Ross and the Contract Buyers League were no longer appealing to the government simply for equality. They were no longer fleeing in hopes of a better deal elsewhere. They were charging society with a crime against their community. They wanted the crime publicly ruled as such. They wanted the crime’s executors declared to be offensive to society. And they wanted restitution for the great injury brought upon them by said offenders.
Coates is making an important distinction between the work of the Contract Buyers League and the work of other similar organizations. The Contract Buyers League involved charging society with a crime and demanding repayment for said crime. Although equality is important, the Contract Buyers League was arguing that equality could not be achieved until the injury done by contract sellers had been healed. This kind of thinking is central to Coates' main argument: that if we want to live in a just America, then we have to think seriously about repairing the damage the country has done to millions of Americans.
The kind of trenchant racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable. The essence of American racism is disrespect.
Coates is fighting against stereotypes about African Americans that claim that their behavior is the reason for their struggles in society. But the issue with this narrative is that the racism Black people have suffered can't be fixed with respect because, at its heart, racism is about disrespecting people of color regardless of their circumstances. As we see elsewhere in the piece, acting more "respectably" does not prevent Black families from being excluded or taken advantage of.
One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one’s ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte. A nation outlives its generations.
Although slavery was in the past, its effects cannot be eliminated just by claiming that the offenses happened in the past. Just like the founding fathers and the Revolutionary War continue to shape this country and its ideals today, so too does the legacy of slaveholders continue to shape America. For someone to accept the founding fathers while denying slaveholders is taking only part of the country. Countries live longer than the people in them do, and as a result, they carry the legacies of people long deceased.
Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy—in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America’s rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy.
Instead of drawing a distinction between the beginning of the democratic ideals so many Americans value—like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—and slavery, Coates is saying that slavery is what made those things possible. Without the labor and economic stability provided by slavery, the United States would not be able to exist. Sadly, the freedom that America prided itself on so much and the ability for America to offer its (white and male) citizens universal suffrage and other incredible opportunities was based on the enslavement of millions.
... When the mid-20th-century white homeowner claimed that the presence of a Bill and Daisy Myers decreased his property value, he was not merely engaging in racist dogma—he was accurately observing the impact of federal policy on market prices. Redlining destroyed the possibility of investment wherever black people lived.
One of the cruxes of Coates' argument is to show that racism and policy unite. White people's racist fear that the very presence of Black people decreased the value of a neighborhood was not only ideological but also manifested in a literal monetary decrease of property value. The federal government's methods of giving low ratings to neighborhoods with Black people in them ensured that the racist belief that Black people were a contagion was ratified economically, as white people and Black people quickly discovered that Black people living in neighborhoods meant that the property there would not be valuable.
It was not a tangle of pathology that put a target on Clyde Ross’s back. It was not a culture of poverty that singled out Mattie Lewis for “the thrill of the chase and the kill.” Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.
Returning to the topic of respectability, Coates takes the time to reemphasize that the behavior and beliefs of the African American community do not prevent people from targeting them. Here, he goes even farther to mention that, far from somehow solving people's problems, the existence of success and "excellence" in Black communities often makes them an even greater target for racism and cruelty. Even taking into consideration the common "twice as good" mantra, black success often only makes white predation even more vicious.
But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it.
Continuing from his point that American democracy was founded based on slavery, Coates here argues that, by extension, racism is not an accident of American history, but an integral part of it. While reparations have been derided for years as something only supported by crazy people on the left, Coates argues that people are scared of reparations because they would involve acknowledging that white supremacy is not simply ignorance or something only truly awful Americans engage in, but a logic that is fundamental to the United States.
