Devoted fans of The Daily Show might be aware that Comedy Central’s long-running flagship news and humor show offers more info and laughs than those that make it to broadcast. An online-only series called “Between the Scenes,” (BtS) features host Trevor Noah offering deeper takes of what the show covered—before he moves onto the next topic. It’s in these unscripted bits that Noah often shines most, as he breaks down challenging subjects, and answers audience questions with his signature, well-informed sense of humor.
The BtS episode accompanying the Mar. 21 episode, which kicked off with a discussion about reparations led by TDS correspondent and “white man” Michael Kosta, is particularly powerful. (Watch the clip if you’re troubled by those quotation marks.) Kosta, with a straight face, explains why he supports reparations: It will finally relieve him of all his white guilt. It’s a clip worth watching.
While this bit was, of course, over the top (and yes, funny), this is not about what Kosta said. This is about the way we talk about reparations, what another (likely white) guy said about reparations, and how Noah responded to him.
June marks the fifth anniversary of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ groundbreaking “The Case for Reparations,” published in The Atlantic. Gigantic both in scope and in size, the meticulously researched piece focused on efforts to keep black Americans from homeownership, and opened the eyes of many who read it, Fox News fans aside. White people were heartbroken to learn the extent of the crafting and maintenance of just one aspect of their race-based privilege; many were shocked to see just how successfully people—who looked like them—had stacked the deck against people who did not.
The lives of black Americans are better than they were half a century ago. The humiliation of “whites only” signs are gone. Rates of black poverty have decreased. Black teen-pregnancy rates are at record lows—and the gap between black and white teen-pregnancy rates has shrunk significantly. But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault lines are everywhere. The income gap between black and white households is roughly the same today as it was in 1970. Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, studied children born from 1955 through 1970 and found that 4 percent of whites and 62 percent of blacks across America had been raised in poor neighborhoods. A generation later, the same study showed, virtually nothing had changed. And whereas whites born into affluent neighborhoods tended to remain in affluent neighborhoods, blacks tended to fall out of them.
This is not surprising. Black families, regardless of income, are significantly less wealthy than white families. The Pew Research Center estimates that white households are worth roughly 20 times as much as black households, and that whereas only 15 percent of whites have zero or negative wealth, more than a third of blacks do.
For many black people, Coates’ piece had the equally powerful impact of laying out, so thoroughly, just one aspect of the known, omnipresent, but rarely discussed inequality of this American life, that nagging feeling of a conspiracy against black success—a confirmation that was both validating and depressing at the same time.
All the same, as noted in a recent New York Magazine interview with Coates—five years after the publication of “Case”—public opinion skews really, really hard against anything having to do with reparations, whatever they might look like.
Not only do upwards of 80 percent of white voters oppose reparations in most polls, but the policy attracts less support from black voters than many race-neutral, redistributive programs do. A Kaiser Family Foundation/CNN survey from 2015 found that only 52 percent of African-Americans support reparations for slavery. In 2016, Marist put that figure at 58 percent, with 35 percent of black voters voicing opposition. And no significant percentage of black voters ranks reparations as a top issue.
Coates isn’t surprised by those numbers.
(P)eople laugh at reparations. Part of that is because reparations is a Dave Chappelle skit. That’s what a lot of people think about, when they think of reparations. That polling is not a natural, free-standing fact. That’s the result of people denigrating the idea repeatedly.
When I wrote “The Case for Reparations,” my notion wasn’t that you could actually get reparations passed, even in my lifetime. My notion was that you could get people to stop laughing. My notion was you could actually have people say, “Oh, shit. This actually isn’t a crazy idea. This actually isn’t insane.” And then, once you got them to stop laughing, you could get them to start fighting. And so it doesn’t particularly surprise me that reparations is unpopular. A part of it being unpopular is the people who have the megaphone not taking it seriously at all.
Unpopular or not, reparations are suddenly coming up quite a bit in conversations with 2020 candidates. Coates thinks it’s now or never that we confront white supremacy and the impact it’s had on people of color, black Americans in particular.
Trump is in the White House, dude. Old man white supremacist is in the White House. The Democratic Party is as far left right now as it’s ever been in my lifetime. If we’re not gonna talk about reparations now, then we’re never going to talk about it.
[...]
(W)e are at this revolutionary moment I thought. Are we questioning? Isn’t it, pretty much, an article of faith on the left that this country, and this world, can’t continue as it is?
At the risk of oversimplification, Coates fears that discussions about reparations will veer from issues of race into class, thus missing the point entirely, and paving the way for the U.S. to keep proudly spreading the virus that is white supremacy.
I am deeply scared of any attempt to close the wealth gap, to ameliorate the broad socioeconomic disparity in almost every field between blacks and whites in this country, that avoids talking about why those disparities are there to begin with. It holds out the prospect of this country never learning the real lesson of white supremacy. It means the possibility of this dream state wherein we still think of ourselves as the font of freedom and liberty continuing. And if that happens, I would say it’s almost inevitable that we go on and plunder someone else.
Which brings us back to “Between the Scenes,” and Trevor Noah.
As the applause fades after Kosta’s “white guilt” bit, Noah cheerfully asks if everyone understands everything, and calls on an unseen (and likely white) audience member who seems wholly unaware of his need for an education on reparations.
Do you think that, like, reparations should just go to like, one, like, group, or like, should they target like, people that are in the same kind of like, socioeconomic, like, group?
