Ta-Nehisi Coates will vote for Bernie Sanders, reparations or no reparations

[pucksr]

@ActionAbe

Also, yes they were and are. The proportion of black Americans rendered ineligible to vote in the present day is tragically high.

I apologize. I was trying my hand at being a good writer. Not nearly as talented as Coates.
I was trying to say that “Blacks” as a timeless and global group were not disenfranchised, but rather point out that several specific incidents took place in specific places. I was not trying to say that bad things haven’t happened or that they don’t continue to happen.

The reason I was making the point is that it really changes the formula for any reparations. We owe former slaves far more in restitution than we owe the black woman who got a 4% interest rate vs 2% interest rate.

@ActionAbe

We use insanely complicated formulas to drive global finance. Sophisticated systems are puzzles solvable by human ingenuity, not impossibilities.

Not exactly the same. Those financial systems are dealing with fixed numbers. If you wanted to figure it out, you could probably figure out exactly how many hammers were purchased in the state of Delaware last month. It would be hard, but it could be determined. You can’t tell me how many people were harmed by racist policies. You can only guess. You can’t tell me how much it impacted their children, you can only guess. You can’t determine how much aid will help correct the problem.

@ActionAbe

It’s interesting that you say this, because increasingly people are realizing that the problem with poor people isn’t that they cannot perform skilled labor, but that they don’t have money. That’s literally what makes people poor. The solution appears to be giving people money. Maybe not cash, but housing-first schemes have helped the homeless a lot more than temporary shelters and employment-first schemes have. So ending poverty is realistic, but giving black people wealth isn’t… somehow?

So, here is the crux of my argument.
Do we give all black people money? What about Barack Obama?
I mention Barack Obama because while he is black, he is not the child of a slave. He is not the child of a black person who suffered any significant racial injustice in the United States. He suffered some injustice, but only in a post-LBJ America. Barack Obama is also a fairly wealthy guy, but ignore that aspect. Imagine Obama was comfortably middle-class. Does he still deserve reparations?

Personally, I am a huge fan of the “negative income tax”. The idea that all people should have a basic level of income to fall back on. I think if we passed a “black-only” NIT that it would be problematic and very poorly received. It might work, but it might also work to reinforce racist stereotypes about welfare queens and ‘lazy blacks’. I think it would be better to pass a global NIT. Tailor it to help the special needs of the black community(i.e. typically lower available liquid assets), but make it global.