid the nation of a bad apple.
My Polish grandparents came to America after WWI.
How much do I owe?
In fact, Republicans should also get reparations from Democrats for the losses they suffered fighting them to free the slaves.
One more thought - We, as a nation have already paid the price of slavery in the form of a war that killed more Americans than any other conflict in which we have been involved. In the case of my family, one branch lost a father in the Battle of the Wilderness. And another branch, which favored the Union but lived in Missouri, had to abandon the family farm and move to another part of the state to avoid continuous raids by Southern sympathizers.
Before that point, and afterwards, we have bodily defended this nation. I seriously doubt that the essayist can say the same. All he has done successfully is beg on the corner for another handout.
I wonder if the essay addressed the Muslim slave traders who are still operating today? They are the ones who kidnapped and sold people into slavery for immense profits.
I wonder if the essay takes into account the current economic conditions in slave countries of origin compared to the economic conditions in our country today of descendants of former slaves? Many, if not all, slave countries of origin have people living in abject poverty.
If the educational levels and economic conditions today show significant improvement, should the offspring of former slaves themselves pay reparations to our government and the descendants of the civil war soldiers who freed them?
(I took my American flag down on 1/20/09 and will not fly Old Glory again until The Present Occupant leaves office.)
Other than the self-proclaimed freed slave CongressWO-MAN!! Sheila Jackson Lee, find me a live slave from The Civil War era, and, of course, they would get the money.
Any other discourse will entail any kind of generational entitlement, which is illegal.
Do these folks hold the rest of the world to the same standard to which they hold America? or is America, to them, exceptional in its badness?
What, is it a grade school book report or something? How many pages is it single spaced? Does he get a gold star, a pat on the back and an "E" for effort? The word counting is juvenile, not impressive.
Liberia - that is the answer as far as I am concerned. The deal: give up US citizenship, one way free ticket to Liberia, one year of welfare benefits in cash up front. Be gone and don’t come back.
The day when Americans who never committed any crimes have to pay restitution to people who were never victims is the day logic has completely left America.