America's Racial Problems
On Friday coming home from work I caught this interview on NPR:
(here)
Its an interview with the Atlantic Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates about his cover article "A Case for Reparations."
This question and Coates answer really stood out to me and point to the clearly larger and more complex issues that get lost in focusing on individual conscience issues:
Here are a few striking quotes (titles and italics are mine):
1947
The Great Migration, a mass exodus of 6 million African Americans that spanned most of the 20th century, was now in its second wave. The black pilgrims did not journey north simply seeking better wages and work, or bright lights and big adventures. They were fleeing the acquisitive warlords of the South. They were seeking the protection of the law.
That was then mentality
A nation outlives its generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delaware, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, but we are still paying out the pensions. 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.
1958
In 1958, the couple bought a home in North Lawndale on contract. They were not blind to the unfairness. But Lewis, born in the teeth of Jim Crow, considered American piracy—black people keep on making it, white people keep on taking it—a fact of nature. “All I wanted was a house. And that was the only way I could get it. They weren’t giving black people loans at that time,” she said. “We thought, ‘This is the way it is. We going to do it till we die, and they ain’t never going to accept us. That’s just the way it is.’
Selective Memory
To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America’s origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte.
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.
President Johnson
Chastening Memories
We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past—at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it.
Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. ... Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.
This Decade (recent financial crisis)
In 2010, Jacob S. Rugh, then a doctoral candidate at Princeton, and the sociologist Douglas S. Massey published a study of the recent foreclosure crisis. Among its drivers, they found an old foe: segregation. Black home buyers—even after controlling for factors like creditworthiness—were still more likely than white home buyers to be steered toward subprime loans.
In 2005, Wells Fargo promoted a series of Wealth Building Strategies seminars. Dubbing itself “the nation’s leading originator of home loans to ethnic minority customers,” the bank enrolled black public figures in an ostensible effort to educate blacks on building “generational wealth.” But the “wealth building” seminars were a front for wealth theft. In 2010, the Justice Department filed a discrimination suit against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank had shunted blacks into predatory loans regardless of their creditworthiness. This was not magic or coincidence or misfortune. It was racism reifying itself. According to TheNew York Times, affidavits found loan officers referring to their black customers as “mud people” and to their subprime products as “ghetto loans.”
For more on collective racism today see:
Recent Pro Publica article on Fair Housing Act - here
Recent This American Life on the same topic, it interviews actors who are employeed to try and rent apartments in Northern Cities exposing segregation continuing today - here
(here)
Its an interview with the Atlantic Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates about his cover article "A Case for Reparations."
This question and Coates answer really stood out to me and point to the clearly larger and more complex issues that get lost in focusing on individual conscience issues:
CORNISH: MTV had this survey on millennials and their attitude toward racial inequality and one of the things they found that millennials overwhelmingly see racism as a problem for older people, right? And then they aspire to colorblindness. Are you essentially trying to introduce this idea, which has like come and gone in many iterations over the decades to the Obama generation?And the last question and his answer also stood out to me:
COATES: Yeah, that makes me very, very sad. I think what happens is that those young people are the inheritance(ph) of an unfortunate idea, and that is that what really needs to happen to solve the - quote-unquote - "race problem" is to get black and white kids to sit at the same lunch table. And if we can do that, everything will be OK. In fact, we're dealing with something much more complicated and much more disturbing. The essential relationship across American history between black people and white people is one of exploitation and one of plunder. This is not, you know, necessarily about, you know, whether you're a good person or not or whether you see black people, you know, on the street and you're willing to shake their hands and be polite. This is about resources. And we haven't been very good at talking about that.
CORNISH: You've been writing about race for many years, and after all these years, are you disheartened that this is the conclusion you've come to?So I took two or three hours to read his article in the Atlantic (here). I say two to three hours to give you perspective on the length and level of thought Coates gave to his subject. It not only spends a lot of time on corporate racism post-civil war, but details some history of slavery. He says in the interview that there is a lot of talk about race, but not much of it an informed conversation. Coates informs.
COATES: No. I feel happy that I understand. You know, I'm a, you know, black man. I was born in West Baltimore, lived in a situation in which violence was everywhere. This was during the crack era. I constantly write about my safety walking to and from school, and then I would come home at night and I would cut on the TV and I would watch a show like "The Wonder Years" or I would watch, you know, some other show like "Family Ties." And it was clear that the America that I lived in was very different than the America that was being televised into me, and I always wanted to know why. That was the driving force behind my work. And, you know, if there's any sort of pride that I take from this piece is that I feel like I have satisfied the question for myself.
Here are a few striking quotes (titles and italics are mine):
1947
The Great Migration, a mass exodus of 6 million African Americans that spanned most of the 20th century, was now in its second wave. The black pilgrims did not journey north simply seeking better wages and work, or bright lights and big adventures. They were fleeing the acquisitive warlords of the South. They were seeking the protection of the law.
That was then mentality
A nation outlives its generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delaware, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, but we are still paying out the pensions. 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.
There has always been another way. “It is in vain to alledge, that our ancestors brought them hither, and not we,” Yale President Timothy Dwight said in 1810.
We inherit our ample patrimony with all its incumbrances; and are bound to pay the debts of our ancestors. This debt, particularly, we are bound to discharge: and, when the righteous Judge of the Universe comes to reckon with his servants, he will rigidly exact the payment at our hands. To give them liberty, and stop here, is to entail upon them a curse.
1958
In 1958, the couple bought a home in North Lawndale on contract. They were not blind to the unfairness. But Lewis, born in the teeth of Jim Crow, considered American piracy—black people keep on making it, white people keep on taking it—a fact of nature. “All I wanted was a house. And that was the only way I could get it. They weren’t giving black people loans at that time,” she said. “We thought, ‘This is the way it is. We going to do it till we die, and they ain’t never going to accept us. That’s just the way it is.’
Selective Memory
To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America’s origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte.
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.
President Johnson
“Negro poverty is not white poverty,” President Johnson said in his historic civil-rights speech.
Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.
Chastening Memories
We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past—at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it.
Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. ... Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.
This Decade (recent financial crisis)
In 2010, Jacob S. Rugh, then a doctoral candidate at Princeton, and the sociologist Douglas S. Massey published a study of the recent foreclosure crisis. Among its drivers, they found an old foe: segregation. Black home buyers—even after controlling for factors like creditworthiness—were still more likely than white home buyers to be steered toward subprime loans.
In 2005, Wells Fargo promoted a series of Wealth Building Strategies seminars. Dubbing itself “the nation’s leading originator of home loans to ethnic minority customers,” the bank enrolled black public figures in an ostensible effort to educate blacks on building “generational wealth.” But the “wealth building” seminars were a front for wealth theft. In 2010, the Justice Department filed a discrimination suit against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank had shunted blacks into predatory loans regardless of their creditworthiness. This was not magic or coincidence or misfortune. It was racism reifying itself. According to TheNew York Times, affidavits found loan officers referring to their black customers as “mud people” and to their subprime products as “ghetto loans.”
For more on collective racism today see:
Recent Pro Publica article on Fair Housing Act - here
Recent This American Life on the same topic, it interviews actors who are employeed to try and rent apartments in Northern Cities exposing segregation continuing today - here
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