Ta Nehisi Coates

Thank heavens Mr. Coates spoke on the Chris Hayes' show to detail some things Jonathan Chait
neglected in Mr. Chait's generous description of American progress towards making black people whole.
Chait indicated that America went from slavery (then one or two memorable events) to the election of a black president.
America was lucky to have Barack Obama. America needed Barack Obama. Barack Obama is the one who sacrificed himself and his family to excruciating exposures.
Is anyone in America laboring under the illusion that an awful calamity would have overcome
Barack Obama and his family had we not elected him POTUS?
Did Michelle Obama have an empty life before she became FLOTUSA?
Our President and his wife were a still young couple with vibrant careers (as vibrant as a black person's career can be when he or she is involved with The University of Chicago).
President Obama had a home, a wife, a family, siblings, in-laws, extended family, a position of respect in his community. His wife was similarly affected.
The United States of America, on the other hand, was on the brink of manufacturing collapse, banking collapse, housing collapse, and retirement fund implosions in an aging society. We were
not doing well at all. We were even embroiled in two foreign wars, one in the Mideast, and one in the Far East. The only passable roads into Afghanistan were a couple which cost us millions per year to traverse. We had to get in and out of the country; but the very first thing we did there was to bomb
the airport. Why? Who was coming that our Air Force couldn't handle?
As my dad used to say, black people, as a total community, always see the brink anyway. We live on the brink.
Ta Nehisi would understand my dad completely.
It used to break my heart to hear my dad say black people couldn't be truly free until we controlled
some resource from the ground through production. I was a teen, but I would tell him to read history, and to look at Wall Street. I tried to explain how entrenched racism was from the ground clean through to production.
We had a majority white country, a great many of whom believed we were born to be exploited, and
a great many others who felt we shouldn't have been born at all.
At bit earlier, during the late fifties, I heard his meetings in our living room with a club he'd founded
called the PEOFA club. People's Economic Opportunity and Freedom Association.
He came to the end in that club when most of the men in it became discouraged. He knew we had a
resilience which would some day give us a chance to achieve some degree of economic parity with
the majority. He felt he had to keep working on the problem of black independence, even if only in
small, incremental ways, in ways with uncertain chronologies. 
I always told dad we had to have faith in each other in the ways he had hoped for even if we couldn't
see immediate effects.
He didn't say much, but was always proud to hear of any achievement a black person could score.
Both my parents expressed a lot of disappointment that most money made by black people in America was available only through the entertainment industry.  But when Oprah came along, they
adopted the attitude- "ok, we'll take it."
Dad always nurtured a hope, however, that we could petition the government to pay us as the community of survivors whose ancestors didn't get the pay owed them for centuries of labor.
I always told him the country couldn't afford to do it if it were to remain a country. All of America
was built by slavery. The America waves of immigrants came to was built by slavery.
All the immigrants worked to enhance, all was stolen property.
Harvard was built by slavery.
Yale was built by slavery.
Chase bank was built by slavery.
All of Wall Street was built by slavery.
Even slavery was sometimes built by the slavery on breeding farms, once the British stopped the trade on the high seas.
And violent crimes against the persons of Africans and African-Americans? How were families to be
compensated for those?
Welfare cannot compensate the work product of the mass of labor of hundreds of years and quadrillions of dollars.
The most the U.S. can do is to pay itself for the work of calculating all that was extorted from us, and list it in the public record.
I see nothing else.
Slavery funded every single endeavor which created fortunes in the colonies...including the war begun with the shot heard 'round the world.