Home Is Where the Hatred Is

The case for reparations: a narrative bibliography
TA-NEHISI COATESJUN 26 2014, 1:20 PM ET


In "The Case for Reparations," I tried to move the lens away from the enslaved and focus on their descendants. Narratively, I thought it made a much more compelling read and I it got us past the "but they're all long-dead" argument. Also, once you understand enslavement as central—not ancillary—to American history, you can then easily intuit that it would have some serious effects on policy 100 years later. When you then consider what directly followed enslavement—disenfranchisement, pogroms, land theft, terrorism, the entire suite of plunder—it seems inconceivable that 20th-century domestic policy would not be awash in white supremacy.

On some vague level, I understood this to be true. Some years ago (before I came here) I read Kenneth Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier. No one who wants to understand the shape of America's cities and suburbs can afford to skip this book. I would go so far as to say that you can't really talk intelligently about urban policy without grappling with Jackson's work. Crabgrass is ostensibly a history of the suburbs in America, but it ranges from antiquity to the 20th century and puts the American obsession with a front lawn and detached housing in context. That makes for great reading, and then, about halfway through the book, the bombshells start dropping. In painstaking detail, Jackson shows how the Federal Housing Administration and the Home Owners' Loan Corporation subsidized segregation, and helped author the wealth gap. I'd heard the term redlining before, but Jackson's book really laid out, in detail, how federal policy worked.

I thought of Jackson's book years later when I picked up Isabel Wilkerson;s The Warmth of Other Suns. Where Jackson outlines the racist policies of federal, local, and state government toward American cities, Wilkerson's work (among other things) tells us how black people responded to those policies. More importantly, for my work, she reversed a popular trend to conflate impoverishment with racism, and pretend as though "the black poor" are the "real" problem. If only quietly, Wilkerson builds a strong case that the policy of the American government has not been to encourage a black middle class, but to discourage it and open it for plunder.



http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/home-is-where-the-hatred-is/373510/