2025-04-14
35 分钟This is The Guardian.
Today, a conversation with the writer Tanahasi Coates on the state of America today.
In 2014,
the writer and journalist Tanahasi Coates published an essay making the case
that African Americans were owed reparations for the system of slavery in place just a few generations before.
I remember the essay, the way that it pinged around the internet,
the way people whose attention spans were already eroding, including myself, actually read it,
thought about it, the way it made this idea, reparations for slavery,
that was always fringe, seemed not just reasonable, but necessary.
It was a rare sight in Congress hearing on reparations held yesterday in one of the many buildings in Washington built on slave labor.
Journalist and author Tanahasi Coates helped kickstart this round of the reparations debate.
The greatest damage that enslavement did besides the economic damage, besides the normalization of torture of rape,
besides the normalization of treating people as though they are things,
is the institution in the American mind that black people are necessarily inferior.
It was a time where even as Donald Trump was rising as a force,
lots of new ways of thinking about race and gender were making that same journey from the fringes to the mainstream.
Ideas that racism was not getting better, but that it was woven into the very structure of our society.
I heard it so many times that there was a reckoning underway on race and gender and identity.
And Tanahasi Coates, who went on to write two best-selling books of essays,
including the Pulitzer nominated Between the World and Me,