1. Read and Annotate the remainder of “The Case for Reparations.” Take photos of at least 4 annotations and include them in your homework response on your ePortfolio. In your shared/posted annotations, draw at least 2 relationships to earlier sections of Coates’ text.

2. How did elements of programs/agencies like the New Deal, the GI Bill, the Federal Housing Administration, and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation help Whites up and hold Blacks back? Explain with at least 2 pieces of textual evidence. (Find key information in parts V and VI of Coates.)

These bills and legislation were set up in ways that excluded blacks without it being obvious. “When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible.” These numbers at such high percentages that they are at, were almost undoubtably noted and ignored when the bill was signed. Similarly in regards to the GI bill, “… Title III of the bill, which aimed to give veterans access to low-interest home loans, left black veterans to tangle with white officials at their local Veterans Administration as well as with the same banks that had, for years, refused to grant mortgages to blacks. The historian Kathleen J. Frydl observes in her 2009 book, The GI Bill, that so many blacks were disqualified from receiving Title III benefits “that it is more accurate simply to say that blacks could not use this particular title.'” Both legislations blatantly ignored the fact that blacks would be unable to use them to their full extent, some being completely unable to use them at all. The same goes for the Home owner’s loan corporation, it was the government turning a blind eye to the discrimination that was undoubtably about to occur.

3. Coates writes in Part VIII, “Contract Sellers did not target the very poor” (para. 7). Consider this section of the text and connect it to another section: Coates’ distinction between the Obamas and the Bushes at the end of Part II. How does what we’re reading help us consider why upward mobility be that much harder for Blacks than for Whites? Explain with evidence.

I think that because racism is so far engrained in the bones of america that many americans find it difficult to believe a black person could ever make it to the top, let alone without hand outs or cheating or anything of that sort. Coates says, ” Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast”. The people who get far in life are subjected to the highest amount of scrutiny and racism. The Obamas must have encountered countless occasions of people second guessing them, assuming they were using other people’s ideas or statements solely because they are black.

4. “Perhaps after serious discussion and debate – the kind that HR 40 proposes – we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans…. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper – America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world” (Coates Part IX, roughly para. 12). Why might the issue of reparations be so much more threatening if it’s not actually about the $?

Americans are not ready to admit that there is an outstanding amount of racism that makes up the very bones of this country. Some claim that we have gotten to where we are today by hard work and perseverance but the plain truth is that the only reason that America is where it is today is because we clawed our way to the top and purposely pushed black people down and held them down so they could never fully reach the top with us. This country would be nowhere if we had relied solely on white ability. The sad truth is that most white people can only see the way up as by pushing people down.