Conservative Outrage Over Ta-Nehisi Coates' Piece On Reparations!

Ta-Nehisi Coates sparks debate over Black Americans still being denied an opportunity to own a piece of the American Dream. He is right, Black Americans are still the most discriminated and likely most segregated.

Ta-Nehisi Coates sparked a firestorm. The American writer, journalist, and educator. Coates is a senior editor for The Atlantic, as well as a blogger for that publication's website (writing on culture, social issues, and politics).

Conservatives were pissed that Coates would write about "US BLACK FOLKS" getting our "40 ACRES AND A MULE". Honestly, if ever that day would come, most of us young folks would have trouble obtaining even a slight amount of dues.

I mean for how many of them "FREED BLACKS" got their property snatched up. When them "FREED BLACKS" were kidnapped and sold into slavery, it took even more years to regain their dignity and freedom.

Since the 20th Century, White America has grown more diverse. Now in the 21st Century, it's getting a whole lot Browner and those in the racist right are going down.

One by one, some are dying off. It's hard to imagine that even with the first Black president, it's still a touchy subject to even mention reparations. There's nothing worse than an opinion that riles up the racists.

In his piece featured in the Atlantic, he wrote citing an investigation by the Associated Press telling about properties owned by Blacks being snatched up. He stated that in 2001 the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period.

The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. “Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia,” the AP reported, as well as “oil fields in Mississippi” and “a baseball spring training facility in Florida.”

He would add that even in Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport. “It was like people who like to go out and shoot lions in Africa. It was the same thrill,” a housing attorney told the historian Beryl Satter in her 2009 book, Family Properties. “The thrill of the chase and the kill.”

The implications are chilling. As a rule, poor black people do not work their way out of the ghetto—and those who do often face the horror of watching their children and grandchildren tumble back.

Even seeming evidence of progress withers under harsh light. In 2012, the Manhattan Institute cheerily noted that segregation had declined since the 1960s. And yet African Americans still remained—by far—the most segregated ethnic group in the country.

With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin. The resulting conflagration has been devastating.

One thread of thinking in the African American community holds that these depressing numbers partially stem from cultural pathologies that can be altered through individual grit and exceptionally good behavior. (In 2011, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, responding to violence among young black males, put the blame on the family: “Too many men making too many babies they don’t want to take care of, and then we end up dealing with your children.” Nutter turned to those presumably fatherless babies: “Pull your pants up and buy a belt, because no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.”) The thread is as old as black politics itself. It is also wrong. The kind of trenchant racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable. The essence of American racism is disrespect. And in the wake of the grim numbers, we see the grim inheritance.

This piece managed to rile up the conservatives.

Blacks are by far the most segregated in jobs, housing, and education. We still are perceived as "natural born criminals". With the turmoils facing a nearly lame duck like President Barack Obama, the conservatives are hoping to keep Blacks out of the White House.

To this day, Republicans aren't even concerned about Blacks. They wrote us off as part of the Democrat Plantation. There's no way to win us back says the strategists. Even if Stallmigo Rand Paul (R-KY) failed in his bid to win over those "BLACK FOLKS" who favor marijuana legalization.

Nonetheless Blacks can't move the needle forward. We have to do so with a spirit of unity. It's almost as hard to win support from Blacks even if you're Black.

Read Ta-Nehisi Coates piece and be inspired.