Wow!! I didn’t know this! I had no idea!! … “Numbers do not lie. US slavery commenced around 1618 and ended in 1868. Puerto Rico slavery began in 1494 and ended in 1873.4 That’s 379 years of slavery in Puerto Rico, versus 250 years of slavery in the US. So Puerto Ricans suffered 129 more years – 51.6 percent more years of slavery – than the US did.” – REPARATIONS!!
When The Atlantic ran Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations” in June 2015,1 the timing was impeccable. Edward Bernays himself could not have done better.2 Ta-Nehisi’s upcoming book – Between the World and Me – was already in the promotional pipeline at Penguin Random House/Spiegel Graf. It was published one year later in July 2016, and the controversy sparked by Coates’s Atlantic article provided a perfect platform for his soon-to-be published book.
The massive 15,000-word article wandered all over US and local Chicago history, but its premise was simple: 250 years of enslavement and an undeclared “war” on black families and black people, had left profound consequences on African-Americans. Therefore, they were entitled to reparations from the US government.
Coates’s article repeatedly cited a congressional bill – John Conyers’s HR 40 – which would “establish a Commission to study and develop reparation proposals for African-Americans to examine…
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