“I read Coates’ essay, no mention later arrivals to the U.S. bearing responsibility for reparations in it, for example”
Coates addresses this argument head on in his original essay:
“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.”
It seems you did not read Coates’ piece carefully enough to catch this point.
Williams point about much of the U.S. population arriving here after slavery ended is a direct rebuttal to Coates’ call for reparations.
Not even close. This isn’t even close to the fundamental premise of Coates’ argument and the fact that you continue to assert this while claiming, laughably, to have read the article is self refuting.
Obliquely, he may have touched on it in his cases of continuing exploitation most recently by sub-prime promoters, but that is also one of the weakest parts of his argument.
Your blithe assertion that this is a weak part of his argument is not especially persuasive considering that you haven’t shown much comprehension of what the basic argument even is so far but that is really beside the point. The real point is that neither you nor Williams even engages with it at all.
I’ll make it simple and short: Housing policy discrimination happened. It happened to people who are still living with the results of that discrimination. We know this and NOBODY disputes it. What is your argument (or Williams’ for that matter) for why those people should receive no compensation from the government that facilitated that discrimination. Or is the assertion of that basic reality too “weak” to even bother grappling with? Maybe you can find something you wrote back in High School that completely responds to that question.
Exactly. Coates admits that he’s read Williams’ arguments before. Yet Coates was not intellectually honest enough in his own recent article to address them. So when Williams repeats the arguments Coates has ducked responding to, Coates again ducks responding to them, making the excuse that it’s somehow unfair to raise unanswered (and perhaps fatal-to-Coates’ argument) issues twice.
Then again, was Coates’ article really about reparations? Or was that just a way to draw attention to his moving and brilliantly-written account of black homeowners getting swindled decades ago? To be serious about reparations he’d have to address Williams’ arguments. Yet it’s okay if this was simply a literary device, an attention-getter, that’s not itself serious.
Coates’ logic is flakey. If your ancestors came here in, say 1950, you don’t have to claim either the slaveholder or the revolutionary soldier. What if you came here from Congo in 1950, or from Poland? Should the first not owe a debt to all black Americans, while the second does? It’s Coates who is hand-waving here.
Personally I had multiple ancestors who fought in the Civil War for the Union, while relatives of theirs died in it. Also, a grandmother who devoted her professional life to teaching at a pubic highschool in Harlem from the '30s into the '50s. If debts accumulate through history, they must go both ways. Far better though to forgive perceived debts of so many years back and go forward as equals now.
Typical TPM “catfight” article. They have a strange obsession with this kind of shallow “journalism”, focusing on the personalities rather than the actual issues.
I’ll let Coates defend his logic, but you did a lot of big talking (typing?) about Coates not being “intellectually honest” and “ducking” arguments. Do you want to admit that you were wrong about that?
By much discussed I guess it means relentlessly pushed by the Atlantic and given friendly interviews on PBS, MSNBC etc. Another issue for the beltway crowd. Most Americans couldn’t care less what Mr. Coates or Mr. Williams think about this non-issue. Actually Mr. Coates can expand this into a dissertation and get his Phd. Then we can call him Dr. Coates when he appears with Bill Moyers.
Whether one is “allowed” to restate an argument or not is an open question but not, I think, an especially important one. That is really between Williams and his editor.
The fact that he, and apparently others on this board, think that it is sufficient to regurgitate what was a weak argument to begin with to refute an argument that isn’t even being made in the present speaks poorly of Williams and his defenders.
Whether one agrees with Coates or not, its quite clear that Williams doesn’t even bother to address the actual argument he is making. Its, at best, incredibly lazy and no one should be defending that.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who doesn’t see what the big deal is here. If Coates’s point is that Williams didn’t address his arguments, then why not say that rather than go off on some tangential non-issue? By focusing on something so seemingly small, Coates makes himself look petty, and it also makes it look like he has no counter for Williams’s arguments.
How is a political columnist repeating himself any less permissible than a political candidate repeating himself?
You will be shocked to know that we’ve had years of Presidential campaigns where the candidates repeat the same stump speech… presenting the same arguments, the same slogans, the same jokes, the same applause lines… at stop after stop, day after day.
Obama and Romney both did it and it never made for a front page “self-plagiarism” tempest.
It’s clear to me that Coates is saying “self-plagiarism” as a clever way of saying that he’s copying and pasting his old work without really engaging with his argument. Parsing the semantics of the euphemism is missing the point entirely.
That’s exactly right, and it seems obvious to me that Coates is using the term “self-plagiarism” to mock William’s intellectual laziness, and not as a charge of ethical violation (other than passing off your used car as new, that is).
Repeating the same old forced feed, Uncle Tomish response is the question, leaving self-plagiarism as the straw man to discuss other issues but the main one, reparation. Sorry this trick is as old as slavery.
