YVETTE CARNELL: Well, listen. I would tell anyone that I am in favor of reparations. But reparations for me looks a lot like what Bernie Sanders defined. Reparations for me is massive investment in poor communities. And for me the whole problem with Ta-Nehisi Coates and what he, and what he did, what he did to me was really intellectually bankrupt. Because what he’s asking black people to do is follow this kind of identity politics, this kind of black identity politics, everything has to be about us being black people as opposed to everything being about us being poor people, disproportionately poor. And he wants us to follow down that road which really is a road to nowhere, leads to a goose egg.
You know, the most interesting thing to me about what Ta-Nehisi Coates said in terms of how he defined reparations is that he never really defined reparations. And he, and when you ask him about, hey, what does reparations look like and what is it supposed to be he says, well, I don’t have all the answers. Well, what you really don’t have is an argument. You’re happy to define reparations for yourself, but you’re telling me that what Bernie Sanders has here doesn’t go far enough.
And I would, I would ask, like he says, you know, he said in a more recent piece, he says, you know, black people have more concentrated poverty. Black people are even more poor than white people, than white poor people. That’s who we are. Well, that’s true. But that goes, that really guts his case. Because if you really know how poor we are as black people then you know that, okay, cutting us a check ain’t going to get it, and what we need is real infrastructure and real investment from the government. Everything from healthcare, everything to, everything from free college education. I mean, when you look at Flint, Michigan right now, that’s just perfect for me. You can’t, you can’t give black people a check for Flint and say, okay, deal with your stuff. That’s some, this is something that’s going to take massive investment from the government to fix.
And so the real, the real intellectually bankrupt part of Coates’ argument is that he doesn’t define an argument for himself other than say, you know what, black people are really, really poor. And socialism doesn’t go far enough. This sort of socialism stuff doesn’t go far enough. Well, that’s really not good in terms of a salient argument, is it, if I say that this doesn’t go far enough. It goes very far, and you haven’t defined how it should go further. The only thing you’ve really said, and the only thing Ta-Nehisi Coates has said, is he says that this sort of socialist politics does not vanquish racism. Those were his words. Well, my response would be nothing vanquishes racism. And we shouldn’t be concerned with vanquishing racism. I’m not concerned whether or not the white guy across town loves black people, or whether he hates black people. What I’m concerned with is the material consequence of racism. And the only way to help alleviate or ameliorate those consequences is through massive public investment that looks a lot like what [Sanders] is talking about.
