"It's really, really important that, you know, if we're going to have this fight, that folks educate themselves on the history," Coates told the audience at an Atlantic event last night.
They’re not an abstract notion. They’re particular amounts of money paid to particular people. To atone for America's sins, whom should the government pay, how much, and why?
The freewheeling opportunity associated with 20th-century California was not available to black residents, and that exclusion reverberates in our neighborhoods and communities today.
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.