[The Federalist] What do we mean by reparations? Writing recently in the Washington Post, Sheryll Cashin, a law professor at Georgetown University, argues that "reparations should repair what white supremacy still breaks. Atoning for the legacy of chattel slavery is simply not enough."That is, reparations must be broad enough to encompass the many crimes and injustices perpetrated against black Americans throughout our history, from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration. The effects of these injustices, says Cashin, are "direct and measurable" among slavery’s descendants: wage gaps, educational disparities, homeownership and property values, incarceration rates, health outcomes.
She is of course right. There is no question that black Americans have suffered greatly, not just from the memory of slavery but from its long legacy of rampant discrimination and racist policies.
It was this history that Ta-Nehisi Coates invoked in testimony last week before a House subcommittee considering a bill to create a commission to study reparations. Responding to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s comment that reparations are not a good idea because no one responsible for slavery is alive today, Coates reeled off a list of racial injustices that were perpetrated in McConnell’s lifetime.
Because McConnell was born in 1942, there is plenty of injustice to point to, and Coates, who has built a successful career on elegantly expressing outrage over such injustice, made the most of it:
We grant that Mr. McConnell was not alive for Appomattox. But he was alive for the electrocution of George Stinney. He was alive for the blinding of Isaac Woodard. He was alive to witness kleptocracy in his native Alabama and a regime premised on electoral theft. Majority Leader McConnell cited civil-rights legislation yesterday, as well he should, because he was alive to witness the harassment, jailing, and betrayal of those responsible for that legislation by a government sworn to protect them. He was alive for the redlining of Chicago and the looting of black homeowners of some $4 billion. Victims of that plunder are very much alive today. I am sure they’d love a word with the majority leader.
This is powerful stuff. The history of America, like the history of all the world, is replete with wickedness and injustice, crimes perpetrated by the powerful against the weak. Slavery and racial discrimination are America’s awful inheritance, which cannot be gainsaid.