Reparations

With a sweeping and widely praised new essay on reparations in the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates has challenged Americans to reconsider how they view their country’s history and to place the influence of white supremacy front and center. Rather than imagine the damages inflicted against African-Americans by white supremacy as having occurred mainly during the antebellum period, Coates asks us to recognize how Jim Crow in the South and redlining in the North denied black people the means to build real, stable lives for themselves, directly explaining the disproportionate poverty we still see in the African-American community today.

In June of 1961, Ambassador Malick Sow of the newly independent African nation of Chad was en route to Washington, D.C.

BY JELANI COBB A century and a half ago, after the start of the Civil War, the federal government took up the question of reparations for slavery. The matter had been…