Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 14

Reparations for Ferguson

A few weeks ago I received an anxious text from my wife informing me that a group of young men were fighting outside of our apartment building. We've spent most of our adult lives in New York, and most of that time in New York living in Harlem. I love Harlem for the same reason I love all the hoods I have lived in. I walk outside in my same uniform, which is to say my same jeans, my same fitted, my same hoodie, and feel myself washing away, disappearing into the boulevard, into the black and (presently) the brown, and becoming human.

There have been young people fighting outside my window for as long as I can remember. I was no older than five sitting on the steps of my parents' home on Woodbrook Avenue watching the older boys knock shoulders in the street—"bucking" as we called it then—daring each other to fire off. From that point on I knew that among my people fisticuffs had their own ritual and script. The script was in effect that evening: show cause (some niggas jumped me in the park), mouth off (I ain't no punk), escalate (wait right her son, I'm bout to get my shit). 

My wife wanted to know what she should do. She was not worried about her own safety—boys like this are primarily a threat to each other. What my wife wanted was someone who could save them young men from themselves, some power which would disperse the boys in a fashion that would not escalate things. No such power exists. I told my wife to stay inside and do nothing. I did not tell her to call the police. If you have watched the events of this past week, you may have some idea why. 

Among the many relevant facts for any African-American negotiating their relationship with the police the following stands out: The police departments of America are endowed by the state with dominion over your body. This summer in Ferguson and Staten Island we have seen that dominion employed to the maximum ends—destruction of the body. This is neither new nor extraordinary. It does not matter if the destruction of your body was an overreaction. It does not matter if the destruction of your body resulted from a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction of your body springs from foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be be destroyed. Protect the home of your mother and your body can be destroyed. Visit the home of your young daughter and your body will be destroyed. The destroyers of your body will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. 

It will not do to point out the rarity of the destruction of your body by the people whom you pay to protect it. As Gene Demby has noted, destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. All of this is old for black people. No one is held accountable. The body of Michael Brown was left in the middle of the street for four hours. It can not be expected that anyone will be held accountable.

We are being told that Michael Brown attacked an armed man and tried to take his gun. The people who are telling us this hail from that universe where choke-holds are warm-fuzzies, where boys discard their skittles yelling, "You're gonna die tonight," and possess the power to summon and banish shotguns from the ether. These are the necessary myths of our country, and without them we are subject to the awful specter of history, and that is just too much for us to bear.

James Poulos is trying admirably to get at this, noting that we fear Lincoln's awesome prophecy. But even Poulos can't quite escape:

We know that America is exceptional in one key respect—we came to democracy without much bloodshed. Around the world, from Hungary and Russia to Iraq and Nigeria, we see the dream of peaceful democratization dragged again and again to what the philosopher Hegel called the slaughter-bench of history. Racial strife and murderous governments, not liberty and democracy, are the rule in history, the established pattern. We know that, mercifully, democratization scourged us only once in ferociously modern style: during the Civil War.

The last sentence here nullifies the first. Some 600,000 Americans—2.5 percent of the American population—died in the Civil War. What came before this was a long bloody war—enslavement—against black families, black communities and black bodies. What came after was a terrorist regime which ruled an entire swath of this country by fire and rope. That regime was not overthrown until an era well within the living memory of many Americans. Taken all together, the body count that led us to our present tenuous democratic moment does not elevate us above the community of nations, but installs us uncomfortably within its ranks. And that is terrifying because it shows us to be neither providential nor exceptional, and only special in the subjective sense that our families are special—because they are ours.

My family lives in Harlem. My wife did not call the police. An older head told the angry boys that they needed to take it somewhere else, which they did. Black people are not above calling the police—but often we do so fully understanding that we are introducing an element that is unaccountable to us. We introduce the police into our communities, the way you might introduce a predator into the food chain. This is not the singular, special fault of the police. The police are but the tip of the sword wielded by American society itself. Something bigger than Stand Your Ground, the drug war, mass incarceration or any other policy is haunting us. And as long we cower from it, the events of this week are as certain as math. The question is not "if," but "when."

There has always been another way.

Reparations For Ferguson

A few weeks ago I received an anxious text from my wife informing me that a group of young men were fighting outside of our apartment building. We've spent most of our adult lives in New York, and most of that time in New York living in Harlem. I love Harlem for the same reason I love all the hoods I have lived in. I walk outside in my same uniform, which is to say my same jeans, my same fitted, my same hoodie and feel myself washing away, disappearing into the boulevard, into the black and (presently) the brown, and becoming human.

There have been young people fighting outside my window for as long as I can remember. I was no older than five sitting on the steps of my parents home on Woodbrook Avenue watching the older boys knock shoulders in the street--"bucking" as we called it then--daring each other to fire off. From that point on I knew that among my people fisticuffs had their own ritual and script. The script was in effect that evening--show cause (Some niggas jumped me in the park.) mouth off (I ain't no punk.) escalate (Wait right her son, I'm bout to get my shit.)

