Race, reparations, and the lie of American patriotism

Ta-Nehisi Coates wants us to more fully acknowledge our troubled history of white supremacy. But any such reckoning would have to contend with powerful patriotic urges.

Patriotism
(Image credit: (Alison Shaw/Corbis))

No contemporary writer has done more to shape and transform my thinking about race in America than Ta-Nehisi Coates. That's why I felt a mixture of excitement and irritation when I heard that he was working on a long essay for The Atlantic in which he would make the case for reparations. I was excited because I knew it would be a fruitful provocation, like almost everything Coates writes. But I was irritated because a call for reparations seems like such an obvious dead end.

For many reasons. Historian Allen Guelzo enumerated some of them in a 2002 essay for First Things that highlighted the way that calls for reparations encourage the perpetuation of essentialist thinking about race. Whites of today simply aren't the oppressors that their white ancestors were, just as blacks today aren't as uniformly victimized as were those of previous eras. Why, then, should present-day whites as a group be made to pay present-day blacks as a group? More specifically, why should a struggling white working-class family have to contribute to reparations that would presumably go to all African-Americans, including successful, upper-middle-class blacks like, well, Ta-Nehisi Coates?

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Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.