Reparations: The Worst Fallacies are those that Trash Liberal Principles

In his essay "Dragon Slayers,"* Jerald Walker recounts a conversation with "a man who wanted me to hate him. I should hate all whites, he felt. ... 'How about slavery,' he asked. I explained, as politely as I could, that I had not been a slave. 'But you feel its effects,' he snapped. 'Racism, discrimination, and prejudice will always be a problem for you in this country. White people,' he insisted, 'are your oppressors.' ... 'After all,' I continued, 'slaves and their immediate descendants were by and large heroic, not pathetic, or I wouldn't be standing here.'The man was outraged. 'You're absolving them of responsibility, of the obligation to atone for past and present wrongs.'"

When I saw this passage yesterday, I realized that Ta-Nehisi Coates is presenting a concealed demand for atonement in The Case for Reparations:

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. ... What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is making essentially religious accusations and demands—"guilt," and atonement—which have no place in politics. Here is an outline of the arguments against Mr. Coates' fallacies:

• Courts determine guilt and punish the guilty. The political process does not.
• A reformer may ask fellow citizens to right wrongs, but not to atone for them.
• There is no political process which demands atonement or which enacts laws having to do with atonement.
• If there are laws inferring guilt from benefit, cite them. Absent evidence, have no doubt: Benefit is not guilt.
• One cannot otherwise be guilty for what someone else has done. Just as (Randall Kennedy notes) "I cannot feel pride in some state of affairs that is independent of my contribution to it," one likewise cannot be guilty for some past state of affairs that is independent of one's contribution to it. Therefore guilt does not inherit. There is no guilt—"white" or otherwise—for ancestors who owned slaves. There is regret. And sorrow.

Guilt does not inherit. Otherwise our attitude toward each other would be rife with baseless accusations. The law of averages being what it is, we all have ancestors, in many cases more recent than Washington and Jefferson, who were murderers. We hold ourselves entirely innocent of our ancestors' heinous felonies, and rightly so. Reality does not work that way.

Benefit is not guilt. Everyday life confers a tangled web of thousands of benefits—and burdens—relative to other individuals, groups, and nations. In most cases these benefits are independent of our wishes or our actions; we did not seek them nor can we avoid them. One could prove any sort of obligation by pointing to the correctly selected benefit. But an argument which can prove anything in actuality proves nothing. For example, it is practically impossible to live in a modern nation without making purchases of food or clothes sold by employees who are not making a living wage. To condemn ourselves for this does not make things better for anyone. Better the quest to right wrongs.

Abby Ohlheiser, in You Should Read the Case for Reparations, cites Ta-Nehisi Coates' assertion of "the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy." But discrimination is not supremacy. (Nor is advantage. Or benefit.) For example, a passage at Time.com documents society-wide discrimination by Temporarily Able Bodied people: "Another six months of Monica, have mercy; I don't care if it harelips the Governor." Would anyone take this as "proving" that "normal supremacy" is, as Mr. Coates claims concerning "white supremacy," "a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it?" If, as is likely, this form of disability discrimination was as widespread in Washington and Jefferson's time as slavery, could one conclude, following Mr. Coates' pattern, that the nation was "erected on a foundation of [able] supremacy"? In both cases, the conclusion exceeds the reach of the argument.

For that matter, what of Ta-Nehisi Coates' insistence that the Framers, and the principles of their Constitution, were hypocritical? He repeatedly charges that the fact that some of the Founders had slaves excludes the possibility that America was the first, and perhaps only, nation founded upon ideas rather than ethnicity. To claim that the character of the person who presents a principled argument, refutes the argument and denies the principle, is classic ad hominem.

According to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who rejects celebrating America as "the great democratizer," the eminent Historian Fritz Stern was wrong to hail the creation of his nation as an inspiration to the world:

“America's noblest traditions,” I insisted, often defined as a state of mind—had “transformed the world . . . [I]ts greatest victory has been the American Revolution; its greatest pronouncement, the Declaration of Independence; its greatest bulwark, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.”

