the internet is cool #3: amplifying Black voices
on reparations, name origins, and more recommended reads
Hey everyone. The week has felt long and short all at once. History is happening right now and to be explicitly clear: Black lives matter.
I’m sending along some of the pieces I’ve been reading, watching, and (metaphorically) digesting this week. All but one are by Black authors or creators.
Have a read and if you do, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
The Case for Reparations
Ta-Nehisi Coates for The Atlantic
Have you ever heard someone talk about the American government, specifically Democratic policies, as “breaking up the black family structure,” creating “welfare queens” in the process? I have. I’d like to use Coates’ incisive analysis from this 2014 piece to challenge that:
The early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about “black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children.
An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer.
As Coates writes, reparations to former slaves were both considered and paid out. The Quakers in some Northeastern states “went so far as to make ‘membership contingent upon compensating one’s former slaves.’”
Unfortunately, the stance posited above was not widely held. See below for the rationalization of how assimilating freed slaves to white culture was “enough” to settle the score:
“They have been taught to labor,” the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1891. “They have been taught Christian civilization, and to speak the noble English language instead of some African gibberish. The account is square with the ex‑slaves.”
Coates warns against cherry-picking the history we hold dear:
To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte. If Thomas Jefferson’s genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally Hemings’s body. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.
The way our laws are written, when someone steals something from you, you can argue for the value of that item back and for damages which are “presumed to be a result of the other party's actions, but are subjective both in nature and determination of value of damages.”
These include pain and suffering, future problems and crippling effect of an injury, loss of ability to perform various acts, shortening of life span, mental anguish, loss of companionship, loss of reputation (in a libel suit, for example), humiliation from scars, loss of anticipated business and other harm.
There’s a precedent for damages in this country. Why is it enough that we simply freed the people we enslaved? Why is it such a radical idea to pay their ancestors damages for the free labor we took from them?
Is it because our country was built on not valuing a black person’s body or mind as a free person — only valuing that person insofar as she can labor for us?
What Reparations for Slavery Might Look Like in 2019
Patricia Cohen for The New York Times
To expound on the previous piece, I found a just slightly more recent article with actionable strategies for paying out reparations:
William A. Darity Jr., an economist at Duke University and a leading scholar on reparations, suggests two qualifying conditions: having at least one ancestor who was enslaved in the United States, and having identified oneself as African-American on a legal document for at least a decade before the approval of any reparations. The 10-year rule, he said, would help screen out anyone trying to cash in on a windfall.
How much would it cost?
Taking account of compounding interest and inflation, Mr. Darity has put the present value at $2.6 trillion. Assuming roughly 30 million descendants of ex-slaves, he concluded it worked out to about $80,000 a person.
To get a sense of the scale, consider that the United States budget this year is $4.7 trillion.
Paying out reparations would cost more than half our country’s annual budget (from 2019).
But how much would slave labor have cost us?
For further reading:
Last year I read The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers by Bridgett M. Davis.
Davis’ mother worked in the numbers, an illegal version of the lottery. The risky job propped her family into some version of middle-class comfort. Except for the fact that she didn’t technically own her home.
Just like the subject of Coates’ article linked above, Fannie Davis bought her house on contract, meaning she paid a down payment to the seller and made payments against the balance to him, instead of a bank.
She did not build equity as she paid. If she missed one payment, the house would be taken back as Davis had no true claim to the land or the home on it.
I’m currently reading Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.
After redlining was abolished, the federal government “guaranteed urban mortgages in an attempt to overcome resistance to lending to Black buyers - as if unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing segregation.”
But if the intent of this policy was to gloss over racism as if it didn’t exist, it created a practice deemed predatory inclusion: “Bankers, investors, and real estate agents took advantage of the perverse incentives, targeting the Black women most likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure, multiplying their profits.”
What’s the origin of many black names? Why are “Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal”? (Well, racism, but I digress.) Evelyn and Azie from Say it Loud dig into the names of it all for us.
Have you found something new about American history you found thought-provoking or humbling? I’d love to hear about it.