"the case for reparations" - Coates

the past?

"for 250 years, American law worked to reduce black people to a class of untouchables and raise all white men to the level of citizens"

reparations!

"if we conclude that the conditions in North Lawndale and black America are not inexplicable but are instead precisely what you'd expect of a community that for centuries has lived in America's crosshairs, then what are we to make of the world's oldest democracy?"

locked out of the great wealth opportunity

"locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history, African Americans who desired and were able to afford home ownership found themselves consigned to central-city communities where their investments were affected by 'the self-fulfilling prophesies' of the FHA appraisers: cut off from sources of new investment, their homes and communities deteriorated and lost value in comparison to those homes and communities that FHA appraisers deemed desirable" > whites went 2 suburbs (w credit system backed by government), while blacks were subjected to unscrupulous landlords ("the thrill of the chase and the kill")

terrorism after slavery

"terrorism carried the day" - blacks were attacked for not removing hats - for refusing to hand over whiskey flasks - for disobeying church procedures - for using "insolent language" > sometimes just to thin out the population - black schools and churches were burned - black voters and candidates were intimidated - many were murdered

a heavy account

- "a heavy account lies against us as a civil society for oppressions committed against people who did not injure us... it would appear that there was considerable due to them" - Quakers in NY and Baltimore made membership conditional upon compensating former slaves - 1782: Quaker Pleasants freed 78 slaves, granted 350 acres, and built a school on their property

great migration

- "fleeing the acquisitive warlords of the South"

fatherhood

- "myth that fatherhood is the antidote to all that ails black people" - but "Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder" - "some black people will always be twice as good. but they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast" the "ancient brutality" - what policies exist to rectify it? - affirmative action... amorphous and toothless

contract men

- "sold" homes at inflated prices in order to evict families that could not pay - missing one payment led to forfeiture of down payment, all monthly payments and the property - "then they'd bring in another black family, rinse, and repeat"

German reparations

- 1953: v few Germans believed that Jews were entitled to anything > only 5% reported "feeling guilty" & 21% said the Jews themselves were partly responsible for the Holocaust "reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. But they did launch Germany's reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name."

account with ex-slaves

- 250 years of slavery - after slavery, in the south "a second slavery ruled" - in the north, blacks were pinned into ghettos by a collusion of mayors, civic associations, banks, legislatures, and citizens

proposals for reparations

- Boris Bittker: take the number of African Americans and multiple that number by the difference in white and black per capita income > $34 billion in 1973 - "white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. and so we must imagine that country" - "a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal"

making the second ghetto

- Chicago was zoned by race in '17 > SC declared such zoning unconstitutional so made use of racial covenants (half of all neighborhoods became off-limits to blacks) - '40s - use of racial violence (mob violence) to enforce "whiteness" of neighborhoods - '47 - mobs of whites yanked blacks out of streetcars and beat them - '51 - thousands of whites attacked an apartments building with a single black family in Cicero

homeownership

- FHA made 10% a standard down payment - blacks were excluded... - "undesirables" ("a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites" 1943)

role of federal govt

- Federal Housing Administration (FHA) is created in 1934 - all neighborhoods were rated A, B, C or D (A "lacked a single foreigner or Negro") - black neighborhoods were rated "D" regardless of conditions - "black people were viewed as a 'contagion'" - redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to entire mortgage industry that was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage

results of Cicero riots

- Grand Jury > refuses to indict rioters > instead indicted the family, the apartment's owner, the lawyer and the rental agency

liberal programs

- New Deal excluded most blacks in South, and 65% in nation - G.I. Bill Title III (low-cost housing loans) did little to protect black applicants > so many blacks were excluded that it is fair to say blacks were simply not granted the use of this title

Jim Crow Mississippi

- a kleptocracy - 1882-1968, more blacks lynched in MS than any other state - black majority "perpetually robbed" of vote

neighborhoods

- black families earning $100,000 typically live in neighborhoods inhabited by whites making $30,000 - "blacks and whites inhabit such different neighborhoods that it is not possible to compare the economic outcomes of black and white children" - "with segregation comes the concentration of disadvantage"

20th century calls for reparations

- confederate Walter Vaughan thought reparations would be good to stimulate southern economy - 1987: National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA) - 1993: NAACP embraced reparations - 1993: Charles Ogletree (Harvard Professor) pursued reparation claims in court

how the kleptocracy worked

- debt peonage - tools & necessities were advanced against the return of the crop, which was determined by the employer; when farmers were in debt, that debt carried over to the next season - land seizures (and reduction to sharecropping) - vagrancy laws - bc refusing work was considered a crime police could arrest those who refused forced labor and those who protested could expect "grave injury or death"

(not) white flight but social engineering

- federal policy: redlining destroyed possibility of investment in black neighborhoods - "piracy" - contract houses ("blacks keep on making it, and whites keep on taking it") - thousands of houses gone - no shield from the violence - "if you got a nice house, you live in a nice neighborhood, you are less prone to violence, because your space is not deprive...you don't need no protection."

wealth

- in 1860, slaves were the single largest financial asset of property in the U.S. economy - the sale of those slaves generated enormous wealth

settled accounts?

- in ghettoes, they were overcrowded, overcharged and undereducated - business discriminated against them - they received worst jobs and worst wages - police brutalized them in streets - "and the nation black lives, black bodies and black wealth were rightful targets" remained entrenched

Chicago: blacks and whites don't inhabit same city

- white neighborhoods have 3x the average per capita income - the black neighborhood with the highest incarceration had a rate 40x as high as the white neighborhood with highest rest -across the US (children born '55-'70): 4% of whites were raised in poor neighborhoods;62% of blacks were raised in poor neighborhood - whites raised in rich neighborhoods generally stay in rich neighborhoods - blacks raised in rich neighborhood often fall out of them

contract buyers league

collection of black homeowners on Chicago's South and West Sides - 1968: demonstrated and sued - asked for reparations: charging society with a crime against community; wanted restitution for great injury brought upon them

theft of black-owned property in the south

land was taken through means ranging from terrorism to legal chicanery

kleptocracy

term applied to a government seen as having a severe and systemic problem with officials/ruling class taking advantage of corruption to extend their personal wealth and political power (embezzlement of state funds at the expense of the wider population)