My wife wanted to know what she should do. She was not worried about her own safety--boys like this are primarily a threat to each other. What my wife wanted was someone who could save them young men from themselves, some power which would disperse the boys in a fashion that would not escalate things, some power. No such power exists. I told my wife to stay inside and do nothing. I did not tell her to call the police. If you have watched the events of this past week, you may have some idea why. 

Among the many relevant facts for any African-American negotiating their relationship with the police the following stands out--the police departments of America are endowed by the state with dominion over your body. I came home at the end of this summer to find that dominion had been This summer in Ferguson and Staten Island we have seen that dominion employed to the maximum ends--destruction of the body.  This is neither new nor extraordinary. It does not matter if the destruction of your body was an overreaction. It does not matter if the destruction of your body resulted from a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction of your body springs from foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be be destroyed. Protect the home of your mother and your body can be destroyed.  Visit the home of your young daughter and your body will be destroyed. The destroyers of your body will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. 

It will not do to point out the rarity of the destruction of your body by the people whom you pay to protect it. As Gene Demby has noted, destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. All of this is old for black people. No one is held accountable. The body of Michael Brown was left in the middle of the street for four hours. It can not be expected that anyone will be held accountable.

We are being told that Michael Brown attacked an armed man  and tried to take his gun. The people who are telling us this hail from that universe where choke-holds are warm-fuzzies,  where boys discard their skittles yelling "You're gonna die tonight," and possess the power to summon and banish shotguns from the ether. These are the necessary myths of our country, and without them we are subject to the awful specter of history, and that is just too much for us to bear.

James Poulos is trying admirably to get at this, noting that we fear Lincoln's awesome prophecy. But even Poulos can't quite escape:

We know that America is exceptional in one key respect—we came to democracy without much bloodshed. Around the world, from Hungary and Russia to Iraq and Nigeria, we see the dream of peaceful democratization dragged again and again to what the philosopher Hegel called the slaughter-bench of history. Racial strife and murderous governments, not liberty and democracy, are the rule in history, the established pattern. We know that, mercifully, democratization scourged us only once in ferociously modern style: during the Civil War.

The last sentence here nullifies the first. Some 600,000 Americans--2.5 percent of the American population--died in the Civil War.  What came before this was a long bloody war--enslavement--against black families, black communities and black bodies. What came after was a terrorist regime which ruled an entire swath of this country by fire and rope. That regime was not overthrown until an era well within the living memory of many Americans. Taken all together, the body count that led us to our present tenuous democratic moment does not elevate us above the community of nations, but installs us uncomfortably within its ranks.  And that is terrifying because it shows us to be neither providential nor exceptional, and only special in the subjective sense that our families are special--because they are ours.

My family lives in Harlem. My wife did not call the police. An older head told the angry boys that they needed to take it somewhere else, which they did. Black people are not above calling the police--but often we do so fully understanding that we are introducing an element that is unaccountable to us. We introduce the police into our communities, the way you might introduce a predator into the food chain. This is not the singular, especial fault of the police. The police are but the tip of the sword wielded by American society itself.  Something bigger than Stand Your Ground, the drug war, mass incarceration or any other policy is haunting us. And as long we cower from it, the events of this week are as certain as math. The question is not "if," but "when."

There has always been another way. 

Black People Are Not Ignoring 'Black on Black' Crime

I'm slowly catching up on my reading on the week's events in Ferguson and trying to get my head around what exactly happened. In the meantime, one idea creeping into the discourse—that black people are unmoved by intra-community violence—deserves to be immediately dismissed.  Eugene Robinson, reacting to the tragic murder of Knijah Bibb, offers an incarnation here:

We’ve been through this so many times. Brown, from all reports, was a good kid who had just graduated from high school and was about to enroll in college. But young black men are automatically assumed to be dangerous thugs—and are not given the benefit of the doubt that young white men are accorded. This is racist and wrong, and it must change.

But we should be just as outraged over Knijah’s death—and just as determined that this kind of killing should never happen again.

The entire Prince George’s County police force—not just the homicide division—has been working long hours to try to find Wallace and is motivated by what a police spokesman called a “sense of moral outrage.”

That feeling should be universal. The near-constant background noise of black-on-black violence is too often ignored. Yet it continues to claim victims at a rate that our society should consider outrageous and unacceptable.

There are a number of things wrong here. To the extent that killings by the police generate more outrage, it is completely understandable. Police in America are granted wide range of powers by the state including lethal force. With that power comes a special place of honor. When cops are killed the outrage is always different than when citizens are killed. Likewise when cops kill under questionable terms, more scrutiny follows directly from the logic of citizenship. Great power. Great responsibility.

More importantly Robinson's claim is demonstrably false. The notion that violence within the black community is "background noise" is not supported by the historical record—or by Google. I have said this before. It's almost as if Stop The Violence never happened, or The Interruptors never happened, or Kendrick Lamar never happened. The call issued by Erica Ford at the end of this Do The Right Thing retrospective is so common as to be ritual. It is not "black on black crime" that is background noise in America, but the pleas of black people.

