Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson.

And I'm David Peña Guzman.

Welcome to Overthink.

The podcast, we're two friends who are also professors, put philosophy and dialogue with the everyday.

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.

Just a month into governing, the Joe Biden administration said that they will be looking

into a plan for reparations.

Basically, they're putting together a commission to look into the history of slavery in the U.S.

as well as how it's harmed African American and black folks in the U.S.

through discriminatory government policies after slavery.

In some sense, it seems like we're entering a new phase of political discourse in the United States

around the history of slavery

and its ongoing effects. Reparations have been discussed at least since the end of slavery

over 150 years ago, but have recently started to make a comeback into the mainstream, to some

extent, thanks to an article that Tanahesi Coates wrote in 2014 in the Atlantic entitled

The Case for Reparations, where he talks about the importance of reparations for

black Americans who are descendants of formerly enslaved people. And as a result of this

article, Coates went on to testify in front of Congress only a couple of years ago in 2019 to make this case

before lawmakers hoping to make what was previously a theoretical argument into an institutional

reality. And you know, I think one of the things that's really powerful about Tana Hose

Coates' original argument about this in 2014 is that his article focuses on a single individual

story, that of Clyde Ross. And so Nahasi Coates's original article really trades on his power

...