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.” ........
Oops.
This malicious lie is destroying the country.