Karen Devaney's Blog - Posts Tagged "reparations"
Response to Reparations
During a recent trip to Kansas to visit my sister I had time to kill before my flight. Browsing an airport bookstores the Atlantic magazine caught my eye due to the compelling front cover which read:
The Case for Reparations
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.
Nestled in the middle seat of a Southwest plane, I opened the magazine and poured over this lengthy piece that gave astonishing testimony to the realities of racism in America. I imagine mutterings from readers echoing responses that “slavery was a long time ago and Jim Crow is dead” or “I think slavery was abominable I would have never owned a slave. African Americans need to move on. ” Like the tragedy of the Holocaust—moving on requires reparations and acknowledgements. Yes, slavery and human trafficking is no longer legal and laws preventing racial discrimination have been written but prejudice sentiments remain. They simply went underground and donned a disguise.
What struck me about this article was the rippling effect slavery has had on the African American race and on America in general. One such glaring result, for many many years fair housing was limited to whites only. The author of the article, Ta-Nehis Coates writes; “Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport. Families were robbed of land that was rightfully theirs. They were evicted from homes they bought under contracts that unknown them were falsified. They were bamboozled told they owed more than the amount of the agreed mortgage or handed unexplained sudden property taxes with an impossible price tag. These contracts were scams that charged high interests and were exempt from any laws but there was no alternative or recourse. F.H. A. loans were not available to black families. And if you missed one payment; they seized the property no questions asked all of the money that had been invested up until that time (which included hefty down payments) was confiscated with no ramifications for the crooks selling the contracts.
“This was hardly unusual. 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 valued at tens of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. “Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia,” the AP reported, as well as “oil fields in Mississippi” and “a baseball spring training facility in Florida.”
Restrictive covenants created by the Federal Housing Association were deemed illegal in the late forties and early fifties but like many of our laws that are left to interpretation, this didn’t translate to enforcement. Whites were encouraged to keep their neighborhoods segregated at all costs. If you sold to a Negro you were terrorized. Groups of Catholics and Christians formed a membership in Chicago that using scare tactics drove any ethnic group other than whites, out. Coates recounts: “On July 1 and 2 of 1946, a mob of thousands assembled in Chicago’s Park Manor neighborhood, hoping to eject a black doctor who’d recently moved in. The mob pelted the house with rocks and set the garage on fire. The doctor moved away.” Neighborhoods where black families lived were propagandized “undesirable” plummeting property values and promoting the great white flight. A vestige of slavery, the upshots of unfair housing has yet to really be rectified. And here in lies the crux of this article, which I recommend every American should read (it is available online) that we cannot pretend restitution has been made. We as a country need to keep this conversation alive not for the sake of lingering in the past but in order for healing to truly happen acknowledgements and reparations need to be made.
As a white female, I have no idea what it feels like to be condemned for the color of my skin. My neighbor, Charlie, does. He is a delightful African American man who was raised in Georgia. He is a Vietnam veteran, a seasoned carpenter, and has been married for thirty-seven years to a wonderful white woman whom he still “adores.” Charlie will only divulge his past experiences when I hound him (which is frequently). It is a past fraught with slavery as his mother picked cotton as a child and worked all of her life for a white family as a domestic. Charlie recalls that he was served supper from the backdoor of the main house and was forbidden to enter any other way. On the backs of those that toiled in the fields, southern whites benefitted financially. Charlie claims he harbors no resentment towards any one. He rose above the chains of segregation bought a house here in California and raised a family. But he notices things; things such as the gentrification of the neighborhood or how there are only a limited number of black people at a particular place or event.
A few years ago when I lived in Philly and taught for DeVry University I had several students who were from the projects; their family destitute yet they were clawing their way out of a destructive cycle of poverty and limited choices. One young man in my speech class recited a poem that brought me to tears. “I Can’t Read.” The poet spoke of being pushed through the system for his skills in basketball but still he couldn’t pick up a book and read. It was a reflective piece of work that gives pause to the deep-seated issue of race and reparations. It was a smack of reality tossed in my face. I thought of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; how the hell are you going to care about an education when you’re hungry or living in a place over run with vermin and drugs. It’s not enough to say oh geez that’s too bad, or geez those people are disgusting how could they live that way and yes how can they! A paralysis as pervasive as a pandemic has settled into generations. Of course the same can be said for any ethic group that trudged to America but the difference--families were not shredded by slavery. Fathers or mothers or children were not sold off and never seen again.
As my plane began its descent, I was still engrossed in the contents of this article. I wondered where do we begin? I thumbed over the claims of Coates that “Liberals today mostly view racism not as an active, distinct evil but as a relative of white poverty and inequality. They ignore the long tradition of this country actively punishing black success—and the elevation of that punishment, in the mid-20th century, to federal policy. President Lyndon Johnson may have noted in his historic civil-rights speech at Howard University in 1965 that “Negro poverty is not white poverty.” But his advisers and their successors were, and still are, loath to craft any policy that recognizes the difference.” Perhaps it is in the most basic of places we need to start that of our own consciousness and cognition. Realization of how the past continues to influence the present. Perhaps it is in the re-writing of history to include the African Americans that paved the way for not only freedom but for advancement side by side the portrait of racism. Like all communication problems, if there is no discourse there is no resolution. Reparation may not lie in finger pointing and resentment but it does lie in fessing up to the damage and to ending blatant disregard for equality. We may not have been the owner of slaves but we may be the owner of residual attitudes. All races have their nuances and that is what makes for cultural diversity and a rich tapestry we call America. But there lies an inherent elephant in the room if we as a country continue to tiptoe around the issue of race and reparations. If we stand around and watch a person get bullied and do nothing—how does that distinguish us from the bully?
