Hell has frozen over and David Brooks is onboard with reparations [View all]
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/opinion/case-for-reparations.html
Nearly five years ago I read Ta-Nehisi Coatess Atlantic article The Case for Reparations, with mild disagreement. All sorts of practical objections leapt to mind. What about the recent African immigrants? What about the poor whites who have nothing of what you would call privilege? Do we pay Oprah and LeBron?
But I have had so many experiences over the past year sitting, for example, with an elderly black woman in South Carolina shaking in rage because the kids in her neighborhood face greater challenges than she did growing up in 1953 that suggest we are at another moment of make-or-break racial reckoning.
Coatess essay seems right now, especially this part: And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely.
What Im talking about is more than recompense for past injustices more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What Im talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.
Were a nation coming apart at the seams, a nation in which each tribe has its own narrative and the narratives are generally resentment narratives. The African-American experience is somehow at the core of this fragmentation the original sin that hardens the heart, separates Americans from one another and serves as model and fuel for other injustices.