The Case For Reparations By Ta-Nehisi Coates

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In his article, The Case for Reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates insists that “until Americans reckon with their compounding moral debts, America will never be whole”. He writes that after four hundred thirty-five years of racial injustice towards the African American community, the American government owes them. The slavery and slave-like conditions people were put in is something The United States should and will be ashamed of until the end of time. The horrific experiences and tragedies people endured are something that will hopefully never happen again. To think of the innocent who were lynched, raped, assaulted, and found guilty of crimes that they did not commit could make anyone’s stomach turn. Segregation, Jim Crow laws, and the Ku Klux Klan are things Americans can never erase. We can’t pretend that they did not happen. We will never be able to make up for the mistakes of past generations. There is no repayment for the lost lives or the broken lives of people who were discriminated against and lost their dignity and their family. “Sorry” does not cover it. There is no way to take it back! Although what African American people went through was demeaning and cruel, I don’t believe we should pay reparations. If we were to be paying reparations, they would go to the modern generations of the ancestors enslaved, stolen from, and discriminated against. That doesn’t make up in any way what white Americans did to their ancestors. I believe, it would have been the right thing to do to pay the people who were there hundreds of years ago when slavery was at its worst, but those people are not here to receive the money. They are not here to be repaid for what was stolen from them. Reparations to distant descendents of slaves would not serve as any meaningful correction to the social or economic injustices of slavery. In the article by Coates, an article by the Associated Press in 2001 is mentioned. The quote from the Associated Press article details what some of the land stolen from African Americans has become. He writes, “This was hardly unusual. In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. “Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia,” the AP reported, as well as “oil fields in Mississippi” and “a baseball spring training facility in Florida”” (Coates). Country clubs and baseball spring training facilities may be what the land is used for now but it is not as if the people who own the land now are the same ones who stole it. The men or women who own the land now have bought it from others. The people who stole the land from African Americans have since sold the land. New owners or generations should not be penalized when they have followed the law. They paid for …show more content…
Health care, subsidized housing, and welfare are just a few of the many programs available to people with low or no income. The disadvantages to African Americans that slavery left behind are a problem of the past. Many African Americans are well off. The problems they face today are brought about by high crime rates, family lifestyles, and dependence on welfare. In The Case for Reparations, Coates mentions Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson’s findings of incarceration rates between two neighborhoods. He …show more content…
He makes it seem as if if you do not think reparations should be paid then you must be a racist, white supremacist. That just isn’t the case. Terrible, horrific things happened to slaves, but when the United States government is already trillions of dollars in debt we shouldn’t go giving money out to people that feel almost no repercussions from the slavery that existed here hundreds of years ago. This is money that would coming from tax payers. It wouldn’t be going to former slaves and it wouldn’t make the situation better. Reparations would not fix the damage done in the

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