The Case for Reparations
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.
Nestled in the middle seat of a Southwest plane, I opened the magazine and poured over this lengthy piece that gave astonishing testimony to the realities of racism in America. I imagine mutterings from readers echoing responses that “slavery was a long time ago and Jim Crow is dead” or “I think slavery was abominable I would have never owned a slave. African Americans need to move on. ” Like the tragedy of the Holocaust—moving on requires reparations and acknowledgements. Yes, slavery and human trafficking is no longer legal and laws preventing racial discrimination have been written but prejudice sentiments remain. They simply went underground and donned a disguise.
What struck me about this article was the rippling effect slavery has had on the African American race and on America in general. One such glaring result, for many many years fair housing was limited to whites only. The author of the article, Ta-Nehis Coates writes; “Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport. Families were robbed of land that was rightfully theirs. They were evicted from homes they bought under contracts that unknown them were falsified. They were bamboozled told they owed more than the amount of the agreed mortgage or handed unexplained sudden property taxes with an impossible price tag. These contracts were scams that charged high interests and were exempt from any laws but there was no alternative or recourse. F.H. A. loans were not available to black families. And if you missed one payment; they seized the property no questions asked all of the money that had been invested up until that time (which included hefty down payments) was confiscated with no ramifications for the crooks selling the contracts.
“This was hardly unusual. 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 valued at tens of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. “Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia,” the AP reported, as well as “oil fields in Mississippi” and “a baseball spring training facility in Florida.”
Restrictive covenants created by the Federal Housing Association were deemed illegal in the late forties and early fifties but like many of our laws that are left to interpretation, this didn’t translate to enforcement. Whites were encouraged to keep their neighborhoods segregated at all costs. If you sold to a Negro you were terrorized. Groups of Catholics and Christians formed a membership in Chicago that using scare tactics drove any ethnic group other than whites, out. Coates recounts: “On July 1 and 2 of 1946, a mob of thousands assembled in Chicago’s Park Manor neighborhood, hoping to eject a black doctor who’d recently moved in. The mob pelted the house with rocks and set the garage on fire. The doctor moved away.” Neighborhoods where black families lived were propagandized “undesirable” plummeting property values and promoting the great white flight. A vestige of slavery, the upshots of unfair housing has yet to really be rectified. And here in lies the crux of this article, which I recommend every American should read (it is available online) that we cannot pretend restitution has been made. We as a country need to keep this conversation alive not for the sake of lingering in the past but in order for healing to truly happen acknowledgements and reparations need to be made.
As a white female, I have no idea what it feels like to be condemned for the color of my skin. My neighbor, Charlie, does. He is a delightful African American man who was raised in Georgia. He is a Vietnam veteran, a seasoned carpenter, and has been married for thirty-seven years to a wonderful white woman whom he still “adores.” Charlie will only divulge his past experiences when I hound him (which is frequently). It is a past fraught with slavery as his mother picked cotton as a child and worked all of her life for a white family as a domestic. Charlie recalls that he was served supper from the backdoor of the main house and was forbidden to enter any other way. On the backs of those that toiled in the fields, southern whites benefitted financially. Charlie claims he harbors no resentment towards any one. He rose above the chains of segregation bought a house here in California and raised a family. But he notices things; things such as the gentrification of the neighborhood or how there are only a limited number of black people at a particular place or event.
A few years ago when I lived in Philly and taught for DeVry University I had several students who were from the projects; their family destitute yet they were clawing their way out of a destructive cycle of poverty and limited choices. One young man in my speech class recited a poem that brought me to tears. “I Can’t Read.” The poet spoke of being pushed through the system for his skills in basketball but still he couldn’t pick up a book and read. It was a reflective piece of work that gives pause to the deep-seated issue of race and reparations. It was a smack of reality tossed in my face. I thought of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; how the hell are you going to care about an education when you’re hungry or living in a place over run with vermin and drugs. It’s not enough to say oh geez that’s too bad, or geez those people are disgusting how could they live that way and yes how can they! A paralysis as pervasive as a pandemic has settled into generations. Of course the same can be said for any ethic group that trudged to America but the difference--families were not shredded by slavery. Fathers or mothers or children were not sold off and never seen again.
As my plane began its descent, I was still engrossed in the contents of this article. I wondered where do we begin? I thumbed over the claims of Coates that “Liberals today mostly view racism not as an active, distinct evil but as a relative of white poverty and inequality. They ignore the long tradition of this country actively punishing black success—and the elevation of that punishment, in the mid-20th century, to federal policy. President Lyndon Johnson may have noted in his historic civil-rights speech at Howard University in 1965 that “Negro poverty is not white poverty.” But his advisers and their successors were, and still are, loath to craft any policy that recognizes the difference.” Perhaps it is in the most basic of places we need to start that of our own consciousness and cognition. Realization of how the past continues to influence the present. Perhaps it is in the re-writing of history to include the African Americans that paved the way for not only freedom but for advancement side by side the portrait of racism. Like all communication problems, if there is no discourse there is no resolution. Reparation may not lie in finger pointing and resentment but it does lie in fessing up to the damage and to ending blatant disregard for equality. We may not have been the owner of slaves but we may be the owner of residual attitudes. All races have their nuances and that is what makes for cultural diversity and a rich tapestry we call America. But there lies an inherent elephant in the room if we as a country continue to tiptoe around the issue of race and reparations. If we stand around and watch a person get bullied and do nothing—how does that distinguish us from the bully?
