Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Carter Center
October 21, 2015
Max Blau
... “There’s no definition of race without racism before it” ... Pointing back to the 17th century, when English settlers established the colony of Jamestown, he noted how bonded classes of black slaves and white indentured servants interacted in the same class relatively equally without much in the way of racial boundaries.
Over time .. racism became a tool for economic exploitation, and not just during slavery. He emphasized that segregationist policies of the 20th century (from redlining to restricted voting rights) were never simply about keeping the races separate .. but about “taking something from someone.”
“If you erect a public university system, as was the case in Mississippi, and you bar black people from attending that university, that is plunder; you are taking tax dollars out of their community, and using it to uphold that institution,” Coates said. “If you use tax dollars from someone and you build an entire public pool system, and you say, ‘You can’t swim here,’ you’re taking. If you take somebody’s tax dollars and erect an entire public library system, build you don’t let them utilize it, you’re taking from them” ...
“I don’t know if I want to forget that, at some point, somebody was crazy enough to have a monument to <Confederate general> Nathan Bedford Forrest,” he said. “That’s a statement about what society was. That shouldn’t be forgotten” ...
http://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/ta-nehisi-coates-on-racism-confederate-monuments-the-costs-of-being-black-in-america/