Thursday, May 22, 2014 4:59 PM UTC
White supremacy is alive and well: Ta-Nehisi Coates and the case for reparations
"The filter of white supremacy is greatly underestimated in this country," says the Atlantic writer VIDEO
Topics: BillMoyers.com, Ta-Nehesi Coates, Racism, Race, reparations, White Supremacy, Politics News
This piece originally appeared on BillMoyers.com.
Signs of overt racism still are all around us, be it a New Hampshire police commissioner’s use of an ethnic slur to describe President Obama or an NBA team owner’s disturbing remarks about black athletes and fans. By now, we all know the drill, the media calls these people out for their ugly words and we play our parts, shaking our heads in sad disbelief — then return to our daily lives.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine, thinks it’s time for a bold step to change the way we talk and think about race in America. This week, Bill speaks to Coates about his June cover story for the magazine, provocatively titled “The Case for Reparations.” In it, Coates argues that we have to dig deeper into our past and the original sin of slavery, confronting the institutional racism that continues to pervade society. From the lynching tree to today’s mass incarceration of young African-Americans, he says we need to examine our motives more intently and reconcile the moral debt and economic damage inflicted upon generations of black Americans.
For one, Coates points to a century of racist and exploitive housing policies that made it hard for African-Americans to own homes and forced them to live in poorer neighborhoods with unequal access to a good education, resulting in a major wealth gap between black and white. In fact, the median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households, according to a Pew Research Center study.
