Coates: Hello Mr. Williamson. Please allow me to skip over any pleasantries and directly address the final claim of your paper. That “The people to whom reparations were owed are long dead; our duty is to the living, and to generations yet to come, and their interests are best served by liberty and prosperity, not by moral theater.” I can wrap my head around the concept of truly equal liberty and prosperity as a way by which moral reparations may be made, but these actions would cause just what you have claimed them not to be – moral theater. The American black populace would continue being trodden upon through the education system, through the economic system, and through the incarceration system. Supposed liberty and equality have been proposed from the time of Lincoln. Every freed man was guaranteed a 40 acres and a mule then, just as every black child and every white child today are told they are equals and can become whatever they want to be as they grow up. Historically, holding the belief that this will simply result through the goodwill of the white populace which controls the country’s present black and white segregated states, is unsound.

 

Williamson: Mr. Coates, and it is of your belief that converting to a system of radical racial apportionment will simply resolve this issue, which is a deeply rooted economic and political one? Your article was intelligently written, and moving to read through, however it fails to hold up to questioning from a present day perspective on the issue. I agree with there being a perilous cycle at work here, one which whereby controlling for income [paraphrased from the article] blacks are far more risk averse fiscally than are whites. But according to this logic, white women are proportionately equally risk averse fiscally when compared to white men. This clearly distinguishes that there is an issue not with individuals within either of these groups, but rather within the system that made them this way.

 

In your claim that sites Lyndon Johnson saying “Negro poverty is not white poverty” your claim on the basis of concentrations of poor minorities and lack of upward economic mobility by Blacks, is that “Reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same”. This draws that conclusion that a significant factor behind the present inequality can be traced back to present day white supremacism. I would argue that not only is this the present cause of strife, that even if it were there are much more pressing and immediate causes. Inequality of care and of representation under the law are what hold back black advancement towards equality. “Black households saw stronger income growth than did white households during the Reagan boom, and from 1990 to 2000, Census figures report aggregate growth in the black median household almost twice that of white households, 23 percent in constant dollars for blacks vs. 12 percent for whites. Had those trends continued, the racial difference in median income would have been wiped out in about 40 years” [from Williamson’s article] The reasoning for these trends not continuing had nothing to do with the black public; it had everything to do with crooked politics enacted from capitol hill. There is no single economic factor, be it unequal upbringing, unequal educations, nor unavailability of jobs which prevent the black American class from growing prosperous.

How then do you justify this growth, and what is it you think that has halted this progress forward? And how do you think reparations will reinstate growth like this moving forward?

Coates:“What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.”

And in terms of culture and economics, one need look no further than the nation of Israel. Its very creation was the results of reparations by the western world following WW2. Land from the British and capital from Germany for the atrocities they were put through. “Israel’s GNP tripled during the 12 years of the agreement. The Bank of Israel attributed 15 percent of this growth, along with 45,000 jobs, to investments made with reparations money. But … the impact went far beyond that. Reparations “had indisputable psychological and political importance”.