The Case for Reparations

Last semester I was in the class, Jim Crow South. We explored various aspects of African American life under Jim Crow. One of my favorite articles that we read for that class was “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. This document did an excellent job of culminating everything that we had learned in the class, about the practices of Jim Crow and other aspects of de jure and de facto segregation, and bringing them into a modern context. The article began by addressing the fact that large swathes of land that had been owned by African Americans had been stolen through the means of terrorism and deception during the 1900’s. This land was illegally seized at the time, but it was never returned to the previous owners. On top of this loss of land, black landowners were not compensated for their losses. This led to a large economic loss for numerous black individuals that was never repaid. Today, that land is still in the hands of the white individuals that stole it, or whomever they decided to sell it to. This was one of the basses that Coates used to establish his “case for reparations.”

Further into the article, Coates examined the practices of home ownership and the process of obtaining loans for blacks. Banks were able to pick and choose who they wanted to give out loans to, which meant that they were free to deny loans to black individuals. Without a home loan from a bank, blacks had to turn to other sources of money lending, which primarily resulted in predatory lending from less than reputable companies. The Federal Housing Administration was set up in 1934 to insure private mortgages, which lowered interest rates and down payments for FHA eligible loans. Unfortunately for black potential home owners, the FHA adopted a map system that ranked neighborhoods based on “perceived stability.” The individuals who charted these maps were of course wealthy white landowners and businessmen who wanted nothing more than to keep communities segregated, which meant that they deemed any black neighborhood as unstable and thus ineligible for this federal program. “Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.”

Coates inspection of housing discrimination was incredibly interesting to me, as the results of redlining still exist today in cities like Chicago, where the previously redlined black community of North Lawndale is an epicenter for crime and unemployment. Another example of a modern adaptation of racial targeting by banks is Wells Fargo, who in 2005 “promoted a series of Wealth Building Strategies seminars” that targeted black churches with predatory loans. So, while it is difficult to claim exactly what reparations would look like in a modern setting, as it is difficult to examine what exactly the cost of all of these racist practices were, Coates made an incredibly convincing case that reparations were in order for the United States’ long history of screwing black landowners.

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/