The perfidy of  Ta-Nehisi Coates' mode of slanted example shows most clearly in the way he neglected to research The Great Emancipator. Lincoln thoroughly and devastatingly refutes Mr. Coates' claim that the intent of the Founders was to create "an empire based on slaveholding and white supremacy." Lincoln used textual analysis to demonstrate that the Founders were confronted by "the necessities arising from [slavery's] existence." He goes on to show that they carefully crafted the Constitution, therefore, to accommodate slavery (for the time being) without legitimizing it:

It is easy to demonstrate that "our fathers, who framed this Government under which we live," looked on slavery as wrong, and so framed it and everything about it as to square with the idea that it was wrong, so far as the necessities arising from its existence permitted.  ... If additional proof is wanted it can be found in the phraseology of the Constitution.  When men are framing a supreme law and chart of government, to secure blessings and prosperity to untold generations yet to come, they use language as short and direct and plain as can be found, to express their meaning  In all matters but this of slavery the framers of the Constitution used the very clearest, shortest, and most direct language.  But the Constitution alludes to slavery three times without mentioning it once  The language used becomes ambiguous, roundabout, and mystical.  They speak of the "immigration of persons," and mean the importation of slaves, but do not say so.  In establishing a basis of representation they say "all other persons," when they mean to say slaves--why did they not use the shortest phrase? In providing for the return of fugitives they say "persons held to service or labor." If they had said slaves it would have been plainer, and less liable to misconstruction.  Why didn't they do it? We cannot doubt that it was done on purpose.  Only one reason is possible, and that is supplied us by one of the framers of the Constitution--and it is not possible for man to conceive of any other--they expected and desired that the system would come to an end, and meant that when it did, the Constitution should not show that there ever had been a slave in this good free country of ours. (Emphasis added)

The Crafters of Ta-Nehisi Coates' nation, and the Framers of his Constitution, "expected and desired that the system [of slavery] would come to an end." Ta-Nehisi Coates asserts the contrary over and over again in the two "reparations" articles. His total silence concerning the way Lincoln obliterates this libel is a fatal omission. It calls in doubt Ta-Nehisi Coates' competence as a writer, and his intellectual probity.


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(*) In The Best American Essays 2007, p. 281 - 82

Fallacies and Sweeping Generalizations in Ta-Nehisi Coates' Repudiation of The Liberal Founding

However, the greatest problem with historical revisionism is not its lack of objectivity but its lack of integrity. History is always being revised as new data come to light and new generations ask new questions. But ''revisionism'' has a characteristic trait: it is typically in the business of denying the obvious and uncovering conspiracies. ...
The bad faith of all such ultra-revisionist undertakings lies in a sustained preference for a priori reasoning over human testimony. ... Nothing can ever count as evidence against such assertions, because they do not rest on evidence in the first place. - Tony Judt, Writing History, Facts Optional, [NYT] April 13, 2000

The first post on this weblog was The Liberal Founding. I quote from that post to suggest a context for Ta-Nehisi Coates' arguments that African American reparations are a pressing policy issue:

Fritz Stern was born in Breslau, Germany in 1926, and moved with his family to the United States in 1938 in response to the rising anti-semitism of the Third Reich. ... [His] Op-Ed New York Times September 4, 1988 (in response to George H.W. Bush’s derogatory use of ‘liberal’) [argued]:

Liberalism—one of “America's noblest traditions,” I insisted, often defined as a state of mind—had “transformed the world . . . [I]ts greatest victory has been the American Revolution; its greatest pronouncement, the Declaration of Independence; its greatest bulwark, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.” It had “stood for freedom against tyranny. At its best . . . a force for change and progress, seeking the institutional defense of decency.” [...] In America's liberal premises the world had seen “the best promise of the West.”

In The Case for Reparations, Mr. 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.

A number of well-intentioned public commentators have looked at this and written, in effect, mea culpa. They shouldn't. This is a confused, misleading, and ultimately dishonest passage. Mr. Coates commits the classic fallacy of attempting to refute an argument by impugning the character of those who present it. In celebrating the American Revolution we celebrate a wonderful transformation of the world in the model of a free and open society. As Thomas Paine wrote, for all their personal flaws, the Founders created "a world":

I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world either to their folly or their baseness.

