An Open Letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Liberals Who Love Him
The reparations demand survives as a parlor debate — it cannot address the real needs and interests of black workers.
Workers on Chicago’s South Side play checkers before going to work in May 1973. US National Archives / Flickr
Dear friends,
Ta-Nehisi Coates recently criticized the Bernie Sanders campaign for Sanders’s pessimism regarding black reparations for slavery and Jim Crow segregation. When asked during a campaign event whether he would support reparations, Sanders responded with characteristic bluntness, saying that “its likelihood of getting through Congress is nil,” before adding that a push for formal reparations for slavery would be politically divisive.
Instead of reparations, Sanders argued,
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