From Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Reparations article:
Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely
Isn’t that the function of MLK day, the Civil Rights Act, and black history month?
Furthermore, black people get monetary reparations through record entitlement spending and government employment. Nearly 21 percent of the nation’s working black adults hold government jobs, as compared to 17 percent of white workers.
The real estate angle is to deflect attention from his otherwise untenable thesis. There exist laws that prohibit housing discrimination under the 1968 Fair Housing Act. He mentions that the Fair Housing Act could be threatened, but the problem is he’s invoking the slippery slope fallacy.
He’s created this abstract definition of reparations that makes any discussion on a singular premise impossible. Like OWS, he has no concrete demands and is otherwise just making noise for clicks and page views. If that was his goal, he succeeded.
Since we already touched the metaphorical stove in discussing contentious subjects such as race, why not go all the way. From iSteve How white are blacks? How black are whites?
The left doesn’t necessarily deny that biological race or taxonomy exists; instead, they deny that some people are biologically better adapted for modern society than others. By ‘some people’ we don’t necessarily mean a particular race, but anyone. By adaptation to modern society, we mean IQ, critical thinking, and other skills and traits that have become invaluable in today’s super-competitive economic environment, which we call the smartist era.