Why Precisely Is Coates Bashing Sanders?

Marjorie Romeyn-Sanabria

Politics, Justice, United States

Ta-Nehisi Coates has taken aim at the Democratic senator over reparations.

Well, well, well. Ta-Nehisi Coates is back in action. “Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations?” is his latest condemnation of white America, appearing in the Atlantic, but its target is not benighted conservatives. Instead, it is, of all people, Bernie Sanders whom Coates now finds wanting. Speaking in Iowa last week, Sanders responded to a question about reparations by saying he didn’t think it was a good idea: “No, I don’t think so. First of all, its likelihood of getting through Congress is nil. Second of all, I think it would be very divisive.” Writing in the Atlantic, Coates said Sanders “should be directly confronted and asked why his political imagination is so active against plutocracy, but so limited against white supremacy.”

Coates, an expert at dumbed-down Marxist analysis presented as cultural criticism, has become the go-to critic about American racism. A little over a year ago he created a frisson of delight on the left with his sprawling Atlantic essay “The Case for Reparations.” The truth is that he made no case at all. Coates’s proposed solution to the centuries-long suffering of blacks in America was as meek as his piece was grand: assemble a congressional committee to look into the possibility of one day awarding monetary compensation to African-Americans. There was no timeline, no suggested amount, neither per individual nor for the black community as a whole. There was no itemized invoice submitted for hundreds of years of unpaid labor with interest added for a hundred years of Jim Crow and the degrading violence that came with it. There was just the indictment, laid at white feet.

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