People hear Ta-Nehisi Coates say he has a case for reparations and they think he wants every Black person in the United States to get cut a sweet, fat check, and maybe also a little postcard that says:
“Our bad! Sincerely, White People.”
But that idea is part of what Coates attacks when, for example, he recently attacked Bernie Sanders for not supporting reparations. He’s attacking an ahistorical public that understands what white folks’ve done to Black folks only as a nebulous, malformed ill of the past for which the repair is, so say its supporters:
“$$$ for everyone!”
He’s challenging the pervasive, persistent idea that racism is a thing we think rather than a thing we do and legislate and enact and enforce. The injury for which Coates seeks repair is not nebulous, nor is it malformed. It is as specific and targeted as would be its cure.
In “The Case for Reparations” (and elsewhere), Coates outlines specific policies, laws, corporate decisionmaking, and tangible actions that had specific effects on specific Black folks, the legacy of which continue to be felt today.
Coates does not simply want a rising economic tide to lift all Black boats. He demands, most of all, that the water level be raised beneath those Black boats left long ago to sink and settle.
But not that Coates is the authority on all this! Reading Coates’s work is like a survey course for something you could spend decades studying.
In other words, don’t just read “The Case for Reparations.” Listen to Michelle Alexander! Check out Nikole Hannah-Jones! Read Cedric Johnson! Better yet, read “The Half Has Never Been Told,” and “The American Slave Coast,” and “Empire of Cotton.” Read “Making the Second Ghetto,” and “Family Properties,” and “The Warmth of Other Suns.”
To read Coates is to see a library of heavy reading heaving against his paragraphs, begging you to read — and consider, and criticize, and debate, pitting historian against historian, critic against critic — so to better understand exactly why what he’s writing is important and indubitable and inevitably incomplete.