There is a pattern here, but it isn't the one Eugene Robinson (for whom I have a great respect) thinks. The pattern is the transmutation of black protest into moral hectoring of black people. Don Imus profanely insults a group of black women. But the real problem is gangsta rap. Trayvon Martin is killed. This becomes a conversation about how black men are bad fathers. Jonathan Martin is bullied mercilessly. This proves that black people have an unfortunate sense of irony.

The politics of respectability are, at their root, the politics of changing the subject—the last resort for those who can not bear the agony of looking their country in the eye. The policy of America has been, for most of its history, white supremacy. The high rates of violence in black neighborhoods do not exist outside of these facts—they evidence them.

This history presents us with a suite of hard choices. We do not like hard choices. Here's a better idea: Let's all get together and talk about how Mike Brown would still be alive if Beyoncé would make more wholesome music, followed by a national forum on how the charge of "acting white" contributes to mass incarceration. We can conclude with a keynote lecture on "Kids Today" and a shrug.

Black People Are Not Ignoring 'Black On Black' Crime

I'm slowly catching up on my reading on the week's events in Ferguson and trying to get my head around what exactly happened. In the meantime, one idea  creeping into the discourse--that black people are unmoved by intra-community violence--deserves to be immediately dismissed.  Eugene Robinson, reacting to the tragic murder of Knijah Bibb, offers an incarnation here:

We’ve been through this so many times. Brown, from all reports, was a good kid who had just graduated from high school and was about to enroll in college. But young black men are automatically assumed to be dangerous thugs — and are not given the benefit of the doubt that young white men are accorded. This is racist and wrong, and it must change.

But we should be just as outraged over Knijah’s death — and just as determined that this kind of killing should never happen again.

The entire Prince George’s County police force — not just the homicide division — has been working long hours to try to find Wallace and is motivated by what a police spokesman called a “sense of moral outrage.”

That feeling should be universal. The near-constant background noise of black-on-black violence is too often ignored. Yet it continues to claim victims at a rate that our society should consider outrageous and unacceptable.

There are a number of things wrong here. To the extent that killings by the police generate more outrage, it is completely understandable. Police in America are granted wide range of powers by the state including lethal force. With that power comes a special place of honor. When cops are killed the outrage is always different when citizens are killed. Likewise when cops kill under questionable terms, more scrutiny follows directly from the logic of citizenship. 

More importantly Robinson's claim is demonstrably false. The notion that violence within the black community is "background noise" is not supported by the historical record--or by google. I have said this before. It's almost as if Stop The Violence never happened, or The Interruptors never happened, or Kendrick Lamar never happened. The call issued by Erica Ford at the end of this Do The Right Thing retrospective is so common as to be ritual. It is not "black on black crime" that is background noise in America, but the pleas of black people.

There is a pattern here, but it isn't the one Eugene Robinson (for whom I have a great respect) thinks. The pattern is the transmutation of black protest into moral hectoring of black people. Don Imus profanely insults a group of black women. But the real problem is gangsta rap. Trayvon Martin is killed. This becomes a conversation about how black men are bad fathers. Jonathan Martin is bullied mercilessly. This proves that black people have an unfortunate sense of irony.

The politics of respectability are, at their root, the politics of changing the subject--the last resort for those who can not bear the agony of looking their country in the eye. The policy of America has been, for most of its history, white supremacy. The high rates of violence in black neighborhoods do not exist outside of these facts--they evidence them.

This history presents us with a suite hard choices. We do not like hard choices. Here's a better idea: let's all get together and talk about how Mike Brown would still be alive if Beyoncé would make more wholesome music, followed by a national forum on how the charge of "acting white" contributes to mass incarceration, then with a keynote lecture on "Kids Today" and a shrug. Then we can all move on. 

Au Revoir Tout Le Monde

Alors, c'est tout. Je suis arrivé et maintenant je dois disparaître. Je vais retourner en aout. À bientôt. Vous me manquez. J'ai très très peur. Mais les choses doivent être faites, no? Demandez Jacque Brel. 

Je suis désolé pour tout erreurs.

On y va...

 

Home Is Where the Hatred Is

In "The Case for Reparations," I tried to move the lens away from the enslaved and focus on their descendants. Narratively, I thought it made a much more compelling read and I it got us past the "but they're all long-dead" argument. Also, once you understand enslavement as central—not ancillary—to American history, you can then easily intuit that it would have some serious effects on policy 100 years later. When you then consider what directly followed enslavement—disenfranchisement, pogroms, land theft, terrorism, the entire suite of plunder—it seems inconceivable that 20th-century domestic policy would not be awash in white supremacy.

On some vague level, I understood this to be true. Some years ago (before I came here) I read Kenneth Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier. No one who wants to understand the shape of America's cities and suburbs can afford to skip this book. I would go so far as to say that you can't really talk intelligently about urban policy without grappling with Jackson's work. Crabgrass is ostensibly a history of the suburbs in America, but it ranges from antiquity to the 20th century and puts the American obsession with a front lawn and detached housing in context. That makes for great reading, and then, about halfway through the book, the bombshells start dropping. In painstaking detail, Jackson shows how the Federal Housing Administration and the Home Owners' Loan Corporation subsidized segregation, and helped author the wealth gap. I'd heard the term redlining before, but Jackson's book really laid out, in detail, how federal policy worked.

