It's rare I outright implore people to read an article

[Spider Jerusalem]

8. Paying for other people's sins from long ago?

Tell that to all the people still living who grew up in the Jim Crow south and were deprived of a decent education because of generational and structural poverty and segregated schools. Tell it to the people who got targeted for subprime loans at higher rates of interest that went underwater in the 2008 crash. I think that one thing that Coates manages to do is to show that the effects of systemic and institutional racism have been far-reaching and are to some extent wired into the American financial and social structure in ways that affect American blacks very disproportionately; this systemic racial bias is partly the result of conscious policy choices on the part of the Federal government and partly the result of conscious policies enacted by private-sector mortgage lenders and countless others. Pretending that the debt side of the ledger the USA is keeping with its black population stopped being written in in 1865 seems like wilful blindness, really.