tallahassee coates between the world and me

His family lost their land, had their land basically stolen from them, had his horse stolen from him. Started out in Mississippi, in the nineteen-twenties, born in Mississippi under Jim Crow.

Ross was living on the West Side of Chicago. Now, your article starts with someone who lived through these racist policies, a man named Clyde Ross. And that, in turn, caused the devaluing of black neighborhoods, and an inability to access credit, to even improve neighborhoods. The government underwrote that, through F.H.A. But beneath that was policy! The reason why black people were confined to those neighborhoods in the first place, and white people had access to neighborhoods further away, was because of political decisions. Again, we have this notion that housing as it exists today sort of sprung up from black people coming north, maybe not finding the jobs that they wanted, and thus forming, you know, some sort of pathological culture, and white people, just being concerned citizens, fled to the suburbs. And the one I picked was housing, was our housing policy. So, out of all of those policies of theft, I had to pick one.

First and foremost, it’s a dissection of a particular policy that’s emblematic of so many other policies. When people talked to me about the article-and I could tell they hadn’t read it-“So, Ta-Nehisi’s making a case for”-no, no, no, I said.

It was a very technical analysis of housing policy. And the case I’m trying to make is, within the lifetime of a large number of Americans in this country, there was theft.Ī lot of your article was about Chicago housing policy. With emancipation and the end of the war? I’m not saying everything was hunky-dory at all! But if you were speaking to the most intellectually honest dubious person-because, you have to remember, what I’m battling is this idea that it ended in 1865. There are a lot of people who-īut you’re not saying that, between 19, everything is hunky-dory. That theft of resources continued well into the period of, I would make the argument, around the time of the Fair Housing Act. This is the theft of resources out of that community. I think what has often been missing-this is what I was trying to make the point of in 2014-that behind all of that oppression was actually theft. The case I make for reparations is, virtually every institution with some degree of history in America, be it public, be it private, has a history of extracting wealth and resources out of the African-American community. Ta-Nehisi, for those who may not have read the article five years ago, what, exactly, is the case that you make for reparations-which is a word that’s been around for a long, long time?

Tallahassee coates between the world and me