This passage also illustrates a misleading technique which is found throughout the "white supremacy" and "reparations" articles: sweeping generalizations which conflate anecdotal, particular instances with the general. Most of us who celebrate the Declaration and Constitution and their principles do not "wave a Confederate flag"; we deplore it. A further example of Coatesian sweeping generalization:

The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.

Washington and Jefferson created a nation which is a living example of the principles of freedom, equality, and human dignity. To celebrate their example is not hypocritical. We celebrate Martin Luther King for effecting real improvement in the human condition. It is not hypocritical that we maintain a kind silence about his serial adulteries. As with King, so with Washington, Jefferson and the rest of the Founders: the good they achieved far outweighed their flaws.


As for Mr. Coates' suggestion that the nation founded on the Fourth is not a great democratizer, again he has, throughout these articles, loaded the deck and slanted his examples. In Ta-Nehisi Coates vs. Lincoln and MLK on "White Supremacy" this weblog cited Lincoln's examples of action which the Founders themselves took to set in process the end of American slavery: "In 1794, they prohibited an out-going slave-trade," Lincoln wrote," ---that is, the taking of slaves FROM the United States to sell." Further citations by Lincoln documented actions taken by the Founders in 1798, 1800, 1803, 1807, and 1820. Mr. Coates does not cite this because it does not fit his sweeping indictment: "A crime that implicates the entire American people." (Emphasis added)

Nor does he particularly credit the "great democratizer" for an agonizing civil war, fought to prevent the extension of slavery to new territories, and eventually to end slavery once and for all. Ta-Nehisi Coates also does not give due notice to the way that what he above describes as a crime-implicated American people fulfilled Martin Luther King's "American dream" in achieving the civil rights revolution of the last century.

In short, through a series of slanted examples, sweeping generalizations, and invalid inferences, Mr. Coates rejects, not only the Founding, but apparently its liberal principles as well. Instead of gladness in well-doing as we remember the Fourth of July, we should experience repentance and sorrow, for the nation as he sees it was conceived in sin. Despite the freeing of the slaves and the Civil Rights Ace, it has continued to be sinful and, Ta-Nehisi Coates prophesies, will because of its inherent criminality keep right on sinning: "An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future." (Emphasis added)

Did you think that the purpose of the money spent in reparations was to improve the condition of poor and disadvantaged people? No, according to Mr. Coates: the purpose is absolution: "What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt."

What is most disturbing in all this is not the bad faith, bad writing, and bad history, but the way Ta-Nehisi Coates imputes racial inferiority. Mr. Coates is not talking about "the entire American people," even though he says he is. He is engaging in a reckless dispensation of guilt: "the sins of the past," "the sins of the present," "the certain sins of the future," and "white guilt."

Ta-Nehisi Coates is not talking about a multi-racial society, "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."

I'll let a companion of the Founders have the last say: "my solemn belief of your cause is, that it is hellish and damnable, and, under that conviction, every thinking man's heart must fail him."

Article in The Atlantic Seems to Cultivate Guilt in order to Leverage Policy

If one looks at the most admirable efforts by activists to overcome racial oppression in the United States, one finds people who yearn for justice, not merely for the advancement of a particular racial group. - Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy, My Race Problem—and Ours

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” - Martin Luther King, Letter from Birmingham Jail

The purpose of public policy in this area can be one of two things. The first is a program focused on trying to improve in real terms the lives of those who are poorly off and those born into circumstances that are likely to lead to their being poorly off adults, proceeding with the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that such programs will disproportionately benefit black Americans, as they should. The second option is a symbolic political process designed to confer a degree of psychic satisfaction on relatively well-off men and women such as Ta-Nehisi Coates. - Kevin D. Williamson, The Case against Reparations 

A personal note: I had always, without particular examination, considered myself to belong to the school of American thought which opposed racism and supported a humanitarian safety net. But sometime around the beginning of the last decade of the last century, I began to realize that many who claimed to belong to that school of thought were telling me, White is bad, male is bad, European is bad. And I began seeking a more liberal outlook, one which did not ask me to practice self-hatred. As seen below, “white guilt” is still alive and well in the pages of a national magazine.*

There are two forms which a citizen's campaign can take in American politics: reform, and revenge. One calls on fellow citizens to take action for the public good. The other seeks to advance one segment of the public, which is valorized; and to adversely affect another segment of the public, which is called out for its sins.**
 
Ta-Nehisi Coates' article in The Atlantic, The Case for Reparations, has been widely praised by well-intended people as a fresh approach to the relationship between the United States and one of the many ethnicities which comprise its population. They believe it to be a worthy addition to other American civil rights movements, such as that which gave American women the right to vote, and the great crusade by Martin Luther King which led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Such crusades act in the name of what George Washington, in the Farewell Address, called "the public good." Their language is universalist, unifying, and uniting: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” King declared. And President Barack Hussein Obama observed, concerning his second inauguration, "we're all in this together."

