- Some annotations from the text:
2. Clyde Ross was a poor black man from the Deep South born during the 1920’s, the era of Jim Crow. He had spent his entire childhood being silenced and taking whatever the white men threw at him. After spending some time enlisted into the army, he moved to Chicago during the migration of black people during the 1940’s, after the murder of Emmett Till. He hoped that here he would get a fresh start and be able to provide for himself and his future family, in ways his parents could not do for him. Life in Chicago seemed to be good for Clyde, he was getting paid and not being scared of white men when we walked down the street. But there were still some glaring injustices that he faced. He moved into a new home, but he was not able to get a mortgage directly from a bank. He had a contract with the old owner, not a bank. And he had to be on top of every payment or his entire life would start to crumble beneath him. The man who sold him his house was inflating the price of his home and trying to move him out to move someone else in to continue this cycle with other black families. The FHA had areas and neighborhoods mapped out as to where white people and black people were supposed to live. Author Ta-Nehisi Coates said, “The FHA insured private mortgages, causing a drop in interest rates and a decline in the size of the down payment required to buy a house. But an insured mortgage was not a possibility for Clyde Ross. The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated “A,” indicated “in demand” neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.” These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated “D” and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red. Neither the percentage of black people living their nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion” showing what the Chicago FHA was doing to the black people. They were creating these areas that they could advertise for the black folk to live in so the white neighborhoods would not be “corrupted” by the black folks. Once word got around that these cities were doing this the citizens started standing up for themselves so they could get the same opportunities and housing the white people got. This discrimination of housing shows that even after the black people had their freedom, there were still people and organizations that fought this and tried their hardest to make it harder for the black people to live in this country.
3. “Forty-five percent of all households are on food stamps—nearly three times the rate of the city at large.” This shows that these families are not making enough money to support themselves and feed themselves. They are living on wages that are not able to truly provide for themselves.
“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.” This data shows that still black families are not able to get the same type of treatments from banks, or loans, that many white families do and this is creating this gap between the worth of the houses families live in.
“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.” segregation has declined rapidly since the 60’s, and people of colour are not as hated around the world but there are still people with their prejudices that limit black people and their families from having true equality. While black people have gained more equality and freedom over the years, they are no wehre near the level of white people.
5. When Coates talks about the HR-40 bill he says, “One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one’s ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte. A nation outlives its generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delaware, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, but we are still paying out the pensions. If Thomas Jefferson’s genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally Hemings’s body. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge” showing the readers that the people they are trying to give reparations to are not the ones who were truly affected by slavery. The people who were hurt and harmed by the racism of the past are not alive now, why should we be giving people things when they weren’t the ones who went through the torture. Reparations should have been made a long time ago, but the reason that they are not passing now is because these black people and their families were not the ones that were held captive in the past. Yes America as a whole is still racists but it is not to the extent that it was many, many years ago. And giving money or some sort of reparation to people now is not going to help the people of the past because they are not the one who were being hurt.
