The pragmatism and ethical question of reparations are pretty connected though. Among other resources, there always has to be proper education for a population to progress, and right now racial literacy is still incredibly low with most white Americans. Coates can write all the challenging articles he wants but people in general will only read the headlines and dismiss him as crazy. He is simply not for everyone (read: no low-information voters). The only way to even confront the question of reparations, and to connect slavery to the new jim crow for an average person, is for the content of contemporary racism to first be apparent to them. And it's just not, yet, until movements like BLM can have people in office who will stand by and listen and allow outside activist ideas to have a foot in the system.

Basically I think Sanders is absolutely right that raising reparations for national debate would tear the country apart racially. He would instantly lose. Can anyone deny that? He's not running for a small town mayor anymore, sometimes we have to accept that WS provides practical limitations in what what we think of as possible.

And lastly, I'd strongly disagree that race can be separated from class in US history. Race-based slavery has always been tied to a plantation-like structure of capitalism, and the effect of the race-class caste fusion is an effect which imo follows the economic history, not some non-economic social history. Coates is simply not being strategically effective, imo, in potentially spearing Sanders' campaign when its success is still very tenuous. As it stands now, the only way to fight capitalist racist colorblindness is with anticapitalist anti-racist colorblindness. There's just no room for reparations talk in that strategy.