What Will Ta-Nehisi Coates' Reparations Articles Accomplish?

The realities of Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case for Reparations are beginning to sink in.

J. D. Vance: "Coates cherry-picks data to score emotional points instead of carefully building an argument for reparations."

Coates' intent is apparently to fix the blame rather than fix the problem. Vance again: "There’s no talk, however, of what to do now, how reparations would help, or why we ought to focus on settling an old score instead of charting a new course. ... But it must be said: breaking hearts is far easier than healing them."

Where one would expect specifics, Coates presents generalities. W. James Antle III:

But when it comes to what reparations would look like or how they would work, Coates has little to say beyond “we should support” John Conyers’ bill to study reparations. And while he insists the failure of this proposal to advance “suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential,” he doesn’t give us any reason to think he is talking about a workable policy that would tangibly improve people’s lives.

Coates waves away as irrelevant the most obvious questions: “Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay?” Many of us suspect these questions are ultimately unanswerable and would take an inquiry into reparations spearheaded by someone with Conyers’ politics as seriously as Coates would take a tea party investigation into Benghazi.

Coates repeatedly fails to make the argument for reparations. Vance:

After considering the victims of predatory lending (people who, by the way, later won a lawsuit), Coates notes that of all the recently vacant houses in Baltimore, 71 percent are in majority-black neighborhoods. The implication here is that banks unfairly targeted black people for foreclosure. Baltimore is 63 percent black, though. So this is largely demographics, not racism, at work. Coates again scores an emotional point. But if his goal is to show America owes reparations, then barely disproportionate vacancy statistics and a successful multimillion-dollar lawsuit by black homeowners don’t support his argument.

Coates fails to clarify what reparations would accomplish, or show how a reparations policy would be workable. Antle again:

When it comes to what reparations would look like or how they would work, Coates has little to say beyond “we should support” John Conyers’ bill to study reparations. And while he insists the failure of this proposal to advance “suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential,” he doesn’t give us any reason to think he is talking about a workable policy that would tangibly improve people’s lives.

/**************************************************/

The people of a country ought to fight to defend their laws as they would fight for their city's walls. - Heraclitus

There is another, more fundamental problem. Two types of Europeans came to America and settled there: The idealists and the adventurers. A previous post, The Liberal Founding, argues that the idealists were the ones who “transformed the world.” Coates doesn't seem to understand either the idealists or their principles. In Black Pathology Crowdsourced, he quotes a passage from Yoni Applebaum to the effect that the principles and values of a street subculture are equivalent to the principles and values of the American idea:

Culture of Poverty is a label attached to a wide array of behaviors. There are behaviors—physical assertiveness—well-suited to that environment that may tend to inhibit success elsewhere.

The problem is that such a culture is dysfunctional, not that civil society frowns on it. Where "physical assertiveness" prevails, the young and strong push everybody else around. Women, children, the elderly and the disabled are marginalized. Because social capital requires an atmosphere of cooperation and trust—so that people can work together—social capital itself never develops. "Physical assertiveness" is a major cause of poverty, but Coates clearly appears not to understand this. He thinks that when his fellow citizens celebrate the American Revolution on the Fourth of July, it is about national chauvinism (or as he sometimes calls it, "white supremacy"). Thus, in The Case for Reparations, Coates asserts: 

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.

Martin Luther King appealed to the principles of American ideals when he said, "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'" Coates dismisses the principles and rejects the idea that his fellow citizens might be deeply moved by the thought of liberty and equality and justice. To Coates this is just hypocritical, "denying the facts of our heritage." 

An earlier post argued that Coates does not see a society of equal, rights-bearing citizens, 

"caught in an inescapable network of mutuality," but a polity irrevocably divided between oppressed race and oppressor race. "Once that fact is acknowledged," Kevin D. Williamson suggests "then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress."

If the mind behind "The Case for Reparations" is one which cannot be moved by ideals which have inspired the rest of the world, that may be a cause, more for pity, than exasperation.