We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

Coates opens this essay by recounting the story of Clyde Ross, a Black Mississippian born in 1923 who saw the state dispossess his parents of their land for nonpayment of taxes they supposedly owed. The Rosses had to become sharecroppers as a result of this widely used stratagem of states in which White supremacy was the law of the land. Coates traces the cascading effects of this expropriation.

As the son of sharecroppers, Ross missed out on a complete education because he had to work in the fields. He learned to swallow his anger when he watched his parents accept injustices to preserve their lives. Although Ross had a small moment of freedom as an enlisted man stationed in California and Guam, the racial violence in Mississippi finally forced him to flee the state and head to Chicago after he completed his enlistment. When Ross bought his own home in Chicago in 1947, he once again found the system rigged against him. What he thought was a mortgage was really a contract that would never actually allow him to own his home.

Such contracts, "predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting" (168), were common in Chicago because of redlining. In the context of government-backed lending and real estate finance, redlining is the practice of using extremely high interest rates to prevent Black Americans from buying homes in White neighborhoods.

With such neighborhoods off limits due to a lack of reasonable financial terms, Black people were forced to move into urban homes that had almost no chance of appreciating in value, a real problem given that this was the primary means by which the middle class grew its wealth in America. These policies created ghettos instead. Ross and his neighbors organized politically to name and shame the lenders. They demanded redress in the form of refunds and sued the lenders for discriminatory practices.

The discriminatory lending practices had far-reaching effects, including racial disparities in crime rates, health outcomes, and encounters with the criminal justice system for people who lived in the urban neighborhoods redlining created. The Black, middle-class people living in these neighborhoods were less financially resilient than their White peers, and they thus more easily fell out of the middle class. Their children paid the price with poorer outcomes than their White, middle-class peers. Clyde and his neighbors’ lawsuit was unsuccessful. Their defeat came just as the social safety net programs designed to improve the lot of Black Americans ended. Nevertheless, Coates sees their demands to be made whole as a call for reparations.

Coates next lists example after example of calls for reparations in every century to show that it is not a new solution to the problem of discrimination. Every time someone argues for reparations, opponents have the same objections. The most ridiculous objection, according to Coates, is that Black Americans should feel lucky that slavery brought them to the Americas. This belief ignores centuries of plunder, racism, and unfair laws that extend well beyond the end of slavery. Other critics object that it’s just not practical to offer reparations. When John Conyers introduced a bill to study this question, he couldn’t even get the bill to a debate on the floor of Congress. This refusal even to study the issue shows that opposition to the proposition that Black Americans should be compensated is the problem, not logistics.

America is hesitant to look honestly at the plunder of Black bodies and labor because doing so would reveal that this theft is as old and American as democracy. While Black Americans bore the brunt of slavery through the destruction of their families, affluent Southerners, British business interests, and Northern factory owners reaped the profits upon which the country and empires were built. The founding fathers claimed slavery was simply a necessary evil despite evidence to the contrary, and Southerners went further by claiming slavery was both necessary and good.

Subsequent American history shows the result of plunder on the country and Black Americans. After the Civil War, Radical Republicans made some efforts to redress the wrongs of slavery, but Southerners responded with racial terror groups like the KKK. By the early 1900s, the South was the scene of race massacres, lynching, and voter suppression tactics. When Franklin D. Roosevelt created New Deal programs designed to lift the American people out of poverty, Black Americans were explicitly excluded. The GI Bill, which helped returning soldiers buy homes in the newly formed suburbs, excluded Black Americans. Redlining was simply a more modern “plunder—quiet, systemic, and submerged” (189).

The segregated neighborhoods that people like Clyde Ross moved to were no accident. The Federal Housing Authority used explicitly racist covenants to keep Black Americans out of certain neighborhoods, and White homeowners organized themselves to avoid Black neighbors as well. Even more damaging was the fact that White flight from integrated neighborhoods ensured that government would never invest in these neighborhoods because its presumed constituents (White property owners) no longer lived there.

The impact of these policies is apparent today. According to Billy Lamar Brooks, a community activist and former Black Panther, the ugliness of some parts of street culture is an effect of the failure to invest in these left-behind communities. No one, not even White liberals, seems to have the will to do anything about these effects. The few efforts to address the aftermath of slavery and ongoing impact of White supremacy—affirmative action, the Affordable Care Act—are half-hearted and generally under legal assault from inception. The impact on Black Americans of the unredressed wrongs is not just economic. Young people see that the system is rigged against their parents and lose a sense of esteem as a result.

Coates believes that bracketing the idea of reparations for a moment and just having open discussion about the past and ongoing plunder of Black Americans would reveal a truer picture of what America is, no matter how painful and unflattering the results. There are historic examples of the benefits of such efforts at truth and reconciliation. Despite the fears of Israeli Jews that reparations would let Germany off the hook for its mass plunder of Jewish lives during the Holocaust, the conversation about the Holocaust proceeded in the 1950s. The reparations Israel received supported massive economic growth in Israel and, more important, forced Germans to acknowledge their complicity in the Holocaust.

The problem in America is that the country has never grown “out of the childhood myth of innocence into a wisdom worthy of it fathers” (207). At the time of the publication of Coates’s essay, the institutions and companies that were complicit in slavery had never been held to account. Because of this failure to address these wrongs, the country continues to repeat its White supremacist errors, with the subprime lending crisis that precipitated the 2008 recession as just the most recent example.