Reparations, Part 1
I have found two very good ways to initiate an abrupt end to a conversation. The first is to tell people what I do for a living. The second is to bring up the topic of reparations. The first works particularly well with non-church folk. The second works particularly well with church folk. In this essay, I, a priest, want to talk about reparations.
If you’ve continued on to this line, I’d like to say up front that my aim is not to convince you of my deeply settled conviction on reparations. I don’t exactly have one yet (although I must say it is becoming more and more settled). Instead, I hope that as I write, I will draw a bit closer to what I believe. In the footsteps of St. Augustine (and John Calvin after him), “I count myself one of the number of those who write as they learn and learn as they write.”1
Given that my thoughts are not fully formed, this is less a polished essay and more an invitation into how I am processing this controversial topic. I’d love to hear how you think about this.
In this first part, I’ll interact with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ now famous essay from 2014, “The Case for Reparations.” In the next, I’ll interact with Duke Kwon and Gregory Thompson’s book Reparations: a Christian Call for Repentance and Repair.
Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations”
The first time I can remember (even somewhat) seriously thinking about reparations was when I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay in The Atlantic (all quotes from Coates are from this, unless otherwise noted). If you haven’t read it, you really should.
Here’s a brief synopsis. In this 15,000+ word essay, Coates’ offers a concise history of theft in America and what Americans might do to remedy the crime.
Coates chronicles the history of American kleptocracy beginning with the introduction of slaves on the shores of the land that became America. For 250 years Black people were enslaved in the “land of the free.” Their histories were stolen, their bodies were stolen, their labor was stolen, the wealth they generated was stolen. Once chattel slavery was abolished, the stealing continued but its methods and mechanisms evolved. The ideology of white supremacy donned different masks: from slavery to sharecropping to forced labor via the 13thAmendment, from separate and unequal Jim Crow to predatory housing schemes and redlining.
Through both legal and illegal means, Black Americans have been routinely robbed of the vote and opportunities to generate and maintain wealth. This, he argues, is the wound that needs healing and the injustice that needs repair. In the essay, Coates traces this common (quintessential?) American experience of theft through the particular story of one Black family.
Lest you get the wrong idea, Coates doesn’t argue that stealing is the whole story of America. His point is that it is that theft is a significant part of every chapter. American history is complex. For many, America has been a land of opportunity but, as Coates shows, that America has largely been closed to the Black people.
After tracing out the contours of American theft, Coates asks what our nation might do to right the wrongs of centuries of stealing. He suggests reparations as part of the path forward for reckoning with our past sins as well as paving a way forward whereby America might finally grow into her remarkable ideals.
That’s as much summary as I will attempt. What I want to do now is point out some things I have most interesting about the essay. I’ll look at 1) how he begins the essay; 2) what I think is the most compelling evidence for the need for reparations; and 3) Coates’ hope for what his essay might accomplish.
1) The Bible and America
First, I’ll begin by looking at how Coates begins his essay. The very first words are a quote from the Book of Deuteronomy.
And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today. (Deut. 15:12-15)
What I find most intriguing about this is that he says a lot about a lot of things but he says nothing about this passage from the Bible. Now, I know fronting a few block quotes in an essay is a common move. They set the temperature for a piece and establish broad themes. Oftentimes they are directly addressed in the body or at least alluded to. But not here.
It’s just there, right at the beginning and left to haunt. This seed of Scripture is poked down into the soil of our subconscious, partially buried but not forgotten and never addressed. Why begin with this passage, which is foundational to the idea of reparations? Why never address it?
I’m sure there are many reasons. I’d like to suggest one. The silence, I think, can be taken as a subtle but powerful indictment of the false, ahistorical notion that America is a Christian nation. This is a myth many believe but it is false. America is not and has never been a Christian nation. Our history is the greatest argument for this fact. Again, American history is complex. The Bible certainly was used by abolitionists to fight slavery. But far more pervasive was the abuse of Scripture – by master and preacher alike – to defend slavery’s status quo. America is a very religious nation but is not and has never been a Christian nation.
