Kanye 2020 | Page 14

Shackles

In “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nahisi Coates explores the years following the Civil War when blacks were no longer slaves to slave masters but instead slaves to the system. For years, blacks were free men, yet the system still worked to shackle them from succeeding in anything but in the most extraordinary of circumstances….

Where Would We Be Today if it Wasn’t For Yesterday?

Coates talks a lot about what happened to african Americans in that past and what has been done to them that has created this huge gap between their white counter parts. The stats and stories that Coates has complied and shared shows how bad African Americans have had it in the past and have it…

Is the American Dream Still Alive

Coates provides a thorough account of why reparations is neither an unjust or unreasonable demand. His argument is best summed through the statement that, “American prosperity was ill gotten and selective in its distribution”. Meaning success of the American economy seemed to miss many of those who helped build it. Even when slavery was…

Feeding the Cycle of Poverty

Ta-Nehisi Coates develops a historical narrative of the transgressions of oppression towards blacks from the early 1900’s to modern day. Coates describes how following the abolishment of slavery, the ideas of white supremacy and the abuse of blacks were very much still instilled in society. Whether these ideas were as explicitly stated as the Jim…

Making the case against “bootstraps”

I have often talked to individuals who oppose government aid at an attempt to understand where they are coming from. I typically hear a story about how their grandfather came from (Ireland/Poland/Other European country) with (nothing but the clothes on his back/not even two coins to rub together/other cliché about poverty) and how he pulled…

When Education is White

While reading “When Affirmative Action was White” I was reminded of Chris, a 24 year old African-American man that I met at an education conference last year. Every day, he carried around this book, I finally asked him what the book was. He told me it was the Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter Godwin…

Selective Memory

In the first two chapters of When Affirmative Action Was White, Ira Katznelson argues that in the period after World War II and before the Civil Rights Movement, the New Deal provided a path of affirmative action for whites. African Americans were worse off than whites in the South; however, the New Deal benefited a…

The Perennial Age of Whiteness

The first chapter of Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White charts the revisionist history of race-based disparities which omits the role of public policy in creating those disparities. The second chapter exposes those policies, revealing the legislative maneuvering which engendered the racial realities of our present. These chapters lay in stark contrast to the…

We All Contradict Ourselves

In Chapters five and six of The Headscarf debates the implications headscarves have on German national identity is discussed. Interestingly enough the debate never reached a concrete solution, except that the majority of headscarf policies are to be left to the power of the state. This response from Germany is fairly consistent with the response…

Emancipation by Westernization

Chapter 5 of The Headscarf Debates illustrates the debates on the headscarf in Germany, and how the German discussion differs from its neighbors. For a country with a history of religious intolerance and discrimination, I was surprised to learn that there is no clear or strict ban against headscarves at any particular site in Germany….