(cache) Tanadrin

July 28, 2015

opulentjoy asked: What do you think of Ta-Nehisi Coates's work?

slatestarscratchpad:
I’ve only read a little.
He’s obviously an excellent writer.
He has a rare gift for saying interesting things about race that I hadn’t heard before, which is of course rare in such a saturated subject. This includes giving good history lessons about the things other history lesson givers don’t talk about, which is a rare skill.
On the other hand, he’s not a social scientist, and it kind of shows. I argue against some of his case for reparations here: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/26/compound-interest-is-the-least-powerful-force-in-the-universe/
I don’t really understand the concept of banks paying reparations for “sucker mortgages”. I would expect banks, as corporations, to be constantly trying to get the best terms that they can, short of fraud or breaking the law. So the question I wonder about isn’t why they tried to ask for extremely favorable terms from blacks, but why they didn’t try to ask for those same extremely favorable terms from whites. Or, if they did, why the blacks took them and the whites didn’t. Until I understand this, the issue makes no sense to me.

This seems relatively straightforward to me, and I think Coates discusses it indirectly in the article: a perception of black people as less intelligent or more gullible–or simply less deserving of common courtesy–would mean offering black people loans with bad terms more often. In my experience there also exists among a certain type of racist white person a willingness to deal unfavorably with black people, while being more generous toward white people–even, and perhaps especially, in a business relationship. Banks aren’t, after all, entirely impersonal entities responding to market forces; their actions are the sum total of the actions of individual employees, who are often racist. Since getting a loan from a bank involves (AFAIK) an extended face-to-face interaction with bank employees, the opportunity for bias to color the nature or outcome of that transaction is presumably heightened considerably, far beyond most other forms of commercial transaction.

9:10am | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZwX9jx1qexruI

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