Summary
Billy Lamar Brooks Sr. has been an activist since his youth in the Black Panther Party, but his work became much more personal when in 1991, he lost his 19-year-old son, Billy Jr., to gang violence. While Brooks has moved away from the West Side of Chicago, he still works in North Lawndale, and talks with Coates about how he’s seen the kids that hang around the block grow up and the violence they’re exposed to.
So much of the country maintains that fatherlessness is the reason for the problems in the African-American community today, but Billy Brooks Jr. and Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis all had fathers. Adhering to ideals of the middle class didn’t shield Ethel Weatherspoon: it made her a target. But many liberals today fail to acknowledge the distinct impact that racism has on poverty.
But this lack of distinction, from the policy level to the affirmative-action level, fails to take into account the simple fact that American society was built on the distinction between white and Black people. Now, even many progressives wish to avoid any mention of something like white supremacy, and avoiding the issue of race makes it possible for aid programs (some of which were written to exclude African Americans) to be perceived as handouts to Black people. Unfortunately, Coates argues, ending American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same thing. Because in the end, America’s message to Black people is that whatever you have, we will take.
One of Ross’s many losses was his brother Winter, who was taken to prison after suffering from a seizure and then declared dead when the Ross family went to retrieve him. Parchman Farm, the prison where he was kept, has been referred to as “the closest thing to slavery that survived the civil war.” Scholars have been talking for a long time about how reparations could possibly be implemented for families’ like Ross’s, from direct monetary payments to job training. But even though the possibility exists that America will never fully repay African Americans, we should at least have the discussion. For nearly its entire history, the United States has relied on the exploitation of the African American family. Previously, we have imagined America only in terms of its positive past, but to move forward, we must imagine a new country, one with a “national reckoning that will lead to spiritual renewal.”
America is not the only country that resisted reparations. When Germany began making amends for the Holocaust in 1952, only 5 percent of West Germans reported feeling guilty, and the media was discouraged from displaying stories that implied Germans as a whole were responsible, configuring the Nazis as a minority. Among Jewish people in Israel, the reparations conversations were extremely fraught, and many were initially against reparations, stating that they could never be repaid. With time, however, they decided to reach a compromise with Germany and accepted their reparations. While reparations could not make up for what Germany did, it could start a conversation on what a national reckoning might look like.
America cannot escape the past, because the past is a current problem. The problems faced by the African-American community are not a result of current behavior, but of a past filled with stories for their exploitation. Even as recently as 2010, researchers discovered that segregation continued to be an enormous problem. Banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America continue to exploit vulnerable populations.
Analysis
Billy Brooks' story of the loss of his son is unfortunately far from uncommon, and cannot be divorced from Chicago's housing policies. The same housing policies that relegated the bulk of public housing to Black neighborhoods are the same ones that are responsible for the poverty that can be seen in those neighborhoods today. Activists like Brooks have seen neighborhoods deteriorate rather than improve over time because of these housing policies. It's easy to compartmentalize something like housing, but in reality, its effects are far-reaching around areas of life and across generations.
With this context, stories like Billy's and Trayvon's reveal themselves not to be the fault of some behavioral or familial flaw in the African-American community. While Coates is not suggesting that individuals should be completely absolved of responsibility, he's suggesting that individuals are not the only factor at play. Moreover, Coates is arguing against a belief that pathologizes the problems within the African American community, attaching them to things like the myth that Black families are broken and that that is the root of their problems. But Ross and Lewis demonstrate that even when African Americans aspire to build those ideal American families, they are blocked from doing so. In fact, it arguably makes them even more of a target.
Because of this, Coates wants to emphasize that racism and classism aren't the same, even though they are related. Addressing classism will deal with Black poverty at the moment, but without addressing the white supremacy that is largely responsible for that classism, the Black community will never gain anything. America's refusal to face up to the fact of its history of white supremacy prevents it from extending help to African Americans. Instead, America makes it clear that every accomplishment African Americans make is subject to being taken away.
Winter's story is not an uncommon one either. Countless Black men were lost to the prison system in the early parts of the 20th century in the Jim Crow South, often on illegitimate charges so that they could be legally made to work without pay. It's stories like this that really show that in many ways, the United States can never repay the African American community for some of the crimes that have been committed. But even with full repayment being impossible, reparations is important to consider because in order for a country to move forward, it must reckon with the past.
In Germany, reparations were also unpopular at first, and yet their implementation proved to be essential to starting to reckon with the Nazi past. It wasn't effective for the German people to simply say sorry, or to claim that only some of them were Nazis. In taking responsibility as a nation, they have started a conversation on what that form of accountability could look like for a country and for the average citizen. Israel's complicated relationship with receiving said reparations shows that reparations do not have to presume to fix everything in order to be useful or meaningful. Reparations do not mean that the crime has been erased from memory, but instead that it is being wrestled with. That wrestling is needed in the United States because the racist policies of the past are shaping and enabling the racist policies of the present.
