Just Don't Call It 'Reparations'
by Clarence Page
"Have you heard of Irish amnesia?," a jolly Irish-American friend once joked. "It's when you forget everything but the grudges."
Indeed, I responded, a lot of us black folks can identify with that: We forget everything but our "40 acres and a mule."
That, in case you haven't heard, is the legendary promise that was made to freed slaves but seldom carried out beyond some truncated efforts by Major General William Tecumseh Sherman and the Freedmen's Bureau.
A century and a half after the Civil War, talk of slavery reparations has faded. Since the original victims and perpetrators of what antebellum southerners politely called "peculiar institution" have long since passed away, even die-hard activists sharply disagree on actual damages or possible remedies.
Yet The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates has revived that conversation with a new angle. In "The Case for Reparations," a provocative 18-page cover story in the magazine's June issue, the senior editor and blogger focuses less on slavery than on its legacy, particularly the trickery and policy choices that systematically denied equal protections and opportunities to descendants of slavery.
After Ku Klux Klan terrorism, political disenfranchisement and
Later came low-interest FHA and
In fact, the practice of "redlining" black neighborhoods out of conventional mortgage and insurance benefits began with federal policy,
How well I know. As a young reporter in the 1970s, I covered the consequences of those racially biased policies in such impoverished
But what is to be done? Here
Having watched Conyers' bill repeatedly fail to make it even to the House floor for debate, I don't expect it to have better chances in the foreseeable future.
As a result, I finished
Such talk helped set the stage for a later revolt by 26 states, largely controlled by Republicans, that refused to participate in the health plan's expansion of
The uninsured include hundreds of thousands of cooks, cashiers and nurses' aides. It is no wonder that talk of slavery reparations has faded. Support for low-income workers of all races needs repair right now.
Available at Amazon.com:
The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
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Article: Copyright © 2014, Tribune Content Agency
"Just Don't Call It 'Reparations' "
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