White Privledge, Part Four

Early on during Debby Irving's process of Waking Up White, she describes watching the film Race: The Power of an Illusion. As the film begins to focus on the GI Bill, Irving gets uncomfortable. She describes it like this.

I remember thinking, Hmm, my father and uncles talked about that bill, about how great it felt to win the war and come home to free education and a housing loan. My father's law school education had been paid for by that bill. My parents' first home had been subsidized by it....But all of a sudden, the film started talking about the bill not being accessible to black Americans....The chilling reality is that while the American dream fell into the laps of millions of Americans, making the GI Bill the great equalizer for the range of white ethnicities in the melting pot, Americans of color, including the one million black GIs who'd risked their lives in the war, were largely excluded. The same GI Bill that had given white families like mine a socio-economic rocket boost had left people of color out to dry.

It was interesting to read this account from someone who benefited from the bill and felted naively foolish after learning this new information. And it motivated me to go back and reread “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Atlantic, May 2014).  Once again, this article left me feeling sick.  And it made me think that the government backed loans that helped my father buy farm land and invest in production where part of this process, part of the reason why "white households are worth roughly 20 times as much as black households..."(Coates).

Coates' article is so full of depressing statics like the one above, that I don't know where to start.  If I can manage it, I'll write sometime soon about Coates' argument for reparations.  Right now, I'd just like to conclude with this reflection from Coates about our willingness to celebrate some of our history while other pieces of it we hide or deny.

One cannot escape...by...disavowing the acts of one's ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration.  The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time.  The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer.  To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte....

Meanwhile, I think that every American should read Coates' article.  It's a brilliant and depressing piece of American history, and I'm afraid many will avoid it because of the word "reparations" in the title.