Ta-Nehisi Coates makes, at some length, the "Case for Reparations"--based on "Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy."
Consider this an amicus brief--with one rather significant amendment. I'm all for Coates' cause, but as a part-Native American and citizen of the Cherokee Nation, I want what's mine and my brothers' and my mother's, too. I want the Southeast United States back, and all the material resources torn from its original inhabitants. I want justice for the official murder of one quarter of the Cherokee Nation as it was forced to march at gunpoint halfway across the country and straight into foreign, "Indian" territory.
I want all my brothers and sisters of other Native-American blood to receive same. In lieu of that, cash will do. Lots of it.
I also want American women to be compensated for their years of unpaid grueling toil as they raised the next generation. And I want compensation for the millions of Jews, Irishmen, Hispanics, Italians and all other minorities who suffered from systematic discrimination in both civil society and the workplace. In fact I want reparations paid to every American who sprang from the loins of oppressed proletarians, for the bondage of class hierarchy is, historically, very real.
I'm not trying to make light of Coates' pain, or to conflate black slavery with "Irish need not apply." But the world doesn't work in the way Mr. Coates believes it should. And almost everybody has a history of major hurt, against which endless cases for reparations could be made.