From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It's not often that an article comes along that changes the world.

And that's exactly what happened with Tanahasi Coates five years ago now when he wrote

the case for reparations. That article in the Atlantic was a very big deal to say the least.

I was shocked at how big it was. I can remember going up to the Red Rooster to meet somebody for

lunch, in his restaurant in Harlem. And I was leaving, and there were two people at the bar. There's a black woman and a black dude who were older, and the dude's eyes get so big. It's just, oh, my God, oh, my God. And the woman said to me, she said, praise God. Praise God. And he runs into the car, and he has an Atlantic. He He says, please sign it. Praise God. I was like, what?

Wow. And I would show up places and people would ask me to sign that the paper. People who couldn't get access to the magazine would like print it out and would come because they're like sold out, you know, at a certain point.

Tanaasi Coates somehow got everybody talking about reparations.

Now, that subject had been discussed since the end of the Civil War, and in fact, there's a bill

that's been sitting in Congress for 30 years about reparations.

But now reparations for slavery and legalized discrimination is a real subject of major discussion among the Democratic presidential candidates.

We're going to spend the entire hour of our program today talking about what exactly are reparations and what the political future of them might be.

I talked to Tanaasi Coates last week.

Tanaasi, for those who may not have read the article five years ago,

what exactly is the case that you make for reparations,

which is a word that's been around for a long, long time?

The case I make for reparations is virtually every institution

with some degree of history in America, be it public,

be it private, has a history of extracting wealth and resources out of the African American

community. I think what has often been missing, this is what I was trying to make the point of

in 2014, that behind all of that, you know, oppression was actually theft. In other words, this is not just mean. This is not just maltreatment. This is the theft of resources out of that community. That theft of resources continued, you know, well into the period of I would make the argument, you know, around the time of the Fair Housing Act. So what year is that? So that's 1968. There are a lot of people who, but you're not saying that between 1968 and 2019, everything is hunky-dor. I'm not saying everything was hunky-dorily at all. But I'm trying, if you were speaking to, you know, the most intellectually honest, dubious person, because you have to remember, what I'm battling against this idea is that it ended in 1865.

With emancipation in the end of the war. With emancipation, yes, yes, yes. And the case I'm trying to make is

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