Just Don't Call It 'Reparations'
"Have you heard of Irish amnesia?," a jolly Irish-American friend once joked. "It's when you forget everything but the grudges."
Indeed, I responded, a lot of us black folks can identify with that: We forget everything but our "40 acres and a mule."
That, in case you haven't heard, is the legendary promise that was made to freed slaves but seldom carried out beyond some truncated efforts by Major General William Tecumseh Sherman and the Freedmen's Bureau.
A century and a half after the Civil War, talk of slavery reparations has faded. Since the original victims and perpetrators of what antebellum southerners politely called "peculiar institution" have long since passed away, even die-hard activists sharply disagree on actual damages or possible remedies.
Yet The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates has revived that conversation with a new angle. In "The Case for Reparations," a provocative 18-page cover story in the magazine's June issue, the senior editor and blogger focuses less on slavery than on its legacy, particularly the trickery and policy choices that systematically denied equal protections and opportunities to descendants of slavery.
After Ku Klux Klan terrorism, political disenfranchisement and Jim Crow segregation as Reconstruction collapsed in the 1870s, he recounts, along came widespread exclusion from labor unions and denial of health, education, welfare and Social Security benefits, even by Franklin D. Roosevelt's progressive New Deal.
Later came low-interest FHA and G.I. Bill home loan benefits that helped veterans build America's post-World War II middle class but were largely denied to black veterans as government policy reflected and even promoted restrictive "housing covenants," a since-outlawed clause in the deed that limits the sale of the property to white Christians.
In fact, the practice of "redlining" black neighborhoods out of conventional mortgage and insurance benefits began with federal policy, Coates recounts, "selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it insured be covered by a restrictive covenant."
How well I know. As a young reporter in the 1970s, I covered the consequences of those racially biased policies in such impoverished Chicago communities as North Lawndale. There Coates profiles residents who organized against mortgage redlining and unscrupulous home-sale contracts as the gap between black and white home ownership and wealth accumulation widened.
Coates' statistics and personal stories offer a spirited rebuttal to those who use the "My family didn't own any slaves" argument to claim racial innocence. A brisk tailwind of white privilege endured in American society long past the Civil War, whether its beneficiaries notice it or not.
...continued
(c) 2014 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
