Author Ta-Nehisi Coates covers a lot of historical ground in his essay, from Bacon’s Rebellion in the late 17th century to the Great Recession of the early 21st century. In a dispassionate style heavy on factual evidence, he makes the case that the United States government ought to pay reparations to African Americans for the harm inflicted upon them by slavery and its aftermath. Aside from a few general remarks, he does not address what form such reparations would take, such as dollar amounts and how the recipients would be determined. The question of how to carry out reparations is really a separate issue, and to deal with it here would distract from his goal of making a case that reparations are indeed warranted.

The idea of paying reparations to descendants of American slaves stems from the issue of deprived liberty. People were forcibly taken from one continent to another to serve as slaves against their will, without any legal protection or consent in the matter. This condition was inherited by all the descendants of slaves for some 200 years until the practice was outlawed in 1865. Although the slaves’ lack of free will and inability to control their own lives is central to Coates’s argument that their descendants are owed reparations, he focuses more on the concrete idea of economics than the abstract idea of liberty.