Winning the Lottery & Reparations??

I’m still working through my thoughts on brother Ta-Nehisi Coates' piece on slavery reparations. If you haven’t seen the video, it’s on this blog.

As I wrote previously, I’m blown away by the comments that ‘The Case for Reparations’ has caused over at the Atlantic magazine and other sites across the Internet.

If you need any more verification that white supremacy remains a real force in American life, all you have to do is read the comments regarding ‘The Case for Reparations.’ The Internet is one part of what I call "the backstage" of modern American racism. It’s a space where people act out publicly what their (semi)private thoughts actually are.

Now, take the next giant step. Those racists are your neighbors, friends, colleagues, and possibly even your family members. Meditate on that motherfuckin fact for a hot second!  

For white folks, the above is a thought experiment. For us Black folks, it’s a matter of life and death. Most of the reaction to Coates’ essay is the old standard, white racist, "color blind" talking-points. As a result, they’re uninteresting, just an expose’ of what white folks really think in post civil rights America. Damn!

 But, and I said but…. There’s one up-and-coming thread in the comments against Coates' essay that deserves our attention. The racists are suggesting….be they active or passive, intentional or accidental, or just drunk on white privilege and the white racial frame….slavery reparations (or for the countless of other state sponsored crimes against Black people in America) are not a fuckin "lottery".

Reparations, in any form, really means acknowledging that a crime has taken place, and said victim (us Black folks) should be made whole, both materially and financially, as well as through the moral gesture of an apology. That ain’t gonna happen!

The lottery is a random win. The lottery is fun. The crimes against humanity that was hundreds of years of white on Black slavery across the Atlantic, more than one hundred years of Racial Apartheid in the United States under Jim and Jane Crow, and then decades more, into the present, of continued institutional white supremacy, is not fun for us Black folks. It’s more than slick. Using the word "lottery" to describe slavery reparations is really an act of violence through language against Black folk’s humanity.

When the justice claims of us Black Americans are compared to a damn game, and the money that can come with winning it, white racists and their allies are disrespectfully dancing on the graves of our recently dead, the long gone dead, and those of us in the present whose life chances continue to be depressingly impacted by white supremacy. I know white people don’t feel empathy towards Black people. And maybe that’s the point? If you don’t feel any sense of empathy or humanity with Black people then why would a person not spit in the face of their lived experiences by reducing their justice claims to a "lottery"?