Mr. Coates' language is radically different from the language of the great reformers:

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. ... What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

Black nationalists, “white supremacy,” white guilt. One can see Mr. Coates' faction, and another faction which appears to be damnably evil. That faction, rather confusingly, appears to be "the entire American people":

The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.

At this point the question must be raised, can an argument which is in many ways incoherent and self-contradictory be considered persuasive? Mr. Coates appears to be asking for altruism—voluntary granting of possibly trillions of dollars in reparations—from people of intentional bad faith. He indicts "the entire American people," among whom his own ethnicity is included. That is self-contradictory. Is he also including Hispanics, Native Americans, and East Asians in the wickedness "fundamental to America?" Are these other minorities also implicated in the "crime" of supremacy he describes above? [PM Carpenter retorts: "I want all my brothers and sisters of other Native-American blood to receive same. In lieu of that, cash will do. Lots of it."]

Kevin D. Williamson, in a splendidly argued post, suggests that Mr. Coates' hidden argument is concealed tribalism: My interests are inseparable from my race, and irrevocably opposed to yours:

A racial disadvantage is only one of many kinds of disadvantages that can be inherited — why should it be the one around which we organize ourselves? ... But dealing with that reality inescapably entails treating people as individuals, and treating people as individuals makes reparations morally and intellectually impossible — even if we accept in toto Mr. Coates’s argument that the brutal imposition of white-supremacist policies is the entire basis for the relative social positions of blacks and whites in the United States in 2014. Which is to say: Even if we accept the facts of aggregate advantage and disadvantage with their roots in historical injustice, the aggregate cannot be converted into the collective inasmuch as neither advantage nor disadvantage is universal on either side nor linked to a straightforward chain of causality. Some blacks are born into college-educated, well-off households, and some whites are born to heroin-addicted single mothers, and even the totality of racial crimes throughout American history does not mean that one of these things matters and one does not.

Once that fact is acknowledged, 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.

Mr. Coates' position seems to be that only black people's disadvantages and poverty matter, because they come from a moral sin which must be punished—the moral sin of "the entire American people." This faux moralism obliterates all other considerations. One of these considerations is that disadvantage and poverty, which liberal concern for the public good should cause us to want to remedy, are not solely or even primarily, when all of us are considered, confined to Mr. Coates' people, but to all the races of the United States.

A policy which leaves everyone out except one's own in-group does not seek justice. It seeks exceptional status (as his reference to black nationalists may suggest). Randall Kennedy argued, in My Race Problem—and Ours:

Unless inhibited, every person and group will tend toward beliefs and practices that are self-aggrandizing. This is certainly true of those who inherit a dominant status. But it is also true of those who inherit a subordinate status. Surely one of the most striking features of human dynamics is the alacrity with which those who have been oppressed will oppress whomever they can once the opportunity presents itself. Because this is so, it is not premature to worry about the possibility that blacks or other historically subordinated groups will abuse power to the detriment of others.

 Mr. Coates portrays his argument as "healing," but sets his own faction against "the entire American people." He describes the American people as indelibly insistent on a crime, “white supremacy,” but expects the same people to be generous, altruistic, and public-spirited in granting reparations. He has persuaded many well-meaning commentators that his article is in the tradition of reform arising out of the spirit of "we the people," but uses a language of condemnation, guilt, bad faith, crime and enmity utterly alien to that tradition. His is the language of confusion, incoherence, and self-contradiction: No one should be persuaded by it.