I thought of Jackson's book years later when I picked up Isabel Wilkerson The Warmth of Other Suns. Where Jackson outlines the racist policies of federal, local, and state government toward American cities, Wilkerson's work (among other things) tells us how black people responded to those policies. More importantly, for my work, she reversed a popular trend to conflate impoverishment with racism, and pretend as though "the black poor" are the "real" problem. If only quietly, Wilkerson builds a strong case that the policy of the American government has not been to encourage a black middle class, but to discourage it and open it for plunder.

Chicago is one of three cities that feature prominently in Warmth. Having had some experience reporting in the city, I began to consider focusing there. The other candidate was Detroit. I wish I could have gotten both. I did a mini deep-dive on Detroit history some years ago, and I strongly suspect that a long, beautiful magazine story about history and could be written from there, if some journalist would take up the challenge. I tried some years ago and failed. (You can read my attempt This gets us grounded and immediately dispenses with the popular notion that our cities and suburbs were unplanned. I can not stress how necessary this book is.

2.) The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson
I would read this to get a more intimate history in the mix early. It's very important to remember that beneath all of this are the lives of individual Americans. Warmth is the finest piece of journalism I've read on America in a very long time.

3.) The Origins of the Urban Crisis, by Thomas Sugrue
This picks up on a lot of the research in Crabgrass around redlining, but zooms in on Detroit. It also adds another feature: pervasive white violence. The thing to understand about racist "policy" is that it existed in consort with racist private policy, racist civic groups, and racist people.

4.) Making the Second Ghetto, by Arnold Hirsch
A tough read, but an essential, granular analysis of how Chicago's ghettos were "made."

5.) Family Properties, by Beryl Satter
The perfect compliment to Hirsch. Satter's book breathes more, and connects all of that policy to actual people in North Lawndale. More disturbing: Satter shows that public policy made private plunder possible. 

6.) American Apartheid, by Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton
In a sense, a compilation of the effects of everything you will have read up to this point. Massey and Denton demonstrate that African-Americans are not just another "ethnicity" on the come up, but the most hyper-segregated group in American history.

7.) Great American City, by Robert Sampson
Back to Chicago, one last time. Again, a book about effects. Sampson is no longer in the realm of history. His data is very recent and very depressing.

8.) Stuck In Place, by Patrick Sharkey
By this point, you will likely be thoroughly bummed out. I was. Sharkey finishes us off by critiquing the "progress" made after the Civil Rights movement. Again, we see the enduring and pervasive effects of segregation. A bracing and important read.

 

Editor's note: This is the third part in a four-part series on the works of history that informed the author's recent piece, "The Case for Reparations." Part one, on race and racism, is available here and part two, on slavery, is here.

Slavery Made America

About five years ago, I began a deep dive into the Civil War, most of it chronicled here. That dive culminated in an essay in our commemorative Civil War issue, much like my deep dive on housing and "colorless" policy culminated in The Case for Reparations. The earlier piece built toward the later one. The Civil War revealed to me the price, and the bounty, of enslavement in this country. The things I focus on in the reparations piece—housing and 20th-century policy—all spring from that period of American history. I could not have understood 20th-century discrimination without understanding its 19th-century manifestations. My entry into this period was idiosyncratic and the reading list below reflects that. Again, nothing here is definitive. I can only show you the path I walked.

Before I took the dive into the Civil War, I understood the enslavement as a moral catastrophe. I also had some vague sense that that enslavement had helped shepherd America into being. Finally I knew that the Civil War was somehow related to slavery. All three of these notions ultimately had to be revised. That enslavement in America was somehow more than a moral problem became apparent while reading the grandfather of all Civil War histories, James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. Battle Cry is ostensibly a history of The Late Unpleasantness, but it is also an expression of the centrality of enslavement in American history.

The first 200 pages or so show that the War was about not only the perpetuation of "African slavery," but its expansion. McPherson quotes directly from the mouths of secessionists who have no problem laying out bondage as their primary casus belli. McPherson shows the essential place enslavement held in the economy of the South and in America at large. Thus the conflagration that follows does not appear out of thin air. Thus when McPherson begins detailing double-timing and flanking maneuvers you have some sense that you are doing something more than watching people play out a violent football game.

Conservatively speaking, 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in the Civil War, two percent of the American population at the time. Twenty percent of all Southern white men of military age died in the War. Until Vietnam, more people had died in the Civil War than all other American wars combined. An interest which compelled that amount of death and suffering must be something more than vague disagreement over a "way of life."

While I was reading McPherson, I was listening to recordings of David Blight's course at Yale, The Civil War and Reconstruction. The great thing about this was I could listen to it while I was gaming, cooking, cleaning, or driving. Blight helps me put the economic portions that McPherson's work talks about in perspective. This stunning quote, for instance, blew me away:

...by 1860, there were more millionaires (slaveholders all) living in the lower Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the United States. In the same year, the nearly 4 million American slaves were worth some $3.5 billion, making them the largest single financial asset in the entire U.S. economy, worth more than all manufacturing and railroads combined. So, of course, the war was rooted in these two expanding and competing economies—but competing over what? What eventually tore asunder America's political culture was slavery's expansion into the Western territories. 

