The Case Against Reparations

If Between the World and Me was viewed as a book saturated with hopelessness, Coates’s most famous essay regarding reparation “The Case against Reparations”, regarding incarceration “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration”, and regarding the president “Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the Evidence of Things Unsaid” would most likely deem him a cynic. Coates begins The Case for Reparations by stating, “Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole”. This essay, stirred so much attention because for a while, no one has spoken in such a hopeless, despairing and bleak

In his essay, Coates refuses the idea of “hope” and delivers his message like a statistic report. He often uses personal anecdotes to make his messages more personal, thus enabling his readers to place themselves in the person’s shoes. Then Coates would go on and recount the gruesome or horrid mistreatment that person has gone through regardless how hurtful or painful these stories are. Furthermore, he substantiates his claims with painful statistic reports and numbers – numbers that pierces the black readers like swords. Tahiti Anyabwile in his essay “A Call for Hope in the Age of Mass Incarceration” states that “Coates fails his readership and fails to represent something vital about African Americans – his writing lacks hope”. Anyabwile states that “if incarceration pillages a person or family so completely, it’s difficult not to feel hopeless”. Yet by accurately describing the way mass incarceration robs a family, Coates is robbing these families of hope. The hope that they desperately gripe at daily and blacks have for the past hundreds of years. Without hope, the blacks lose motive

His accounts are real: his claims are backed with real life accounts, anecdotes as well as statistics suggesting the lopsided difference in living standard and income between an average black and an average white. He has experienced the “struggle” of what it was like living in the States as a black. The “struggle” that his son will undeniably experience and go through. Therefore, Coates’s concerns are simply rationalized as a father he is for the son that he has. He refuses to hide behind the naïve optimism and instead faces the painful reality to live this life of struggle. Short on solutions or much in the way of optimism regarding reparation and the long overdue justice to the black race; Coates’s works preach a gospel of brutal truths about race, and stresses the importance of acknowledging them as an aspiration in itself. Despite the fact of a black American president, despite the media focus on the protest against police killings, he sees no prospect of much change, at least not until America acknowledges the facts of its history. The act of articulating that feeling is, in a sense, the only hope that he offers Samori in his letter to him. The necessity is to understand the nature of the struggle, the way the land lies, and to be able to express it. “But I’m a writer. I have no responsibility to be hopeful” – Coates defending himself. As Coates claims, he is a writer who simply delivers his opinion and truth presented to him to the public. He