MrFantastic
Pro
Great Thread.....
I don't think that Frum is necessarily in opposition to reparations on ideological or ethical grounds. He generally acknowledges the deleterious effect that centuries of oppression has had on African-Americans and his particular brand of cynically pragmatic centrism does allow for such considerations, but the way he's approached the practicalities of it (or lack thereof as he would have it) is in bad faith.Frum says "The most disappointing thing about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ case for reparations, from my personal point of view, is that it detracts from the most powerful elements of the story he himself tells. Ta-Nehisi is right about the nature of the harm done to black Americans. He’s right that later generations of black Americans still suffer from harms inflicted in the past. He’s wrong to insist on a remedy that is not only unworkable, but indefensible against the very obvious questions that I raised earlier this week—and that Ta-Nehisi mostly ignored. "
The debate between Frum and Coates is really interesting, and telling. Frum pretends to have an issue with Coates' lack of acknowledgement of the "fine details" of reparations but all I see is the fear of a white man having to acknowledge the pervasiveness white supremacy. The discomfort of acknowledging that the higher income, education and homeownership rates of whites has nothing to do with their being exceptional and everything to do the exploitative roots of this nation.
What do you all think?
As for the practicalities of a reparations programme, even the most goat stubborn equivocator must concede that far more effort has gone into determining why reparations are impossible, than has been spent genuinely exploring the possibilities, functionality and ramifications and until that changes no argument against will have a leg to stand on.
- Coates: The Secret Lives of Inner-City Black Males
- Chait: Barack Obama, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Poverty, and Culture
- Coates: Black Pathology and the Closing of the Progressive Mind
- Chait: Barack Obama vs. the Culture of Poverty
- Coates: Other People’s Pathologies
- Coates: Race, Culture, and Poverty: The Path Forward
"we"
"us"
@ this cac
Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out. This would normally be a homeowner’s responsibility, but in fact, Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He’d bought “on contract”: a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting—while offering the benefits of neither. Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself.
The men who peddled contracts in North Lawndale would sell homes at inflated prices and then evict families who could not pay—taking their down payment and their monthly installments as profit. Then they’d bring in another black family, rinse, and repeat. “He loads them up with payments they can’t meet,” an office secretary told The Chicago Daily Newsof her boss, the speculator Lou Fushanis, in 1963. “Then he takes the property away from them. He’s sold some of the buildings three or four times.”
Ross had tried to get a legitimate mortgage in another neighborhood, but was told by a loan officer that there was no financing available. The truth was that there was no financing for people like Clyde Ross. From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from “restrictive covenants” to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated.
Their efforts were buttressed by the federal government. In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured private mortgages, causing a drop in interest rates and a decline in the size of the down payment required to buy a house. But an insured mortgage was not a possibility for Clyde Ross. The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated “A,” indicated “in demand” neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.” These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated “D” and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red. Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion. Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.
So I'm reading the article and this section needs to really stand out to black people and public education:
I remember breaking it down to @Napoleon that shyt like redlining, racism at the FHA, and how public schools are funded (property tax) is one of the many reasons black people need to separate from cacs. That was when I first suspected him of being a white supremacist, and his posts over the last couple months have just reaffirmed my belief
I never denied this????
Reparations in the form of scholarships, building schools, and improving neighborhoods (not just so rich white people can move in) would be a great idea. But not as in cash money, because most would just give that right back to white people anyway.
your giving money right back to white people with your idea as wellReparations in the form of scholarships, building schools, and improving neighborhoods (not just so rich white people can move in) would be a great idea. But not as in cash money, because most would just give that right back to white people anyway.
You have so little faith in black people that you don't think we have more common sense than to just buy rims, jewelry, and start record labels ???