I quote that a lot, because it contradicts this idea of enslavement as ancillary to American history, and establishes it as foundational. Blight was pulling from Roger Ransom's incredible paper, The Economics of the Civil War. Again, the numbers are simply mind-bending—in a state like South Carolina, almost 60 percent of the people were enslaved. Beyond the numbers, Blight's lectures brought to life the words of the actual people who were enslaved. Pulling from a great number of oral sources, Blight bids us not to forget that there were actual humans, not abstract figures, who were being enslaved.

In understanding the humanity of the enslaved, I don't know if there is a better book than The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Because Douglass wrote three autobiographies, and Life and Times is the longest, it tends to get short shrift. But, for my money, it's the best of the three and one of the most beautiful autobiographies ever written by an American. Douglass's portrait of slavery is just gripping. Forgive me for quoting at length:

The close-fisted stinginess that fed the poor slave on coarse corn-meal and tainted meat, that clothed him in crashy tow-linen and hurried him on to toil through the field in all weathers, with wind and rain beating through his tattered garments, and that scarcely gave even the young slave-mother time to nurse her infant in the fence-corner, wholly vanished on approaching the sacred precincts of the "Great House" itself. There the scriptural phrase descriptive of the wealthy found exact illustration. The highly-favored inmates of this mansion were literally arrayed in "purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day."

The table of this house groaned under the blood-bought luxuries gathered with pains-taking care at home and abroad. Fields, forests, rivers, and seas were made tributary. Immense wealth and its lavish expenditures filled the Great House with all that could please the eye or tempt the taste. Fish, flesh, and fowl were here in profusion. Chickens of all breeds; ducks of all kinds, wild and tame, the common and the huge Muscovite; Guinea fowls, turkeys, geese and pea-fowls; all were fat and fattening for the destined vortex...

Alas, this immense wealth, this gilded splendor, this profusion of luxury, this exemption from toil. this life of ease, this sea of plenty were not the pearly gates they seemed to a world of happiness and sweet content to be. The poor slave, on his hard pine plank, scantily covered with his thin blanket, slept more soundly than the feverish voluptuary who reclined upon his downy pillow. Food to the indolent is poison, not sustenance. Lurking beneath the rich and tempting viands were invisible spirits of evil, which filled the self-deluded gormandizer with aches and pains, passions uncontrollable, fierce tempers, dyspepsia, rheumatism, lumbago, and gout, and of these the Lloyds had a full share.

Douglass is a masterful narrator, and one of the things he communicates is that slavery is not a sanitized form of forced labor, but first and foremost, a system of violence, an assault on black bodies, black families, and black institutions. This all gets lost in the talk about economics and robbing people of their work. That robbery was abetted by the destruction of people. For me no book better captures this then Thavolia Glymph's Out of The House of Bondage. Glymph is specifically interested in the violence that allegedly mild slave-mistresses visited upon their slaves. By focusing on what people think of us as the mildest form of slavery (the domestic) Glymph reveals that enslavement is not violent sometimes, but is, itself, a form of violence.

Picking up from yesterday's readings on racism as a "done thing," as a choice, these readings helped me understand why that choice was made and how essential it was to the American project. And if that is the case, if enslavement was essential, how could it be that its effects faded in 1860? Douglass says "a man is worked on by what he works on." For 250 years, Americans worked on the breaking of people for profit. What I found, going forward, is that enslavement had worked on us too. You can see its ghost all over American policy, especially in the realm of housing.

And so the sources:

1.) Battle Cry of Freedom, by James McPherson
Just a beautiful read. One of my favorite books of all time, and a book that does not entertain Neo-Confederate dissembling.

2.) "The Civil War and Reconstruction," David Blight's lecture series
Blight is a great lecturer and covers the essentials of both periods. 

3.) "The Economics Of The Civil War," by Roger L. Ransom
This is a really short but essential read. Perhaps more than any article I've read it explains the forces that led us to war.

4.) The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass
Just beautiful. Don't just read this to understand enslavement; read it because it is an incredible work of literature.

5.) Out Of The House of Bondage, by Thavolia Glymph
I actually came to this after the reparations article was in the queue, but it crystalizes something that Douglass demonstrates--the horrific violence that was slavery. You can not divide the two. The Cliven Bundy fantasy of black people happily picking cotton, and living in two parent homes with food and shelter provided is the exact opposite of what slavery was. You can not plunder a people nonviolently.

 

Editor's note: This is the second part in a four-part series on the works of history that informed the author's recent piece, The Case for Reparations. Part one, on race and racism, is available here.

How Racism Invented Race in America

As I've said before, the idea of reparations precedes this month's cover of The Atlantic, and the work around it—among scholars, activists, and writers—has been ongoing, even if the interest of the broader world is fickle. Following up on the autopsy of an idea, I thought I'd give some larger sense of how something like this came to be. My hope is to give people who are interested some entrée into further reading, and also to credit the antecedents to my own thinking. Perhaps most importantly, I wish to return to one of the original features of blogging—the documentation of public thinking. I would suggest that more writers, more academics, and more journalists do this, and do so honestly. It have come to believe that arguing with the self is as important as arguing with the broader world.

