“The case for reparations” Analysis

The case for reparations is an article that focuses on different points that touch segregation and racism after slavery. The author Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates talks about the story of Clyde Ross and other black people who lived during Jim crow and witnessed the hardness of sharecropping and segregation. This text mainly focuses on the life of Clyde Ross when he was a child when he became a man. It shows the difficulties his family went through while living in the south, sharecropping. It talks about his losses and lack of opportunities because of his skin color. It talks also about the great migration, when African-Americans moved from the south to the north for better living and the complications they faced there. The audience of this text might be both colored and white people because they are both concerned about what happened to colored people in the US. The purpose of this article is to remind people of what colored people have been and are still going through in the United States. The author used both logos and pathos by persuading the audience and making them feel certain emotions and by using arguments that they will perceive as logical. His argument is persuasive because this article included pieces of evidence and statistics that solidify his arguments. One section that stood up to me the most is, “Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized” (chapter 3). This quote is very powerful because it says a lot. It means that slavery has had terrorized colored people for years now. They are put apart and restricted in U.S. society. They have been dehumanized and brainwashed to believe that they can’t achieve anything on their own because they have always relied on white people.