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(*)According to this doctrine, America had been responsible for numerous crimes and misdeeds through its history for which it deserved punishment and chastisement. White Americans had enslaved blacks and committed genocide against Native Americans. They had oppressed women and tyrannized minority groups, such as the Japanese who had been interned in camps during World War II. They had been harsh and unfeeling toward the poor. By our greed, we had despoiled the environment and were consuming a disproportionate share of the world's wealth and resources. We had coddled dictators abroad and violated human rights out of our irrational fear of communism. [...The punitive left] sought to cultivate guilt in order to leverage policy. [...We should not] "accept the notion that we can only make a better world for others by moving backwards ourselves." - James Piereson "Punitive Liberalism" June 28, 2004
(**)There is a model for the second, us-vs-them approach, but it is not a democratic one. The Communist Manifesto ends: "Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains."


The previous article on this weblog, Ta-Nehisi Coates vs. Lincoln and MLK on "White Supremacy", documented Abraham Lincoln's extensive refutation of Coates' charge that the United States was founded on the Original Sin of intentional slavery. As an Addendum, John McWhorter's observations may be apropos:

Take even two random years a good while ago now. In 2001, a traveling museum exhibit of the Henrietta Marie slave-ship artifacts was launched and broke attendance records in 20 cities, while at a centennial celebration of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, organizers highlighted the racially discriminatory side of the original event. ... in York, Pennsylvania, to counter a white supremacist group that had travelled there to demonstrate, 400 people, white and black, held a unity rally. One could go on, year by year.

Despite frequent claims that America “doesn’t want to talk about race,” we talk about it 24/7 amidst ringing declamations against racism on all forms. ... And let’s not forget recent major release films such as The Help, 12 Years a Slave, and The Butler.

Can we really say that these are signs of a nation in denial about race, racism, and its history?

Yet for writers like Coates, somehow none of this is enough. A shoe has yet to drop. We remain an “America that looks away,” “ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates vs. Lincoln and MLK on "White Supremacy"

Coates' argument [appears to be] that an eradicable American wish to enslave underlies "white supremacy." - Vide infra

Martin Luther King ... rejected the suggestion of white group guilt implied by Coates' "white supremacy nation" meme. - Vide infra

The earliest Congress, under the constitution, took the same view of slavery. They hedged and hemmed it in to the narrowest limits of necessity. - Lincoln, on the Founders' moves to achieve the end of slavery

In 1807, in apparent hot haste, they passed the law, nearly a year in advance to take effect the first day of 1808—the very first day the constitution would permit—prohibiting the African slave trade by heavy pecuniary and corporal penalties. - Lincoln, ibid.

In today's article The Case for Reparations: An Intellectual Autopsy, Ta-Nehisi Coates continues asserting that "white supremacy" is the true story of the United States' founding and history:

When I wrote opposing reparations I was about halfway through my deep-dive into the Civil War. I roughly understood then that the Civil War—the most lethal conflict in American history—boiled down to the right to raise an empire based on slaveholding and white supremacy. What had not yet clicked for me was precisely how essential enslavement was to America, that its foundational nature explained the Civil War's body count. ...
In fact there are people who don't "have to prep Sunday to Sunday, to get into a good high school." But they tend to live in neighborhoods that have historically excluded children with names like Dejanellie. Why is that? Housing policy. What are the roots of our housing policy? White supremacy. What are the roots of white supremacy in America? Justification for enslavement. ...
The final piece of this was the uptick in cultural pathology critiques extending from the White House on down. There is massive, overwhelming evidence for the proposition that white supremacy is the only thing wrong with black people. There is significantly less evidence for the proposition that culture is a major part of what's wrong with black people. But we don't really talk about white supremacy. We talk about inequality, vestigial racism, and culture.

Oddly enough, Abraham Lincoln's opponents as he sought the presidency had a similar argument. The Founders, they said, meant the United States to be a slaveholding nation in perpetuity. Lincoln wrote of the plantation owners' denial of the principle of equality in the Declaration:

The principles of Jefferson ["all men are created equal," etc.] are the definitions and axioms of free society.  And yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of success.  One dashingly calls them "glittering generalities." Another bluntly calls them "self-evident lies."  And others insidiously argue that they apply to "superior races."

As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in earlier days:

On the eve of War, Alexander Stephens, vice-president of the Confederacy explicitly dismissed [the] Jeffersonian view of slavery: ...

