2014The Case for ReparationsTa-Nehisi Coates
HistoryEssay · 2014
The Case for Reparations
Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Atlantic ran this as the cover story of its June 2014 issue, an essay of roughly sixteen thousand words. The link is to We Were Eight Years in Power, the One World collection of 2017 that gathers Coates's Atlantic essays from the Obama years and prints this one among them, each with a new reflection by the author.
Why you should read this
Coates's long-form magazine essay traces housing discrimination and contract selling in twentieth-century Chicago to argue that reparations are a matter of accounting for specific, documented harms rather than abstract guilt. Revived reparations as a serious subject of American political debate and is now widely assigned in courses.
- Field
- History
- Form
- Non-fiction
- Published
- 2014
- Themes
- RaceHistoryContemporary
