[Legal Insurrection] Author Ta-Nehisi Coates
| ...son of a former Black Panther by one of his four wives (some of whom appear to be baby mamas -- Wikipedia is vague about this). Mr. Coates is a one-note writer about the institutional racism which led him to a senior editorship at The Atlantic, a visiting professorship at MIT, and status as a public intellectual. He would no doubt want us to know that he is an atheist and a feminist, though whether the latter is related to growing up in a close-knit family with five half-siblings and their mothers is not to be asked... |
is hot, hot, hot in progressive circles.
His demand for Reparations published in The Atlantic pushed him into the stratosphere. But it was an empty, amateurish effort, as I wrote at the time, The dead-end Case for Reparations:
Coates never gives the answer as to who gets what and how.
And that's ultimately the problem with reparations arguments that are not based upon the people causing the harm paying the people directly harmed by specific conduct soon after the conduct is remedied.
If you can't answer the question of why a Vietnamese boat person has to pay reparations for the conduct of white plantation owners more than a century earlier, then you can't make the argument.
If you can't answer the question of why two successful black doctors living in a fashionable suburb should get reparations paid for by the white children of Appalachia, then you can't make the argument. |