David Remnick: It's not often that an article comes along that changes the world. That's exactly what happened with Ta-Nehisi Coates five years ago now, when he wrote The Case for Reparations. That article in The Atlantic was a very big deal, to say the least.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I was shocked at how big it was. I can remember going up to the Red Rooster to meet somebody for lunch in Harlem's Restaurant in Harlem. I was leaving, and there were two people at the bar. There was a Black woman and a Black dude who were older, and the dude's eyes get so big, he just, "Oh my God. Oh my God". The woman said to me, she said, "Praise God. Praise God." He runs into the car and he has an Atlantic, says, "Please sign it, sign it, praise God." I was like, "What?" I would show up places and people would ask me to sign the paper, people who couldn't get access to the magazine would print it out and would come because they sold out at a certain point.

Ta-Nehisi Coates somehow got everybody talking about reparations. Now, that subject had been discussed since the end of the Civil War. In fact, there's a bill that's been sitting in Congress for 30 years about reparations, but now reparations for slavery and legalized discrimination is a real subject of major discussion among the Democratic presidential candidates.

We're going to spend the entire hour of our program today talking about what exactly are reparations and what the political future of them might be. I talked to Ta-Nehisi Coates last week. Ta-Nehisi, for those who have may not have read the article five years ago, what exactly is the case that you make for reparations, which is a word that's been around for a long, long time.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: The case I make for reparations is virtually every institution with some degree of history in America, be it public, be it private, has a history of extracting wealth and resources out of the African-American community. I think what has often been missing, this is what I was trying to make the point of in 2014, that behind all of that, oppression was actually theft. In other words, this is not just mean. This is not just maltreatment. This is the theft of resources out of that community. That theft of resources continued well into the period of, I would make the argument, around the time of the Fair Housing Act.

David Remnick: What year is that?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: That's 1968. There are a lot of people, but [crosstalk]

David Remnick: You're not saying that between 1968 and 2019, everything is hunky dory.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I'm not saying everything was hunky dory at all, but I'm trying-- If you were speaking to the most intellectually honest, dubious person, because you have to remember what I'm battling against this idea is that it ended in 1865.

David Remnick: With emancipation in the end of the war.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: With emancipation, yes, yes, yes. The case I'm trying to make is within the lifetime of a large number of Americans in this country, there was theft.

David Remnick: A lot of your article was about Chicago Housing Policy. It was a very technical analysis of Chicago Housing Policy. When people talk to me about the article, and I could tell they hadn't read it, said Ta-Nehisi making a case for it. No, no. First and foremost, it's a dissection of a particular policy as emblematic of so many other policies.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Out of all of those policies of theft, I had to pick one. That was really my goal. The one I picked was housing, was our housing policy. Again, we have this notion that housing, as it exists today, sprung up from Black people coming north, maybe not finding the jobs that they want, and thus forming some pathological culture and white people just being concerned citizens fled to the suburbs, but beneath that was policy.

The reason why Black people were confined to those neighborhoods in the first place, and white people had access to neighborhoods further away was because of political decisions. The government underwrote that through FHA loans through the GI Bill. That, in turn, caused the devaluing of Black neighborhoods and inability to access credit to even improve neighborhoods.

David Remnick: Now, your article starts with someone who lived through these racist policies, a man named Clyde Ross. Tell us the story of Clyde Ross. How did he react to the article?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Mr. Ross was living on the west side of Chicago.

David Remnick: Started out in Mississippi,

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Started out in Mississippi in the 1920s, born in Mississippi under Jim Crow, his family lost their land, had their land basically stolen from them, had his horse stolen from him. He goes off, fights in World War II, comes back like a lot of people, said, "I can't live in Clarkdale, I just can't. I can't be here. I'm going to kill somebody. I'm going to get killed." Comes up to Chicago.

In Chicago, all of the social conventions of Jim Crow are gone. He doesn't have to move off the street because somebody white is walking back, doesn't have to take his hat off or look down or anything like that, gets a job at the Campbell Soup Company. He wants the last emblem of the American dream, he wants home ownership, couldn't go to the bank and get a loan like everybody else.

