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026267f
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Won't reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say - that American propserity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.
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black-history
institutionalized-racism
reparations
us-history
wealth
wealth-creation
wealth-gap
wealth-management
white-guilt
whiteness
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6066335
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In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land values at tends of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism.
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american-history
black-history
institutional-oppression
institutionalized-racism
kleptocracy
land-ownership
slave-economy
us-history
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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26fea1b
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When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible.
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franklin-roosevelt
institutionalized-racism
racism-in-america
roosevelt
social-security
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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364dc79
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t can be objected that I am speaking of political freedom in spiritual terms, but the political institutions of any nation are always menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of that nation. We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know, and the American dream has therefore become something much more closely resembling a nightmare, on the private, domestic, and international levels. Privately, we cannot stand our lives and dare not examine them; domestically, we take no responsibility for (and no pride in) what goes on in our country; and, internationally, for many millions of people, we are an unmitigated disaster.
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compassion
freedom
institutionalized-racism
politics
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James Baldwin |
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47851e8
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"The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards' code of ethics warned that "a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood ... any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values." A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesireables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters - and "a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites." The federal government concurred. It was the How Owners' Loan Corporation, not a private trade association, that pioneered the practice of redlining, selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it insured be covered by a restrictive covenant - a clause in the deed forbidding the sale of the property to anyone other than whites. Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods. "For perhaps the first time, the federal government embraced the discriminatory attitudes of the marketplace," the historian Kenneth R. Jackson wrote in his 1985 book, Crabgrass Frontier, a history of suburbanization. "Previously, prejudices were personalized and individualized; FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy. Whole areas of cities were declared ineligible for loan guarantees." Redlining was not officially outlawed until 1968, by the Fair Housing Act. By then the damage was done - and reports of redlining by banks have continued."
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black-history
discrimination
housing
housing-discrimination
housing-loans
institutionalized-racism
loans
mortgage
mortgages
property
real-estate
real-estate-history
redlining
segregation
us-history
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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14d1743
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The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter.
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hr-40
institutionalized-racism
prejudice
racism
reparations
slavery
slavery-in-the-united-states
white-guilt
whiteness
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0273b98
|
Kids in North Lawndale need not be confused about their prospects: Cook County's Juvenile Temporary Detention Center sits directly adjacent to the neighborhood.
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chicago
institutionalized-racism
reparations
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |