When will a white man say what Ta-Nehisi Coates said?

We shouldn't need black people to recount the horrors of slavery for us

Ta-Nehisi Coates
(Image credit: Zach Gibson/Getty Images)

How can it be that, in 2019, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates was forced to give testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee that sounded like it could have been given in front of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction in 1866? How is it that, more than a century and a half after the end of the Civil War, a black man had to instruct members of the United States Congress on the rudiments of slavery and its legacies?

How can it be that, rather than participating in a national reckoning like those provided by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or Germany's many post-war acts of national self-reflection and atonement, America is barely humoring the idea of paying reparations to the descendants of former slaves?

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Peter Birkenhead

Peter Birkenhead is a writer who lives in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. He is the author of Gonville, a memoir published by Simon & Schuster.