Ta-Nehisi Coates: Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations?

[tishaLA]

39. Yeah, I never would have guessed that's what you thought he was implying

In the excerpt above, and in the rest of the article, he specifically says that Sanders has historically, and in this campaign, constructed himself as someone willing to pursue goals constructed as "radical" (or, in his parlance, "revolutionary&quot like free college tuition, health care for all, and other initiatives that, given the makeup of Congress, are "implausible." So he is interested in the shift toward pragmatism in Senator Sanders' stance on reparations--Mr Coates quotes Sen Sanders as saying it has "nil" possibility of passing Congress, which is almost certainly true, but Mr Coates is interested in the rhetorical shift here from idealism to pragmatism. As he writes, "One of the great functions of radical candidates is to war against equivocators and opportunists who conflate these two things. Radicals expand the political imagination and, hopefully, prevent incrementalism from becoming a virtue."

Mr Coates, a proponent of reparations, is hardly an advocate for the status quo. In fact, he believes that reparations are necessary to confront white supremacy because capital is its mother's milk:

Reparations is not one possible tool against white supremacy. It is the indispensable tool against white supremacy. One cannot propose to plunder a people, incur a moral and monetary debt, propose to never pay it back, and then claim to be seriously engaging in the fight against white supremacy.

If that sounds like advocacy for the status quo....