The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically.

It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away.  ...

Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. …  Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2011/05/in-defense-of-slavery/239719/

 
Coates seems not to have mentioned any of Lincoln's powerful arguments against the "white supremacy" position. In his Peoria Speech, Lincoln cited numerous instances in which the Founders, sometimes "in apparent hot haste," began the work of dismantling slavery:

The argument of "Necessity" was the only argument they ever admitted in favor of slavery; and so far, and so far only as it carried them, did they ever go. They found the institution existing among us, which they could not help; and they cast blame upon the British King for having permitted its introduction. BEFORE the constitution, they prohibited its introduction into the north-western Territory---the only country we owned, then free from it. AT the framing and adoption of the constitution, they forbore to so much as mention the word "slave" or "slavery" in the whole instrument. In the provision for the recovery of fugitives, the slave is spoken of as a "PERSON HELD TO SERVICE OR LABOR." In that prohibiting the abolition of the African slave trade for twenty years, that trade is spoken of as "The migration or importation of such persons as any of the States NOW EXISTING, shall think proper to admit," &c. These are the only provisions alluding to slavery. Thus, the thing is hid away, in the constitution, just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time. Less than this our fathers COULD not do; and NOW [MORE?] they WOULD not do. Necessity drove them so far, and farther, they would not go. But this is not all. The earliest Congress, under the constitution, took the same view of slavery. They hedged and hemmed it in to the narrowest limits of necessity.

In 1794, they prohibited an out-going slave-trade---that is, the taking of slaves FROM the United States to sell.

In 1798, they prohibited the bringing of slaves from Africa, INTO the Mississippi Territory---this territory then comprising what are now the States of Mississippi and Alabama. This was TEN YEARS before they had the authority to do the same thing as to the States existing at the adoption of the constitution.

In 1800 they prohibited AMERICAN CITIZENS from trading in slaves between foreign countries---as, for instance, from Africa to Brazil.

In 1803 they passed a law in aid of one or two State laws, in restraint of the internal slave trade.

In 1807, in apparent hot haste, they passed the law, nearly a year in advance to take effect the first day of 1808---the very first day the constitution would permit---prohibiting the African slave trade by heavy pecuniary and corporal penalties.

In 1820, finding these provisions ineffectual, they declared the trade piracy, and annexed to it, the extreme penalty of death. While all this was passing in the general government, five or six of the original slave States had adopted systems of gradual emancipation; and by which the institution was rapidly becoming extinct within these limits.

Thus we see, the plain unmistakable spirit of that age, towards slavery, was hostility to the PRINCIPLE, and toleration, ONLY BY NECESSITY.

Remember that Coates' argument above was that an eradicable American wish to enslave underlies "white supremacy":

What are the roots of our housing policy? White supremacy. What are the roots of white supremacy in America? Justification for enslavement.

Lincoln utterly denied the position that a wish to degrade, debase, and enslave another people was the hidden essence of the Founding.

As John McCormack wrote:

In Lincoln's famous 1860 Cooper Union speech, he noted that of the 39 framers of the Constitution, 22 had voted on the question of banning slavery in the new territories. Twenty of the 22 voted to ban it, while another one of the Constitution's framers--George Washington--signed into law legislation enforcing the Northwest Ordinance that banned slavery in the Northwest Territories. At Cooper Union, Lincoln also quoted Thomas Jefferson, who had argued in favor of Virginia emancipation: "It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation, and deportation, peaceably, and in such slow degrees, as that the evil will wear off insensibly...."

Turning to Martin Luther King, the great warrior against racial discrimination rejected the suggestion of white group guilt implied by Coates' "white supremacy nation" meme. From a post on this weblog last year:

One answer is suggested by the example of Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights leader said several things ... He said, "Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust." He did not draw a distinction between one group of humans and another. "God is not merely interested in the freedom of brown men, yellow men, red men and black men," King said. "He is interested in the freedom of the whole human race." From such a perspective the problem with theories of group guilt is that it divides King's "human race" into two separate, unequal categories, one part burdened by accusation and shame, the other indignant, resentful, and inclined to feel justified in seeking retribution.

In seeking reparations.