Perhaps this is wrong, perhaps I am making more out of the silence than I should. Nevertheless, I do believe beginning the essay with this Scripture raises important questions for (American) Christians: What role have the Scriptures play in the history of America? What role has the Bible played in shaping our moral imaginations? What role ought the Bible have in structuring our life together? These are big and important questions. The answers are mixed and complex and beyond the scope of what we can tackle here.
Whether Coates intended as much, I think these questions are worth asking. In the end, I appreciate Coates’ restraint (if restraint is the right word). The Bible is as much as part of his heritage as anyone’s but I don’t think he is the Bible teacher we need. I think it’s also clear that he has little interest in assuming this kind of role. If, in fact, this biblical quote is meant as a kind of indictment of the Church and the nation, the judgment would be just and even, I think we could say, prophetic. That said, I don’t think Coates should be nor do I think he would want to be confused for a Christian prophet. This is not a distinction without a difference.
In any case, beginning with the Bible is a helpful challenge for Christian readers. The Bible is central to any thinking about reparations and Christians of every nation would do well to take the Bible more seriously in this regard. I will have more to say about what the Bible has to say about reparations when I interact with Kwon and Thompson’s book Reparations.
2) The Wealth Gap
Second, I want to point out what I found to be the most compelling evidence for the need for reparations: the wealth gap. The wealth gap, as Coates describes it, “puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution.” It is a kind of hard evidence, as it were.
So, what is the wealth gap? The wealth gap refers to enormous and egregious disparity in net wealth between White Americans and Black Americans (“net wealth” defined as the gross between assets and liabilities). According to data from the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finance, median net wealth of a White family was nearly 8 times as much as the median net wealth of a Black family - $188,200 compared to just $24,100.2
In the words of Coates: “The concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin.” Of course, the most recent data is more recent than Coates’ 2014 article but the historical data indicates that no progress has been made in bridging the gap for at least 70 years.3
Coates describes how the wealth gap was created and offers an image that powerfully captures our current situation. He writes this:
Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, “Never again.” But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us.
I find this image of credit card debt to be incredibly salient. The debt owed to Black Americans is like credit card debt.
One common misconception is that American has “solved” its racism problem with the abolition of slavery, unjust laws, and other discriminatory practices. This kind of thinking misunderstands of the nature of the injury, of the theft. The wrongs of the past are not righted simply by emancipation and making racist policies illegal. Abolishing these things is necessary but insufficient. The entrenchment of wealth inequality between Black and white Americans is evidence that these things are not enough to right the wrongs.
This is why the metaphor of credit card debt is so helpful. Credit card debt doesn’t simply go away when you stop spending. The balance needs to be paid or else it will grow. The same is true for the wealth gap.
The wealth gap has been engineered by American racism in its various forms. Even though many of the discriminatory practices are now illegal, the debt they accrued is still compounding. This is how it works. The longer we tarry, the larger the debt grows. It continues to compound and pass down from generation to generation.
I think Coates is correct when he says that “perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap.” The staggering and enduring gap between Black and white wealth is the result of denying Black people the opportunity to accumulate wealth through discrimination in education, employment, and housing sectors. The balance sheet of American history, the bottom line for Black Americans is written in red. The nature of wealth is such that the impact of America’s legacy of theft is passed down from generation-to-generation.
The wealth gap is an open, unhealed wound caused by American theft. That it has persisted so consistently for generations is an indication that all other attempts at repair have been insufficient and that something else, something more is required.
The enduring wealth gap makes a strong case for why reparations ought to be considered as part of the solution to heal the compounding wounds of American racism.
3) Don’t Laugh
The third and final thing I want to highlight here is what Mr. Coates was hoping to accomplish with his masterful essay.
As the title makes clear, Coates is writing to make the case for reparations. The case for reparations is really quite simple. For 250 year, Black Americans were plundered by slavery and the theft continued for 150 years as they were cut out from equal opportunities to generate, build, and eventually pass wealth on to their descendants. The attempted solutions thus far have failed to repair the wound and so reparations could help bind the national wound and should be considered. After 400 years of being robbed, Black Americans might be owed something more. That is the case for reparations in a nutshell.
But this argument is distinct from what he hoped to accomplish in making the case. In an interview in New York Magazine – five years after his essay was published – Coates reflects on what he was really attempting to do. His goal in writing was far less ambitious than you might think.
Coates’ hope was not to finally garner support for the perennially stalled bill H.R. 40 (Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act) or to persuade Americans to vote for a pro-reparations politician (do any exist?). His goal was not to actually make reparations a reality. Instead, it was to get people to stop laughing at the very idea.
Coates is a student of the American soul. He understands us enough to know that getting people to not immediately ridicule the idea of reparations is, if not the biggest, at least the first obstacle to making any progress. In the article, he describes why:
Part of that is because reparations is a Dave Chappelle skit. That’s what a lot of people think about, when they think of reparations. That polling [data suggests reparations are not popular] is not a natural, free-standing fact. That’s the result of people denigrating the idea repeatedly. When I wrote “The Case for Reparations,” my notion wasn’t that you could actually get reparations passed, even in my lifetime. My notion was that you could get people to stop laughing. My notion was you could actually have people say, “Oh, shit. This actually isn’t a crazy idea. This actually isn’t insane.” And then, once you got them to stop laughing, you could get them to start fighting. And so it doesn’t particularly surprise me that reparations is unpopular. A part of it being unpopular is the people who have the megaphone not taking it seriously at all.4
When I first read this, I was surprised. Eventually, I realized I was just naïve. Coates understands America better than most. He is no fool. Whether he is a pessimist or simply a realist, he understands the obstacles and realizes the possibility of reparations is a long game.
As I’ve reflected on his seemingly humble hopes for his remarkable essay, I’ve been reflecting on what this reveals about America. Why is our first instinct laughter? What might this tell us about ourselves?
Perhaps we laugh because of the logistics of it all. Surely reparations would be complicated to carry out. Who is eligible? How do you determine this? How much would they be owed? When would the debt finally be paid?
Perhaps it is related to the notion of responsibility. Here the question is not whether a wrong has been done, or a theft has happened. Instead, the question is to what degree people living today responsible for the actions of dead people in the past? Maybe the notion of being responsible for the sins of others is ridiculous.
Perhaps it’s about fear. What if our laughter is a mechanism for self-protection? What if it is a deflection? Do we ridicule the idea of reparations to avoid facing something we are terrified to face – that we are somehow participant in America’s long history of plundering? Are we afraid of what reparations might cost us?
Whatever the reasons our first instinct is mocking laughter, I do believe the tide is turning. Nearly a decade later, I think Coates’ essay is beginning to accomplish its purpose. Less people are laughing. More people are taking reparations seriously. More and more are wrestling with the all the questions reparations raises for us.
I want to end with why Coates thinks wrestling with these and similar questions about reparations is such a good thing:
…I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.
The reality of theft is that both the victim and the perpetrator – the robbed and the robber – are diminished. The plundering of Black Americans is a wrong that is still waiting to be righted. The longer America waits to repair the damage, the further she gets from becoming a nation than embodies its ideals.
Might it be possible that reparations are not such a ridiculous idea after all? Might it be that reparations are actually the only way America can grow into maturity?
I’d love to hear what you think.
St. Augustine, Letters 143.2. Calvin cites this passage in the Institutes of Christian Religion.
Neil Bhutta, Andrew C. Chang, Lisa J. Dettling, and Joanne W. Hsu with assistance from Julia Hewitt, “Disparities in Wealth by Race and Ethnicity in the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances,” September 28, 2020.
Moritz Kuhn, Moritz Schularick, and Ulrike I. Steins, “Income and Wealth Inequality in America, 1949-2016,” in Journal of Political Economy (vol. 128, no. 9, September 2020, pp. 3469-3519).
Eric Levitz, “Ta-Nehisi Coates is an Optimist Now: A conversation about race and 2020,” in New York Magazine, March 17, 2019.