Ta-Nehisi Coates The Case For Reparations Summary

The Case for Reparations Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer for the Atlantic, argues that the idea of reparations ought to have an important place in discussions of race for Americans in his ten-section article, The Case for Reparations. In this article, Coates uses several specific examples to describe how Jim Crow Laws influence black people’s experience in America and analyze black people’s unequal suffering, relating it with American history. And at last, Coates concludes that America should make reparations for African Americans. First of all, Coates shows African Americans’ unequal treatment throughout American history from pass to present. From the beginning, Coates argues that the virtues in America were founded on slavery. He states that

When the government and private banks failed, racial violence began when mobs destroyed black family homes and beat them up on streets. Eventually, black people fled their neighborhood, and made Chicago become the “Second Ghetto”. In the article, Coates talks about the story of Clyde Ross, a black man who fled worsening conditions in Mississippi to find jobs in Chicago. As many Americans dreamed of owning a home, Ross worked hard in order to earn money and support his family. However, the only way for black people to own a house in Chicago in the mid-twentieth century was to buy a house from predatory contract sellers, who charged huge rates with few legal protections for buyers. As a result, Ross had to find one more job to pay for the house. Not only Ross, but also Mattie Lewis, Ross’s neighbor, who also faced a similar situation of housing inequality. From the story of Ross and Lewis, Coates claims that the homebuyers of black people are getting ripped off, but they have to accept it, and the only way for black people to get a home is to get robbed by white

Black people and white Americans do not inhabit the same city, and there is a huge income gap between black people and white Americans. The income of Chicago’s white neighborhoods is almost three times that of its black neighborhoods. Coates declares that black families, regardless of income, are significantly less wealthy than white families, as an evidence the estimation from the Pew Research Center that he cites: “White households are worth roughly 20 times as much as black households, and that whereas only 15 percent of whites have zero or negative wealth, more than a third of blacks do.” (6) From the research, Coates emphasizes that black people live in the United States without safe surroundings, and they would face a series of problems in their lives such as a medical emergency, divorce and unemployment when financial calamity strikes. Without adequate protections for black people, many liberals think that racism is not an active concept, but as a relative of white poverty and inequality. America is built on the preferential treatment of white people, therefore white poverty will never be equal to black poverty and the negative foundation that America is built on, will always have a critical effect on black youth, and that’s what Coates points