Shelby Steele And Ta-Nehisi Coates Debate: Reparations Or Bootstraps?
(intro to segment cut off - see video with intro at C&L link)
http://crooksandliars.com/2015/02/shelby-steele-and-ta-nehisi-coates-debate
= new reply since forum marked as read
out of his depth on the issue.
I mean just recommending that "we do nothing" about past and present policies like discriminatory housing and lending policies by predatory lenders that stripped and cheated wealth from decades of black home buyers, or the harsh policing towards black men, or unequal hiring policies that deprived generations of African Americans opportunity is so-stuck-in-the-past, "yassa massa" thinking that it's embarrassing for Steele and he doesn't seem to know that he should be embarrassed to even mouth such absurdities in answer to Coates — and while on national TV no less.
And one thing that even Coates does not mention when it comes to every 5 cents of African American household wealth v one dollar for white household wealth (he didn't touch upon it even in his great essay on reparations in "Alantic"
is the, in my opinion, the glaring, huge, elephant-in-the-room fact that for hundreds of years, hundreds of thousands of enslaved African Americans were NOT PAID for untold millions of 12-hour (dawn-to-dust) back-breaking days of labor.
And people wonder why no wealth (even if it was just a few hundred or a few thousand dollars) was passed down historically from generation to generation of many black families as it was for many whites families who had generation after generation of ancestors who were PAID for their labor.
That humongous disparity is rarely even recognized much less discussed and is IMO a huge issue. Just think of the principle of compounding and what that unpaid for labor from centuries of interest accumulation would be worth now. It would literally be trillions of dollars yet there is always fierce opposition to reparations — and I'm not talking about cutting a check to individual African Americans but for scholarship funds to be set up and small business funding to be made available — those kind of things that would symbolically make up for, but not even come close to repaying the untold trillions of dollars of unpaid compensation that enslaved African American were denied.
is audacious and amazing in his willingness to further push AA down and back behind all others in this society. I just shake my head at a person such as he. He's been around since slavery's heyday.....still pushing the field n..... out the back door telling him, their ain't no food for him or his family while sitting down to a meal of sustenance himself..........