David Remnick: He was making a decent wage.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Making a decent wage enough that he could save some money and enough for a down payment. Obviously, he has no knowledge. None of us really did at that point of what was actually happening, of why this was, no concept of federal policy really. What he ends up with is basically a contract lender, which is a private lender who says, "Hey, you give me the down payment and you own the house." What they actually did was they kept the deed for the house, and you had to pay off the house in its entirety in order to get the deed.

Although you were effectively a renter, you had all of lack of privilege that a renter has, and yet all the responsibilities that a buyer has. If something goes wrong in the house, you have to pay for that. These fees would just pile up on these people and they would lose their houses, and you don't get your down payment back. Clyde Ross is one of the few people who was able to actually keep his home.

David Remnick: There's such a moving moment in the piece where he's sitting with you and he admits we were ashamed. We did not want anyone to know we were that ignorant, and felt that his ignorance had extended to his understanding of life in America in Chicago, which had seemed, to use the phrase of the Great Migration, the Promised Land.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: He felt like a sucker, and he felt stupid just as anybody would. I don't think he knew on the level, the extent to which the con actually went. Then living in a community of people, and this was something I didn't get into peace, but living in a community of people who were being ripped off, and they couldn't talk about it to each other because they wanted to maintain this façade or this front that they own their homes, not that somebody else actually held the deed. For a long time, there was a great period of silence about it.

David Remnick: Did Mr. Ross react to your piece?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Yes, he did.

David Remnick: What'd he say?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: He said reparations will never end.

David Remnick: In the aftermath of the piece, piece comes out 15,000 words in The Atlantic, tremendous interest in it. You said this about the piece, I think it was in the Washington Post, you said, "When I wrote the case for reparations, my notion wasn't that you could actually get reparations passed even in my lifetime. My notion was that you could get people to stop laughing." What do you mean?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I meant it was a Dave Chappelle joke. What the joke was, was if Black people got reparations, all the silly dumb things they would actually do.

David Remnick: Meaning?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Buy cars, buy rims, fancy clothes, as though other people don't do those things. Once I started researching not just the fact of plunder, but actually the history of the reparations fight, which literally goes back to the American revolution. George Washington, when he dies and he leaves things to those who are enslaved. It wasn't a foreign notion that if you had stripped people of something, you might actually owe them something. It really only became foreign after the Civil War and emancipation.

I remember this was quite a dignified idea and actually an idea, there was quite a bit of literature on. The notion that it was somehow funnier, I thought, really, really diminished what was a serious trenchant and deeply, deeply perceptive idea.

David Remnick: If you visited Israel between the '50s and a certain time, you would see Mercedes-Benz taxis all over the country. You'd wonder, this is not a particularly rich country, or at least not yet. This was reparations, this was part of the reparations payment from Germany to Israel. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, 2nd World War, what does reparations look like now? What do we--

Ta-Nehisi Coates: They gave them vouchers to buy German goods.

David Remnick: What's being asked for, the rewriting of textbooks, the public discussion, what in terms of policy? How do you look at it?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: First you need the actual crime document. You need, like what you would get is the official imprimatur of the state to say, "This actually happened." I just think that's a crucial, crucial first step. The second reason you have a commission is to figure out how we pay it back. I think it's crucial to tie reparations to specific acts, which again, why you need a study. This is not I checked Black on my census, therefore. I'll give you an example of this. For instance, we have a, what I would almost call a pilot, but significant reparations program right now actually running in Chicago.

John Burge, who ran this terrible unit of police officers that tortured Black people and sent a lot of innocent Black people to jail over the course of, I think it was like 20 or so years. Then once he was found out in Chicago, there was a reparations plan put together where his victims were actually given reparations, but in addition to that, crucial to that, they changed how they taught history. You had to actually teach John Burge. You had to actually teach people about what actually happened. It wasn't just the money, there was some, I hate to say educational, but I guess that's the word we use, educational element to it. I just think, you can't win this argument by trying to hide the ball, not in the long term. I think both of those things are crucial.

