This is a pretty lousy argument against reparations

I'm not sure how an effective reparations program would work, but I do know that this is probably about the worst argument against it:

  The room grew raucous at times, with spectators hissing at Republican witnesses and Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, the subcommittee’s senior Republican, when he spoke against the measure. In a comment that rippled throughout the hearing, Mr. Johnson suggested that great black leaders like Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington thought African-Americans should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. 

“Those great leaders encouraged people to take responsibility for their own lives, because that gives every human being a greater sense of meaning and satisfaction,” he said, adding that the bill “risks communicating the opposite message.”

 It's the old "bootstraps for thee" argument, and it presumes that whites have achieved their greater wealth by dint of hard work and grit, so why can't African Americans do the same? The problem is that a lot of wealth that whites hold they hold by dint of A) government action and B) being the "right" race.

Ta-Nehisi Coates demonstrated the falsity of the bootstraps argument in his "Case for Reparations" that kicked off the current debate, a few years ago in The Atlantic.

When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible. The NAACP protested, calling the new American safety net “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.” 

 The oft-celebrated G.I. Bill similarly failed black Americans, by mirroring the broader country’s insistence on a racist housing policy. Though ostensibly color-blind, Title III of the bill, which aimed to give veterans access to low-interest home loans, left black veterans to tangle with white officials at their local Veterans Administration as well as with the same banks that had, for years, refused to grant mortgages to blacks. The historian Kathleen J. Frydl observes in her 2009 book, The GI Bill, that so many blacks were disqualified from receiving Title III benefits “that it is more accurate simply to say that blacks could not use this particular title.” 

 Whereas shortly before the New Deal, a typical mortgage required a large down payment and full repayment within about 10 years, the creation of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in 1933 and then the Federal Housing Administration the following year allowed banks to offer loans requiring no more than 10 percent down, amortized over 20 to 30 years. “Without federal intervention in the housing market, massive suburbanization would have been impossible,” writes Thomas J. Sugrue, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. “In 1930, only 30 percent of Americans owned their own homes; by 1960, more than 60 percent were home owners. Home ownership became an emblem of American citizenship.” 

 That emblem was not to be awarded to blacks. The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle.

So the bootstraps argument is just so much hooey. African Americans haven't been given access to the same types of programs that allowed whites to get ahead. Generations of white Americans didn't get a better mortgages than their black neighbor across town because they had "taken responsibility for their own life." They had the advantage of policies that reflected this country's longstanding white supremacy. That's one starting point for any honest discussion of reparations.

Bag O' Books: James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time"

I came to this book after reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Between the World and Me", which a number of reviews suggested followed in Baldwin's footsteps. It's true there are similarities — both relatively short, yet incisive, essays on what it's like to live as a black man in America — but there are differences: Baldwin's book is written when (in 1963) it seems like white supremacy in America might be undone; perhaps as a result, it's a more hopeful book than what Coates delivered. Which is an odd thing to say about a book that remains bracing, angry, and uncompromising after all these years.

A few quotes from the book that seem relevant to our current discussions. These are all taken from the second part of the book, ""Down At The Cross — Letter from a Region of My Mind":

Three Thoughts about Ta-Nehisi Coates and "Between the World and Me"

Three thoughts about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me”:

• This is a relentlessly political book — how could it not be? — and yet attempts to respond to the book from within the typical left-right Democratic-Republican construct of punditry seem to be insufficient to me — they come to the book, as with other political debates, without curiosity, for the sake of trying to win an argument. Let’s try again. This is an American black man telling us how he perceives living as a black man in America today: It contains no policy prescriptions, no endorsement of party or candidate, no 10-point campaign for better living. We haven’t found the right way to talk about this book yet.