Everyone capable of gripping a pencil with a maximum of one hand and capable of requiring fewer than two syllables to pronounce d-o-g, agrees that racism in America has shrunk to infinitesimal levels.
A magnifying glass is needed to identify it.
Except among our liberal friends.
Routinely, liberals contend contemporary racism is scarcely has retreated since the mid-19th century, that it is – almost happily — the equivalent of every white family owning at least one slave.
They love Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Baltimore-born author journalist who shot to acclaim two years ago with an upside-down book that was a boon to professional victims everywhere.
Bathing almost nourishingly in the ugly waters of bigotry, Mr. Coates, who somehow became successful in a majority-white country, portrays America as incurably racist, a land where a black man may as well surrender early.
Sounding like a willing, enthusiastic, professional and immutable “victim” of modern-day racism, Mr. Coates, a journalist by day, wrote a bleak book in the form of a letter to his teenage son.
“Between the World and Me” is recommended for depressed people of every race who are considering disposing of themselves.
Were I Coates Jr. – keep in mind, the elder Coates, 41, is a writer of stature — I would have left home after my first day in the first grade.
Here is a passage that should elevate your blood pressure:
“I write you in your 15th year. “And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. . . . I tell you now that the question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers itself.”
Last Friday Mr. Coates pushed emotional buttons when he gave the keynote address at Harvard for a conference that was the quintessential moment of leftist political correctness:
Exploring historic links between slavery and universities.
That topic flung open the door for one of Mr. Coates’s more controversial goals:
Reparations for all black Americans.
Those of mixed races will receive a little less.
Non-blacks should ante up before April 15 for an instant tax break.