Okay. On y va.

Recently, a young woman told me that this generation of Americans was "the most diverse in American history." The assumption was that across the span of that history, there was some immutable group of racial categories whose numbers we could compare. I am not sure this holds up. Biracial is a new category for America, but it is not clear to me that today there are relatively more children of black and white unions than there were in the past. We certainly are more apt to acknowledge them as such, and that is a good thing. Nevertheless, the assumption of that "something new" is happening "racially," that these terms are somehow constant is one of the great, and underestimated, barriers to understanding the case for reparations.

The myth of any such constant was exposed to me at Howard University. I was a history major—and yes, I am bragging about this, and not at all humbly. In all my history classes we were treated to the dizzying taxonomy of race—mulatto and Italian, creole and quadroon, Jew and mestizo. This terminology would change quickly, change back, and then change again. And borders would change with them. Not even continents were constant. "Africa begins at the Pyrenees," we read in The Races of Europe.

No work more influenced my own thinking on this more than St. Clair Drake's two-volume work Black Folk Here and There. Drake is better known for his study of Chicago, Black Metropolis, a book that informed the profile I wrote of Michelle Obama and, to some extent, my work on reparations. But Black Folk was the first book that made the argument that sticks with me to this day—that there is nothing particularly "natural" about viewing people with darker skin and curlier hair as inferior. Drake surveys all perceptions of people with darker skin, curlier hair, or both across history. He finds very little consistency and concludes that racism, as we know it, is basically a product of the slave trade, which is to say the seizure of power.

Other books confirmed Drake's basic insight to me—Allison Blakely's Blacks in the Dutch World, Nell Irvin Painter's The History of White People. If you can get your hands on it I also would recommend The Image of the Black in Western Art, which is both expensive and priceless. It's fascinating to see how black people were viewed before we decided that African ancestry made you, by God or science, property. For a energetic rebuttal (which I find ultimately unconvincing) see Winthrop Jordan's White Over Black.

The import of this all came home for me many years later in Barbara and Karen Fields's Racecraft. The book is a collection of essay, and is sometimes hard to follow, but its basic insight is brilliant. Basically, Americans talk about "race" but not "racism," and in doing that they turn a series of "actions" into a "state." This is basically true of all our conversations of this sort, left and right. You can see this in all our terminology—racial justice, racial quotas, racial discrimination, etc. But this language is ahistorical, and it obscures the current conflict. Affirmative action, for instance, is not intended to remedy plunder (action) but to aid "women and people of color" (state) or produce "diversity" (another state). And the benefits of affirmative action are not people who have been plundered, but "the black race."

But American notions of race are the product of racism, not the other way around. We know this because we can see the formation of "race" in American law and policy, and also see how formations differ across time and space. So what is "black" in the United States is not "black" in Brazil. More significantly the relevance and import of "blackness" is not constant across American history. Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom helped me a lot on this. At the start of the book the English are allying with the rebellious Cimarrons against the hated and demonic Spanish. By the end of the book the great-grandchildren of the English are convinced that blacks are a singular blight upon the Earth. The change is not mysterious. Morgan traces the nexus of law, policy, and financial interest to show how current notions of "blackness" and "whiteness" were formed.

It is important to remember that American racism is a thing that was done, and a world where American racism is beaten back is not a world of "racial diversity" but a world without such terminology. Perhaps we can never actually get to that world. Perhaps we are just too far gone. But we should never forget that this world was "made." Whiteness and blackness are not a fact of providence, but of policy—of slave codes, black codes, Jim Crow, redlining, GI Bills, housing covenants, New Deals, and mass incarcerations.

I did not understand it at the time, but this way of thinking pushed me toward reparations. In the popular mind, reparations is seen as a "race-based" scheme, i.e., giving money to people solely because they are black or have direct African ancestry. But if you understand racism as the headwaters of the problem, as injury, as plunder you can reorient and focus not on the ancestry but on the injury.

For me it goes back to Black Folks Here and There. I came to St. Clair Drake feeling a deep need to prove that the Ancient Egyptians were "black." (The whole first volume is a consideration of "race" and Ancient Egypt.) I was dogged by Saul Bellow's challenge: "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?" I left feeling like Ralph Wiley—Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus. Wiley's point was that the entire exercise of attempting to prove the worth of humans through monuments and walls was morally flawed. This was radicalizing. It warned me away from beginning an argument with racist reasoning, by accepting its premises. The argument for racism is corrupt at its root, and must be confronted there. You can understand how such thinking might inevitably lead you toward reparations.

Over the next few days I'll write three more posts like this—covering enslavement, housing and domestic policy, and thinking around reparations. If I were starting out and trying to grapple the relationship between "race" and "racism," here is how I would proceed. It is not the only—and perhaps not even the best—path. It's simply the one I'd suggest.

