Twice as good vs. thrice as fast

If you haven't read Ta-Nehisi Coates's cover story in the current Atlantic, do. Coates surveys the history of white supremacy in America, with a particular focus on housing policy in one Chicago neighborhood, and calls us to do what we've never really done: seriously consider what it might take to make it right.

The headline is "The Case for Reparations," but Coates doesn't name a dollar amount or even argue that payment is the main goal. What he's after is a genuine reckoning with the deep racism that's helped build white America—with collective, structural sins against black people, sins that reap fruit long after we've stopped actively committing (some of) them. Anticipating the objection, "Won't reparations divide us?" Coates responds:

Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.