I predict that Ta-Nehisi Coates will win many awards for his latest piece making the case for reparations for the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and predatory housing policies. He’s right that the subject has become a taboo, largely because the first questions people ask are who should be paid and who should do the paying. I’d add to that a second problem. The way blacks were oppressed historically was that they were arbitrarily treated as a distinct class of citizens based on a subjective perception of their race. It didn’t matter if they were half-black, a quarter-black, or an eighth-black, so long as they looked recognizably African.
We’ve done away with that way of thinking, at least under the law. In order to institute some form of reparations, we’d probably have to reintroduce the same arbitrary standard to identify the people who are deserving of compensation.
It may be the case that there are still-living individuals who can demonstrate that they were the victims of, say, a predatory housing system that robbed them blind. But, then, the same case can be made for many of those who were robbed blind during the most recent housing boom.
I think if there were to be reparations, it wouldn’t be a cash transfer to individuals, but some kind of commitment to communities. Beyond the political difficulty of achieving a just settlement, it’s hard to even come up with a solution in an idealized world.