1.) American Slavery, American Freedom, by Edmund Morgan
Essential to understanding your country and how it came to see "blacks" in one light and "whites" in another.

2.) White Over Black, by Winthrop Jordan
I don't agree with this book, but it's important to confront the counterargument—that Anglo-American culture is racist at its very root and predisposed toward hatred of black people.

3.) The History of White People, by Nell Irvin Painter
A deeply amusing book that finds great minds—chiefly Ralph Waldo Emerson—arguing that race explains why "Celts" are Catholic and "Saxons" Protestant. It also reveals how poorly racist thinking ages. The book is an eminently readable guide through the evolution and conception of white people. Again, nothing inevitable here.

4.) Black Folks Here and There, by St. Clair Drake
The source for me. This book changed my life. I've listed it so low because at the time I read it, I had nothing else to do, really. I didn't do much homework. I skipped a lot of class. I just soaked stuff like this up.

5.) "On Being White ... and Other Lies," by James Baldwin
No one is better on the idea of "race," and particularly whiteness, and its import than Baldwin: "No one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations and a vast amount of coercion ..." In this essay, he brings together all the history and wastes no words dumbing down its likely import:

... in this debasement and definition of black people, they have debased and defined themselves. And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white. Because they think they are white, they dare not confront the ravage and lie of their history. Because they think they are white, they cannot allow themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers .... Because they think they are white, they believe, as even no child believes, in the dream of safety.

This, to me, is the deepest significance of reparations. People who think this is just a matter of giving black things vastly underestimate the challenge. Reparations may seem impractical. Living without history, I suspect, will—in the long term—prove to be suicidal.

 

Editor's note: This is the first part in a four-part series on the works of history that informed the author's recent piece, "The Case for Reparations." Part two, on slavery, is here.

The Case for Reparations: A Narrative Bibliography

As I've said before, the idea of reparations precedes this month's cover of The Atlantic, and the work around it—among scholars, activists, and writers—has been ongoing, even if the interest of the broader world is fickle. Following up on the autopsy of an idea, I thought I'd give some larger sense of how something like this came to be. My hope is to give people who are interested some entrée into further reading, and also to credit the antecedents to my own thinking. Perhaps most importantly, I wish to return to one of the original features of blogging—the documentation of public thinking. I would suggest that more writers, more academics, and more journalists do this, and do so honestly. It have come to believe that arguing with the self is as important as arguing with the broader world.

Okay. On y va.

Recently, a young woman told me that this generation of Americans was "the most diverse in American history." The assumption was that across the span of that history, there was some immutable group of racial categories whose numbers we could compare. I am not sure this holds up. Biracial is a new category for America, but it is not clear to me that today there are relatively more children of black and white unions than there were in the past. We certainly are more apt to acknowledge them as such, and that is a good thing. Nevertheless, the assumption of that "something new" is happening "racially," that these terms are somehow constant is one of the great, and underestimated, barriers to understanding the case for reparations.

The myth of any such constant was exposed to me at Howard University. I was a history major—and yes, I am bragging about this, and not at all humbly. In all my history classes we were treated to the dizzying taxonomy of race—mulatto and Italian, creole and quadroon, Jew and mestizo. This terminology would change quickly, change back, and then change again. And borders would change with them. Not even continents were constant. "Africa begins at the Pyrenees," we read in The Races of Europe.

No work more influenced my own thinking on this more than St. Clair Drake's two-volume work Black Folk Here and There. Drake is better known for his study of Chicago, Black Metropolis, a book that informed the profile I wrote of Michelle Obama and, to some extent, my work on reparations. But Black Folk was the first book that made the argument that sticks with me to this day—that there is nothing particularly "natural" about viewing people with darker skin and curlier hair as inferior. Drake surveys all perceptions of people with darker skin, curlier hair, or both across history. He finds very little consistency and concludes that racism, as we know it, is basically a product of the slave trade, which is to say the seizure of power.

Other books confirmed Drake's basic insight to me—Allison Blakely's Blacks in the Dutch World, Nell Irvin Painter's The History of White People. If you can get your hands on it I also would recommend The Image of the Black in Western Art, which is both expensive and priceless. It's fascinating to see how black people were viewed before we decided that African ancestry made you, by God or science, property. For a energetic rebuttal (which I find ultimately unconvincing) see Winthrop Jordan's White Over Black.

The import of this all came home for me many years later in Barbara and Karen Fields's Racecraft. The book is a collection of essay, and is sometimes hard to follow, but its basic insight is brilliant. Basically, Americans talk about "race" but not "racism," and in doing that they turn a series of "actions" into a "state." This is basically true of all our conversations of this sort, left and right. You can see this in all our terminology—racial justice, racial quotas, racial discrimination, etc. But this language is ahistorical, and it obscures the current conflict. Affirmative action, for instance, is not intended to remedy plunder (action) but to aid "women and people of color" (state) or produce "diversity" (another state). And the benefits of affirmative action are not people who have been plundered, but "the black race."

