In order to understand why reading is important for writers, you will read
this essay, "Home Is Where the Hatred Is: The case for reparations: a narrative bibliography" by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer for
The Atlantic.
In your assigned reading, you will notice that Coates refers to an essay he wrote that was published in May 2014,
a cover story for the Atlantic Monthly called "
The Case for Reparations." The original essay's argument and evidence are too complex to summarize adequately here; if you follow the links in this paragraph and
scroll down through the original essay's various parts, you'll see what I mean. But the text below the title ("Two hundred fifty years of slavery...Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole") gives you a sense of his broad claim: America needs to reckon with the "moral debts" it incurred in the long period in which slavery was legal, and that it continued to incur in periods of time subsequent to its abolition––including our present moment. "The Case for Reparations" does what its title suggests, presenting a rationale for
cultural change through a major reckoning of America's debt to slavery and, by extension, what Americans owe the descendants of those who were enslaved.
If you're interested in learning more about the cover article's impact and reception, please take a look at
this story in The Washington Post when you find a convenient time. And of course, I encourage you to read the original essay at that time as well.
We will not be discussing "The Case for Reparations" or debating the merits of that argument in our upcoming class meeting, however. Not yet, anyway. For the purposes of our next meeting (and toward the end of completing Assignment 1), we aren't concerned with the argument itself so much as the process of learning and thinking that led him to make it. Coates provides us with an exceptionally useful glimpse into that process in "Home Is Where the Hatred Is," a piece he describes aptly as "a narrative bibliography." It functions as both a follow-up piece to the original cover story and a behind-the-scenes look at why the best writers are those who read and think deeply about what they read.
I mentioned previously that we'll primarily read academic writing that appears in venues that are not funded by advertising. In this case (and in many others this semester), I'm assigning an essay that doesn't fit that description neatly. But more so than almost any other piece of writing I know, I think it beautifully illustrates how reading shapes how we think and informs both how and what we write.
Your Assignment 1, due by the start of our upcoming class meeting, is as follows:
