Fronleichnam hätte ich vergessen, wenn es nicht in meinem Kalender gestanden hätte. So stellte ich mir keinen Wecker, schlief ein Stündchen länger als sonst, lungerte mit Flat White auf dem Balkon rum, las dann erstmal ausgiebig die Zeitungen der letzten beiden Tage, auf die mein Kopf vorher noch keine Lust gehabt hatte, und guckte Masterchef.

Den Rest des Tages und des Abends verbrachte ich dann wieder am Schreibtisch, wo ich allerdings keine wilden Entdeckungen mehr machte. Ich erledigte stattdessen Kram, den ich seit Monaten vor mir herschiebe: mal alle Bilder von Protzen vernünftig zu benennen – also die Fotos, die ich von wiederum Fotos seiner Gemälde gemacht hatte, die in Alben im Nachlass liegen und die bisher die Titel trugen, die in den Alben vermerkt waren, so umzubenennen, dass sie mit dem Werkverzeichnis übereinstimmen. Dabei konnte ich auch gleich Entstehungsjahr und Maße im Dateinamen vermerken, dann muss ich danach nicht immer suchen, und bei 700 Bildern kostet sowas halt Zeit. Und ich habe noch nicht mal alle 700 geschafft. Ich ahne jetzt, warum Dissertationen so lange dauern.

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Here’s What Ta-Nehisi Coates Told Congress About Reparations

Die Überschrift sagt schon alles, und der Beginn des Textes ist sehr schlau:

„Yesterday, when I asked about reparations, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offered a familiar reply. America should not be held liable for something that happened 150 years ago, since none of us currently alive are responsible. This rebuttal proffers a strange theory of governance that American accounts are somehow bound by the lifetime of its generations. But well into the century the United States was still paying out pensions to the heirs of Civil War soldiers. We honor treaties that date back some 200 years despite no one being alive who signed those treaties.

Many of us would love to be taxed for the things we are solely and individually responsible for. But we are American citizens, and thus bound to a collective enterprise that extends beyond our individual and personal reach. It would seem ridiculous to dispute invocations of the founders, or the Greatest Generation, on the basis of a lack of membership in either group. We recognize our lineage as a generational trust, as inheritance and the real dilemma posed by reparations is just that: a dilemma of inheritance. It’s impossible to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery.“

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There Is No Middle Ground on Reparations

Der Text von Ibram X. Kendi zum gleichen Thema fängt ähnlich gut an:

„On December 1, 1862—a month before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation—President Abraham Lincoln wrote to Congress. He was not yet the Great Emancipator. Instead, he proposed to become the Great Compensator.

Lincoln proposed a Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: the most expansive and expensive slavery-reparations plan ever put forth by a U.S. president. “Every State wherein slavery now exists shall abolish the same therein at any time or times before” January 1, 1900, and slaveholders “shall receive compensation from the United States” for emancipating the enslaved.

Lincoln stressed to his fellow citizens that “we cannot escape history.” Pursuing gradual emancipation, and compensating the enslavers for their lost labor and wealth—and not the enslaved for their lost labor and wealth—would repair a broken America once and for all. “Other means may succeed,” he said in closing; “this could not fail.”

Indeed, Lincoln’s proposal did not fail to escape history. His politically expedient plan made and portended history, projecting a middle ground for Americans to stand between permanent slavery and inequality, and immediate emancipation and equality.

Today, many Americans who oppose reparations, including a slight majority of Democrats, stand on this middle ground. These Americans self-identify as “not racist,” but do nothing in the face of the racial wealth gap that grows as white people are compensated by past and present racist policies.“