Simply speaking, Bill Moyers’ Friday evening show featuring Atlantic Monthly senior editor Ta-Nehisi Coates’ disarming, concise and compelling overview of the social and economic devastation inflicted upon African-Americans by many centuries of institutionalized racism in this country—and when viewers listen to his discussion of “progress” on the matter, even the most hardcore neocons will be hard-pressed to not accept his statements for the facts that they still represent in present-day America--should be required viewing for everyone in the U.S.
Frankly, there’s nothing more to say, since conveying Coates’ sentiments, rather than hearing them from him directly, would be a disservice to the audience.
Full Show: Facing the Truth: The Case for Reparations
BillMoyers.com
Friday, May 23rd, 2014
Signs of overt racism still are all around us, be it a New Hampshire police commissioner’s use of an ethnic slur to describe President Obama or an NBA team owner’s disturbing remarks about black athletes and fans. By now, we all know the drill, the media calls these people out for their ugly words and we play our parts, shaking our heads in sad disbelief — then return to our daily lives...
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Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine, thinks it’s time for a bold step to change the way we talk and think about race in America. This week, Bill speaks to Coates about his June cover story for the magazine, provocatively titled “The Case for Reparations.” In it, Coates argues that we have to dig deeper into our past and the original sin of slavery, confronting the institutional racism that continues to pervade society. From the lynching tree to today’s mass incarceration of young African-Americans, he says we need to examine our motives more intently and reconcile the moral debt and economic damage inflicted upon generations of black Americans.
For one, Coates points to a century of racist and exploitive housing policies that made it hard for African-Americans to own homes and forced them to live in poorer neighborhoods with unequal access to a good education, resulting in a major wealth gap between black and white. In fact, the median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households, according to a Pew Research Center study.
“There are plenty of African-Americans in this country — and I would say this goes right up to the White House — who are not by any means poor, but are very much afflicted by white supremacy,” Coates says. By white supremacy Coates says he refers to an age-old system in America which holds that whites “should always be ensured that they will not sink to a certain level. And that level is the level occupied by black people.”
Coates explains to Moyers: “I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver. I’m asking you as an American to see all of the freedoms that you enjoy and see how they are rooted in things that the country you belong to condoned or actively participated in the past.”
Producer: Gina Kim. Segment Producer: Lena Shemel. Editor: Sikay Tang. Intro & Outro Producer: Lena Shemel. Intro & Outro Editor: Rob Kuhns.
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As the folks over at BillMoyers.com note about the interview, they’ve “…also cut extra clips from their conversation, which were just too good to leave on the cutting room floor…”
More From Ta-Nehisi Coates on Our Racist Heritage
BillMoyers.com
May 23, 2014
The Elementary School Experience That Changed Him
Coates recounts an after-school fight that he witnessed as a child in which another child pulled out a gun in a 7-Eleven parking lot and brandished it. “When you think about the moment that your world is different, that was the moment,” Coates tells Moyers.
On Black vs. White Neighborhoods
Coates says to understand African-American communities today, you need to look at the legacy of our discriminatory housing policies. “We didn’t want integration … It’s not just white people being bigoted. It’s not a disease of the heart. It is that we had certain policies that guaranteed that that was going to be the result. And here we have it.” Coates points to sociologist Patrick Sharkey’s research that finds an African-American family earning $100,000 a year on average will live in a neighborhood that is comparable to a white family that makes $30,000 a year.
On Chicago’s Scam Housing Loans
The practice of redlining made it nearly impossible for most African-Americans in Chicago to secure mortgages in the 1960s. “Contract sellers” jumped in to fill the void giving eager first-time buyers an opportunity to “purchase” a home under miserable terms, which led almost all black families at the time to be evicted from their homes. Coates explains that the “rinse and repeat” process of contract lending relied on fear tactics to get white homeowners to sell.
The Messages America Sends to Black Children
Coates tells Moyers that African-American kids get messages from our society — through television and community policing practices, for example — that equates young black children to second-class citizens. “You take a message if you’re living in New York and you’re walking down the block and you’re regularly stopped and frisked,” Coates says.
On America’s Heritage and Reparations
Coates says that when Americans reflect on their collective history they in effect, cherry pick, by only recognizing the past when it flatters us. “We’re deluding ourselves. We are trying not to open our bills. We only want to open our paychecks that come from the past. But the bill is accumulating. And it’s all around us.”
Featured images: 1) Ta-Nehisi Coates 2) White homeowners in 1969 Chicago formed block clubs, designed to keep the neighborhood white. Credit: AP Photo/JLP 3) Civil rights marchers enter west-of-Chicago suburb in Cicero, Ill., on September 4, 1966. Credit: AP Photo 4) Justin Williams, 6, center, waits with his grandmother Denise Robinson, left, before the start of a silent march to end the “stop-and-frisk” program in New York, Sunday, June 17, 2012. Credit: AP Photo/Seth Wenig 5)The Freedom Chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution, march with the colors during the annual 4th of July Parade in The Woodlands, Texas. Credit: AP Photo/Houston Chronicle, Brett Coomer
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Another must-read and brutally integral part of Moyers’ show is linked here (the format of the charts prevented them from being reproduced at Daily Kos; however, virtually everything related to the show and its website content is technically enabled for comprehensive reproduction by the public, at-large): “These Eight Charts Show Why Racial Equality Is a Myth in America.”
These Eight Charts Show Why Racial Equality Is a Myth in America
John Light
BillMoyers.com
May 22, 2014
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ cover story at The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations,” published last night — and the subject of this week’s Moyers & Company interview — shows how dramatically the legacy of slavery and centuries of legalized and institutionalized racism have held back our country’s African-American population. In 2014, there still very much exists what in 1967 Martin Luther King described as “two Americas,” one “overflowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of opportunity,” the other tainted by “a daily ugliness … that constantly transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair.”
Last summer, America celebrated the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, and this week marks the 50th anniversary of the beginning of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. But in 2014, just as in the mid-1960s, which one of Dr. King’s two Americas you live in likely depends on the color of your skin.
These charts show what those two Americas look like…
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Here’s a link to the six mentions of Ta-Nehisi Coates in the past week here at Daily Kos, and here are the direct links to two of those pieces…
On Racism, Reparations, Restoration and Reconciliation, by Kossack Vyan (5/23/14)
Dear White Folks, Reparations for Black Americans are Not a 'Lottery', by Kossack chaunceydevega (5/23/14)
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