I have not read the article at the Atlantic, "
The Case for Reparations."
According to
William Jacobson, it's a 15,000 word essay, and frankly wading through it doesn't seem like an enjoyable prospect. Perhaps I'll read it at the newsstand.
Meanwhile, I have watched this video, an interview with Bill Moyers:
What strikes me about Coates is his infantile psychology. He clearly has no compelling answer to the question of black progress in America. If the United States is so implacably racist, if we are doomed (damned) to perpetual white supremacy, how is it possible that Barack Obama could have become president of the United States? Or, how is it possible that Oprah Winfrey could have become perhaps the most powerful woman in the television industry at one time? How is it possible that over the past 50 years we've had a consistent and compelling story of the expansion of a large and prosperous black middle class? How is it possible that the entertainment industry today -- from music to films -- is filled with prominent and influential black leaders?
Are we where we need to be? Definitely not. But to constantly harp on this point that America is not discussing race at a "deep" level is nothing but a despicable lie. And it's a lie that's perpetuated by America-hating hypocrites like Bill Moyers. If anyone should appreciate and understand our progress on race relations it's Bill Moyers. He was President Lyndon Johnson's press secretary. Johnson was
the civil rights president. He took the case to the nation that "we will overcome." He made the case to the nation that we can't "take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair."
They're shameless, inveterate liars.
Ta-Nehisi Coates' whole existence is a lie. He's a walking ball of contradictions and deceit. A contributing writer at the Atlantic Monthly, he's a regular columnist at the New York Times who turned down a permanent job at that newspaper. And he also just completed a "
dazzling two years" as the MLK Visiting Scholar in Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Really? I mean really?!! America is so racist, America is so supremacist, that there must have been some kind of mistake made somewhere to give this black man all the benchmarks of a highly successful if not privileged life. I mean blow me down! How is that possible? Does Ta-Nehisi need even more "reparations" to elevate him to an even higher level of success and prestige in American life? The self-conscious psychological denial here is practically violent. It's obtrusive and obstreperous. It's assaulting my sense of decency and propriety. Seriously. I mean who will now have to pay this "case for reparations" proposed by this walking shell of far-left hypocrisy? This hulk of hatred who looks at any white person as a ghost of the Klan?
He's evil. And Bill Moyers is evil. They're evil not just for their lies --- epic, hateful historical lies --- they're evil for the statist, collectivist, redistributionist order that they're working diabolically to impose over our nation's model of equality of opportunity. No level of civil rights progress is enough, because there's no level of social and economic equality that's good enough for the radical left. The fact is freedom has to be abolished in the name of equality. That's the endgame. For when everyone is equal --- when you abolish this ever present system of white supremacy --- no one will be free. Everyone will be crushed under the jackboot of leftist egalitarianism.
That's why I'm not interested in wading through this long, long piece at the Atlantic. It's not like I've haven't heard it before. All we ever hear about these days is "racism" and "diversity" and "white privilege" and "ethnic appropriation" and ... well the list goes on. The American dream is alive and well for any American to seek it and enjoy its blessings. There remains poverty not because of intractable racism but because the left has an investment in perpetuating an underclass. The Democrat Party has an investment in racial failure, for when racism recedes from the spotlight, the party's
reason d'etre evaporates. Unfortunately, the left has been marching through the institutions of power and everyday Americans are being blindsided by a Gramscian Marxian collectivist order designed to break American exceptionalism and replace it with an endless regime of racist victimology. And the real racists are those now running these institutions. Look at any public school system in America today, and when you see diversity initiatives what lies beneath is totalitarianism.
The "case for reparations" is just recycled race-baiting far-left hatred and recrimination. Ta-Nehisi Coates is a mountebank and a huckster. Any decent conservative with half a brain would eat him alive. His only response would to scream racism in the desperate hope of preserving his insidious, invidious reparations scam.
