John McWhorter is a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University (he specializes in Creole languages), is black, and appears, politically, to be a Liberal/Centrist. That, at least, should give him enough credibility so that one couldn’t from the outset totally dismiss his piece at The American Interest called “Atonement as Activism.”
It’s a two-barreled indictment, first of activist, writer, and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, about whom I can’t say much as I haven’t read him, and, second, about the self-flagellation of white people in the face of the indictments that Coates apparently levels at America: we’re a land of endemic, structural racism where blacks are due reparations and improvements in civil rights have been merely cosmetic.
All I can say is this: reparations is a hard problem, but I think something must be done to repair the damage of slavery and racism. That “something”, in my…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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