Ten years in an America enslaved to race recrimination
Adecade ago, in June 2014, the Atlantic published a cover story with a simple declarative title: “The Case for Reparations,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The piece had taken him two years to write, and the work paid off — with praise sweeping through the ranks of media, prizes from the most prominent elite institutions. The piece was named the “Top Work of Journalism of the Decade” by New York University’s journalism institute. It was hailed as a rare piece of writing which pushed open a cultural dialogue about a controversial subject.
This conversation had been taking place among liberal elites and in all the high places they command — at the Kennedy School and in the New Yorker and National Public Radio — but in August that year it exploded into something more when the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri became a flashpoint in America’s racial reckoning. Coates’s examination of America’s incapacity to truly deal with its history of sin, slavery and persecution went from being the stuff of ethical and intellectual debate to creating the basis for an entire movement — bridging the gap between the high and the low.
