Just Don't Call It 'Reparations'
But what is to be done? Here Coates' robust case for reparations turns squishy with a strikingly modest plea. He endorses a bill that Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, has repeatedly introduced for 25 years to study the issue and offer "appropriate remedies."
Having watched Conyers' bill repeatedly fail to make it even to the House floor for debate, I don't expect it to have better chances in the foreseeable future.
As a result, I finished Coates' essay more committed than ever to my long-held view that the first step toward repair of the damage left by slavery is to stop calling it "reparations." The word that does less these days to rally black support than to enflame white opposition.
Rush Limbaugh knows. Although President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act makes no mention of race, the right-wing talk show star denounced it in early 2010 not only as redistribution from rich to poor but also as "a civil rights bill... reparations, whatever you want to call it." Whatever. I call it playing the race card.
Such talk helped set the stage for a later revolt by 26 states, largely controlled by Republicans, that refused to participate in the health plan's expansion of Medicaid, the medical insurance program for the poor. That refusal, a New York Times analysis has found, left more than half of the nation's uninsured low-wage workers -- including two-thirds of its low-wage uninsured single mothers and African Americans -- uninsured.
The uninsured include hundreds of thousands of cooks, cashiers and nurses' aides. It is no wonder that talk of slavery reparations has faded. Support for low-income workers of all races needs repair right now.
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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.
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