Reparations-A Hammer in Search of a Nail

[Pressing-On]

Great article!!

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Reparations: A Hammer in Search of a Nail

The hope that electing the first black president would put an end to the era of racial politics has long ago seemed quaint, along with many other exaggerated expectations for Barack Obama. But now we have proof that a whole new era of racial politics is just beginning.

If you want to add anything new to the discussion, you have to go farther. You have to actually demonstrate that this is a real, workable idea.

Yet the punt is instructive, because it tells us what this piece is actually about: it’s about making the case that America is guilty.

Ideologically, far from slavery being somehow essential to America’s founding, many of America’s Founders knew that it contradicted their doctrine of individual rights and that the country would eventually have to reckon with the question of how to eliminate it. Economically, from the very beginning it was widely remarked upon—Alexis de Tocqueville discusses it at length in Democracy in America—that America’s slave states were much less productive than its free states. American agriculture was expanded, not by the plantations of the slaveholders, but by the homesteads of the pioneers; American industry was driven, not by slave labor, but by innovation, not by cotton but by steam engines and steel mills.

http://thefederalist.com/2014/05/29/...rch-of-a-nail/