1. The effects of the laws put in place back then are still affecting blacks lives and families today. From centires ago till today, America owes so much back to the blacks for their sufferage, discrimination and pain they have gone through because of these laws and scams put in place to rise against them. The HR 40 is a bill that was created to study the idea of reparations to Blacks in America today. This bill only talks about “‘…studying [reparations]…we [America] study everything. We study the water, the air. We can’t even study the issue? This bill does not authorise one red cent to anyone’”(Coates pg 15). This bill does not permit any sort of payment to anyone. This bill was created just to study how these reparations could be done and paid off. But the government will not even let this bill go to the house floor. Why would the house not even be interested in studying the reparations owed to the blacks of America today? I believe that the United States government does not want to admit what this country was truly grown from. The political leaders today pride themselves in creating a better country for everyone, but the country cannot become better with the lies of the past. Without being able to repay the debts we owe, we cannot be one whole country. Carol Dweck would categorize the American Government with a fixed mindset. A fixed mindset is defined by one who does not like challenges, and believes they can avoid discomfort. They “…have run from difficulty… They run from the error. They don’t engage with it [the challenge]” (Dweck para 4). The American Government has run far and for centuries to avoid this challenging topic. They believe that running from the HR 40 will make it disappear, or solve the problem; running will do neither. 
   1. This used to be two paragraphs, and I revised it to combine these two authors ideas, in order to better fit the prompt. I think these ideas went well together, and it did not make sense just to have one paragraph just with Coates here.

2. When the polticial leaders of today avoid the discussion, it only creates more reason to keep pushing for justice for the years of discrimination agaisnt blacks in America. These leaders “…believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look” (Coates 15-16). This is completely wrong. The debt is made more devastating if it is avoided longer. White dominance in America’s history is one that cannot be changed, but ignoring all of the pain the government and people within our own societies still bring to blacks today makes white dominance in America still prevalent. The fix minded political leaders allow police brutality and unfair treatment of blacks to occur under their noses. If the American government were to have a growth mindset about this topic, this does not mean they would have to agree. A growth mindset is not about agreement, it is about creating compromises. A growth mindset among the House and Senate about HR 40 would take many different view points to come to one agreement. Critical thinking needs to be introduced. Critical thinking involves the skill of looking at many different viewpoints and researched topics, and creating your own viewpoint based on these other outside perspectives. Critical thinking is “…adapting to cultural shifts while sharing a common language and assumptions, overlapping knowledge bases, and the core of critical thinking” (Scheuer para 14). This statement of skills is exactly what representatives and senators need in order to study and discuss reparations. Thousands of cultural changes have been made to society from the time many laws have been put in place. America’s democracy is outdated, and needs to be researched and redesigned. Blacks are confused “…what are we to make of the world’s oldest democracy?”(Coates pg 15). This democracy needs to be discussed, and those re-establishing it need to critically think about how different laws will affect the lives of others. 

1. This paragraph I combined the ideas of Coates and Scheuer to support my claim prior in the other paragraph. It was important to me to talk about the two sides of the HR 40, why I believe that the government is not passing it and what would happen if the HR 40 were to be discussed.