Coates Flashcards
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations” 1. What are reparations in the case of Coates’ article? What social wrongs are they supposed to address?
A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions. But we are not interested.
- What does the case of Belinda Royall illustrate about early attempts at reparations? ?
She was the first to show that demanding reperations worked. she showed that balck people do need to be repaid.
- What is the generally consistent response from the country regarding reparations?
But while the people advocating reparations have changed over time, the response from the country has remained virtually the same. “They have been taught to labor,” the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1891. “They have been taught Christian civilization, and to speak the noble English language instead of some African gibberish. The account is square with the ex-slaves.”
- How did “black plunder” and “white democracy” work together to begin modern America
America begins in black plunder and white democracy, two features that are not contradictory but complementary. “The men who came together to found the independent United States, dedicated to freedom and equality, either held slaves or were willing to join hands with those who did,” the historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote. “None of them felt entirely comfortable about the fact, but neither did they feel responsible for it. Most of them had inherited both their slaves and their attachment to freedom from an earlier generation, and they knew the two were not unconnected.”