But American notions of race are the product of racism, not the other way around. We know this because we can see the formation of "race" in American law and policy, and also see how formations differ across time and space. So what is "black" in the United States is not "black" in Brazil. More significantly the relevance and import of "blackness" is not constant across American history. Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom helped me a lot on this. At the start of the book the English are allying with the rebellious Cimarrons against the hated and demonic Spanish. By the end of the book the great-grandchildren of the English are convinced that blacks are a singular blight upon the Earth. The change is not mysterious. Morgan traces the nexus of law, policy, and financial interest to show how current notions of "blackness" and "whiteness" were formed.

It is important to remember that American racism is a thing that was done, and a world where American racism is beaten back is not a world of "racial diversity" but a world without such terminology. Perhaps we can never actually get to that world. Perhaps we are just too far gone. But we should never forget that this world was "made." Whiteness and blackness are not a fact of providence, but of policy—of slave codes, black codes, Jim Crow, redlining, GI Bills, housing covenants, New Deals, and mass incarcerations.

I did not understand it at the time, but this way of thinking pushed me toward reparations. In the popular mind, reparations is seen as a "race-based" scheme, i.e., giving money to people solely because they are black or have direct African ancestry. But if you understand racism as the headwaters of the problem, as injury, as plunder you can reorient and focus not on the ancestry but on the injury.

For me it goes back to Black Folks Here and There. I came to St. Clair Drake feeling a deep need to prove that the Ancient Egyptians were "black." (The whole first volume is a consideration of "race" and Ancient Egypt.) I was dogged by Saul Bellow's challenge: "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?" I left feeling like Ralph Wiley—Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus. Wiley's point was that the entire exercise of attempting to prove the worth of humans through monuments and walls was morally flawed. This was radicalizing. It warned me away from beginning an argument with racist reasoning, by accepting its premises. The argument for racism is corrupt at its root, and must be confronted there. You can understand how such thinking might inevitably lead you toward reparations.

Over the next few days I'll write three more posts like this—covering enslavement, housing and domestic policy, and thinking around reparations. If I were starting out and trying to grapple the relationship between "race" and "racism," here is how I would proceed. It is not the only—and perhaps not even the best—path. It's simply the one I'd suggest.

1.) American Slavery, American Freedom, by Edmund Morgan
Essential to understanding your country and how it came to see "blacks" in one light and "whites" in another.

2.) White Over Black, by Winthrop Jordan
I don't agree with this book, but it's important to confront the counterargument—that Anglo-American culture is racist at its very root and predisposed toward hatred of black people.

3.) The History of White People, by Nell Irvin Painter
A deeply amusing book that finds great minds—chiefly Ralph Waldo Emerson—arguing that race explains why "Celts" are Catholic and "Saxons" Protestant. It also reveals how poorly racist thinking ages. The book is an eminently readable guide through the evolution and conception of white people. Again, nothing inevitable here.

4.) Black Folks Here and There, by St. Clair Drake
The source for me. This book changed my life. I've listed it so low because at the time I read it, I had nothing else to do, really. I didn't do much homework. I skipped a lot of class. I just soaked stuff like this up.

5.) "On Being White ... and Other Lies," by James Baldwin
No one is better on the idea of "race," and particularly whiteness, and its import than Baldwin: "No one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations and a vast amount of coercion ..." In this essay, he brings together all the history and wastes no words dumbing down its likely import:

... in this debasement and definition of black people, they have debased and defined themselves. And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white. Because they think they are white, they dare not confront the ravage and lie of their history. Because they think they are white, they cannot allow themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers .... Because they think they are white, they believe, as even no child believes, in the dream of safety.

This, to me, is the deepest significance of reparations. People who think this is just a matter of giving black things vastly underestimate the challenge. Reparations may seem impractical. Living without history, I suspect, will—in the long term—prove to be suicidal.

A Last Tango With Paris

Forgive my absence these past few days. June's cover story has taken on a life of its own. But it's a life that I will soon be parting with. I am leaving you for awhile, a fact that saddens me because this space--more than any other resource--is responsible for so much of what I've learned over the past few years. That learning hasn't been limited to the comprehension of the force of racism in American history, or even American history at all.

As some of you know I've spent the past two years or so, grappling with the French language. It has gotten better of me, repeatedly, piling up the humiliations like lumber. But I suspect that there is no other real way to learn at my age, and possibly not at all. This summer I expect the humiliations to increase substantially as I head off for seven weeks of intense immersion. Je vais parler en français, écrire en français, lire en français, et finalment, penser et revoir en français. Alors, I can't really do this while being normal. So I won't be talking to, well, anyone in my life, except those few people who speak French. I think of this like living underwater for awhile, like exploring all the beautiful and weird things that live in the deep. 

After next Thursday, you will not hear from me for awhile. I want to thank the Francophone Horde who've talked to me, and chatted with me en français as I have grappled with the language. My first French tutor rose up from the horde and, Kathleen, I am forever in your debt. I want to thank my editors James Bennet, Scott Stossel, John Gould and Bob Cohn for supporting me in this. I have long believed that the best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself. The best thing I can say about the reparations piece is that I now understand. I can not control what others do. But I can understand as much as possible in the short time I have with you. 

Best,

Ta-Nehisi

P.S. Thank you for the shirt.