Noah asks for clarification—perhaps curious to see if the anonymous query is an attempt to address other terrible sins in white American history, such as Japanese interment camps, maybe, or perhaps the Native American genocide and land theft.
Nah.
Well, like, there, are like, white people that have, like, been disenfranchised, like, recently—
Noah interrupts the (likely white) man to remind him that “’recently’ is the key.” The audience member, unfazed, soldiers on.
Well the country like, deindustrialized, right? So like, a lot of people in like, manufacturing jobs and stuff, like, their areas were affected and—
Noah jumps in at this point, and launches into a skilled, funny, and thoughtful explanation of not just what “reparations” means, but also why they’re important, and why they’re not for white people.
To your question, I think you have to understand what the word “reparations” means first. So, “reparations,” you are repairing something that you have broken, you are paying for something that you were supposed to pay for.
I’m not saying that there aren’t people living in America today who are suffering, and are going through pain and strife because of what’s happening when it comes to machines taking jobs, factories becoming industrialized, et cetera.
But “reparations” is a specific conversation about a specific time in America; and that is, black people were slaves. I’ve even heard people say “Oh, but there were some of the Irish who were indentured.”
Slavery. Look at the numbers, look at the time, look at the level of work. You could not work toward your freedom. For most black people in America, this was a time when you lived and died a slave. And so that’s what “reparations” is about.
So I hear what you’re saying, but I think that’s a completely separate conversation that has to be had about the now.
Noah then dove into a simple analogy—careful to center white feelings for a moment, just to keep people focused.
If you are not careful, what you then do, is you combine everybody’s suffering into the same ball, and you make it seem like all injustices have the same weighting and they don’t. Just like crimes—theft isn’t the same as murder, we don’t try them the same way.
As much as there is a white person who’s suffering today … I feel for anybody who’s suffering, ‘cause I know what it’s like to be poor, I know what it’s like to suffer. I didn’t come from a wealthy family, we struggled when I was growing up—but I also understand that there are levels of that suffering.
It does block a white person ‘cause you go, “white privilege,” and the person goes, “I’m poor and I’m white, where’s the privilege?” White people are like, “I wish I could activate my white privilege. I wish I could do it right now: WHITE PRIVILEGE, GIVE ME SOMETHING!”
I get that. Trust me, I get it. It’s hard to accept that you have benefits because of the color of your skin if you cannot see the benefits you have.
It’s then that Noah dips into a quick sports analogy, all the better to help white people wrap their heads around the concept of how race privilege works.
Think of it more like golf—don’t think of it as privilege, then, think of it like a handicap. In golf, they acknowledge that you are in a position where you need so many advantages just to be competitive in the game. So what they say is “Alright, you’ve got a handicap of 15, so that means you’re going to be hitting from this tee and you get more chances to get the ball in, because we understand the position you’re in.”
But enough (predominately white) sport talk! This is about black people and reparations!
If you’re a black person in America, from slavery, from day one, the number of injustices that have held black people back in America amount to an insurmountable—if you look at black people’s freedom, if you look at black people’s land, just land alone.
The amount of wealth you can acquire over time if you own land is exponential: You have the land, you have the fact that you can borrow based on the land, you have the fact that you can use the money that you have borrowed to grow more wealth, you can use it to grow your family’s wealth.
Just taking that away from black people alone is crippling them.
We interrupt this skillful response to sigh in disbelief at the widespread and continued use of ableist terms like “crippling.”
But back to that (likely white) guy’s schooling, courtesy of Trevor Noah’s top of mind.
So you combine that with slavery and then you look at Jim Crow laws. You didn’t let black people in America live in the areas that they wanted to live in, they couldn’t get loans from the banks that they wanted to get loans from.
And then, on top of that, when they started getting the loans from American banks, American banks were found to be giving them higher interest rates—when in fact, they were the same risk as many of the other races that they were giving loans to.
It’s time to bring it home.
So when you combine all of those things, I think it’s safe to say that black Americans have a conversation that they need to be having with the United States. It doesn’t involve me, it doesn’t involve white people—it’s like, yo, American government, meet the black people. That’s it.
Have that conversation.
No word on how the (likely white) guy responded.
In all seriousness, as more of the 2020 candidates choose to NOT shy away from the reparations discussion, Fox News and their ilk are seizing on the subject with all the nuance one might expect. Everything Noah—who, remember, grew up during South African apartheid with one white and one black parent—said in this segment is common knowledge to most black Americans, who are most likely to face confrontations when the topic of reparations comes up. Most black Americans, however, won’t experience the power dynamic that Noah enjoyed in this segment; even worse, black self-interest is often used as a way to discredit and dismiss these conversations entirely.
And thus, white allies are once again presented with an opportunity to step up. Hopefully, Noah’s impassioned, well-reasoned response can serve as something of a colloquial toolkit to further that goal; a snarky Cliff’s Notes version of Coates’ oh-so-thorough, five-year-old “Case for Reparations.”
Nobody—2020 candidates included—may know what slavery reparations might look like for black Americans, much less the impact on white ones. But before that conversation can begin in earnest, conversations like the one Noah had with this audience member must be dealt with accordingly—and the necessary conversations that Noah speaks of must be allowed to happen. This is how, and why, we pass HR 40—which simply asks to study what reparations might look like.
Which, as Coates reminds us, was alway the first step.