I grew up poor and white in America. This is why I support reparations

I didn't feel privileged, so for a while I didn't think I was. Then I realized where I'd gone wrong

Counter-protesters in Idaho flew Confederate flags this week (Zuma Wire/Rex)

There were Confederate flags at the Capitol here in Idaho this month, waved by armed men. Without the peaceful protest happening before them, they wouldn’t have appeared (let alone “accidentally” fired into the dirt). It was as if the call for black rights had stirred them – grabbing their muskets and rushing outside, not stopping to wonder what they were actually protesting.

I recalled a 2016 trip I’d taken to the Whitney Plantation. Focused solely on the slave experience, the site gained attention last year after oblivious visitors wondered why they left out all the “fun parts” of plantation life. The Holocaust lasted four years, our guide noted, so now consider the holocaust of the Atlantic slave trade lasting 246. When you wonder how we’ve valued black lives, consider that for every 100 insured exports across the dreaded Middle Passage, as many as 40 more died.

In between the Pledge of Allegiance and Paul Revere, this isn’t something we were taught in school.

The tiny Oregon town where I grew up, along the Umatilla Indian Reservation, is home to few black Americans. I belonged to an evangelical, lower-middle class, white family – free and reduced lunches, paperboy and fast food jobs, student loans. Modest, I thought, but as Twain said, “We do not deal much in facts when we are contemplating ourselves.” So went my own contemplation: I wasn’t privileged because I didn’t feel privileged.

A month after the Whitney, I was in Boston for a marketing conference. It was the morning following the 2016 election and Ta-Nehisi Coates was the opening speaker. Coates took the podium late, exhausted and raw, promptly chucked away his planned speech and worked instead from notes he’d stayed up writing.

“Some of y’all know what’s about to happen,” he said, and a few people actually left.

He began at the beginning: 1619, when the first boats with human cargo arrived on our shores; then 1840, when 60 percent of US exports were cotton via black slave labor; to 1965, when the Voting Rights Act grudgingly opened the ballot booth to black Americans (meant to have been opened a century earlier).

“We have to take ownership of our history,” he said. We celebrate battles we didn’t personally fight, pay taxes for things we don’t use, but when it comes to past mistakes, we tend to opt for “patriotism à la carte.” I felt like a boy at church camp again, raising my hand when the pastor asked who wanted forgiveness and salvation. And like a boy, my faith ebbed the further I got back from the sermon. I still couldn’t bring myself to take it all as seriously as I should have.

I was laid off 10 months after the election. I wrote, found a volunteer gig, and worked freelance while my partner covered more of our bills. It didn’t feel like it (again) but this was privilege (again). Due to what James Baldwin called the “false identity” of whiteness – a construct not based on shared language or culture, on being Italian or Irish or Jewish, whose single distinction is simply being not-black – I’ve been handed access to better healthcare, greater paychecks, and more positive attention by teachers, police, and judges.

Like the tribal land we’re tilling, it’s a privilege we hold no rights to. Yet we’re witnessing the evolution of the same 400-year policies. Replace the cull of the Middle Passage with poorer health outcomes, the Whitney for Orleans Parish Prison, the noose for a knee on the neck. The President hasn’t shot someone without losing support, as he once boasted, but he’s heading a system that has and will. Perhaps most important, the case for reparations, akin to Germany’s debt after the Holocaust and which Coates pled before Congress in 2019, continues to be spearheaded by a handful of black voices, and summarily shoved aside. We remain no closer to “getting over” slavery than to getting over the Founding Fathers or the Second Amendment.

Even a formal apology has been taken from the table. America has some practice in the issuing of sorrys, the President aside. We’ve offered national apologies for the odious Tuskegee Experiments, interning American citizens, protecting Nazis, lending the muscle when a few sugar-high businessmen wanted to annex Hawaii. We just change the conversation when the bill arrives. Paying a tiny fraction of what’s owed, most of our apologies arrive sans compensation, even when the damages run into the trillions.

“America has paid the highest and most extraordinary price for becoming white,” Baldwin wrote. “Because they think they are white, they do not dare confront the ravage and the lie of their history. Because they think they are white, they cannot allow themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers.”

A humanity devoid of responsibility can hardly be called moral, equitable, or great. If we progressive white men – because it’s always white men, overrepresented at the intersection of policy makers and payroll, publishing and protests – truly believe there’s a debt owed, that black history is American history, we need to lead the call not just for textbook revisions but tuition reimbursements (and much more).

We may never fully pay the debt owed to our fellow Americans, black and Native. But we must begin at the beginning, with reparations.

To be clear: it’s not enough. But all privilege comes at a cost, and the choice is either our humanity or an identity that grabs its gun in defense of what it’s not.