The United States of Ferguson

In the wake of decisions by grand juries in both Missouri and New York’s Staten Island not to indict white police officers in the deaths of unarmed African-Americans, this week we present an encore broadcast of Bill’s conversation earlier this year with journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates. First telecast in May 2014, Coates had just written a cover story in The Atlantic magazine, provocatively titled “The Case for Reparations.” It urged that we begin a national dialogue on whether the United States should compensate African-Americans not only as recognition of slavery’s “ancient brutality” — as President Lyndon Johnson called it – but also as acknowledgement of all the prejudice and discrimination that have followed in a direct line from this, our original sin. His words are remarkably prescient in light of recent events. As Coates explained to Moyers, “I am not asking you, as a white person, to see yourself as an enslaver. I’m asking you as an American to see all of the freedoms that you enjoy and see how they are rooted in things that the country you belong to condoned or actively participated in in the past. And that covers everything from enslavement to the era of lynching, when we effectively decided that we weren’t going to afford African-Americans the same level of protection of the law… “There are plenty of African-Americans in this country — and I would say that this goes right up to the White House — who are not by any means poor, but are very much afflicted by white supremacy.” Reparations, Coates said, are “what the United States, first of all, really owes African-Americans, but not far behind that, what it owes itself, because this is really about our health as a country… I firmly believe that reparation is a chance to be pioneers. We say we set all these examples about liberty and freedom and democracy and all that great stuff. Well, here’s an opportunity for us to live that out.”