David Remnick: Ta-Nehisi, as of this moment, in 2019, there were more than 20 Democratic presidential candidates running, eight of them have said they'll support a bill to at least create a commission to study reparations. What do you make of that? Is it symbolic, or is it lip service, or is it just a way to secure the Black vote, or is it something much more serious than all that?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: It's probably, in some measure, all four of those things. It certainly is symbolic. Supporting a commission is not reparations in and of itself. It's certainly lip service from at least some of the candidates. I'm actually less sure about, in terms of the Black vote, it may ultimately be true that this is something that folks rally around, but that's never been my sense.

David Remnick: Are there candidates that you take more seriously than others when they talk about reparations?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Yes, I think Elizabeth Warren is probably serious.

David Remnick: In what way?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I think she means it. I guess it will break a little news. After The Case For Reparations came out, she just asked me to come and talk one-on-one with her about it.

David Remnick: This is five years ago, your piece came out in The Atlantic.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Yes, maybe it was a little later than that, but it was about the time. It was well before she declared anything about running for president.

David Remnick: What was your conversation with Elizabeth Warren like?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: She had read it. She was deeply serious, and she had questions. It wasn't like, "Will you do X, Y and Z for me?" It wasn't like, "I'm trying to demonstrate my serious, therefore, will you?" I have not heard from her since either, by the way.

David Remnick: Have you talked to any candidates about it?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: No.

David Remnick: Ta-Nehisi, you published your article five years ago. Barack Obama was president. We are now in a different time and place. How would you place the reparations discussion in this moment?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I think people have stopped laughing, and I think that's really, really important. Does it mean reparations tomorrow? No, it doesn't. Does it mean end of the fight? No, it doesn't, but it's a step, and I think that's significant.

David Remnick: Now, what would you like to see the outcome of a conversation or the American equivalent of South African study into American history be?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: A policy for repair. I think what you need to do is you need to figure out what the exact axis of white supremacy are and have been, and find out a policy to repair each of those. In other words, this is not just a math payment. Take the area that I researched, the time I wrote the article less every day. The time I wrote the article, they were living victims and are living victims who had been denied, who had been discriminated.

David Remnick: Who were on the South Side and the West Side of Chicago?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Yes, all over this country. All over this country, people who had been deprived, who had been discriminated against. Set up a claims office, look at the census tracks, are those people actually still living there? Maybe you can design some sort of investment through ERISA. Maybe you can have something at the individual level. Maybe you can have something at the neighborhood level. Then you would go down the line, you would look at education, you would look at our criminal justice policy. You would go down the line and address these specifically and directly.

David Remnick: Is your job just to break the glass on a subject the way you do with reparations, or is your job to then follow through the way a scholar would for years thereafter? Do you feel your work here is done, and now I'm moving on to the next thing, as you have with many number of subjects, or do you have to sustain it? Is that on you?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I don't know. I really don't know. I would like to be able to move on, but I recognize that that's not entirely up to me.

David Remnick: It's not.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: No, not at all. I just feel like if you write an article on reparations that has the effect that it actually does, which I didn't expect. This is very hard to say. I have to conclude that I clearly have something to say and a way of saying it that can affect things. If that's the case, what is your responsibility then? What right of you to say, "I'm done talking about this because I feel like it." I don't know if you get to do that.

Actually, I feel myself to be very, very grounded in the African-American struggle even though I don't consider myself an activist. When I think about writing that article, I think about all the people before me who've been making the case for reparations from street corners, 125th in Harlem, and couldn't get access to a August publication like that. I think about how I got access, and it strikes me that you owe folks something. You don't get to just do what you want.

David Remnick: Ta-Nehisi Coates, thank you so much.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Thanks for having me.

David Remnick: Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of Between the World and Me, and We Were Eight Years in Power. His short story, Conduction, which is an excerpt of a forthcoming novel, is in the next issue of The New Yorker.

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