>>7290374But his arguments are basically dishonest, or at least badly uninformed. Let's go through it in order:
I-III. The first substantive thing in here is the contract-mortgage saga. Here's the thing: the provisions that he's complaining about are only slightly different from those that are in every mortgage. Then he throws out some factoids about African-Americans with high incomes having less in savings than Whites of the same income level. No real context or explanation is given--we're just meant to infer that sinister forces are at work. Then we get some inspirational stories that don't really have much upshot.
IV. Slavery. He presents a fair number of statistics, but he doesn't really do so systematically. He doesn't do the work of coming up with a number, or even a rough approximation of one. He talks for a while about separation of slave families, but he doesn't come close to a hard number for how many occurred. Is it not possible to make an estimate? Has he declined to do the research? Is he just declining to tell us? Not at all clear.
V. Violence in the post-Reconstruction South. A lot of vivid anecdotes and not a lot to concretize what the conditions really were for most people.
VI. Back to housing in Chicago--some stuff about race riots in the 1940s, but, again, not much context or explanation of what the real material stakes were or what the outcomes were.
VII. Back to the Contract Buyers League--very vivid storytelling, not a lot of hard facts.
VIII-IX. A lot of quotes from various community leaders and academics, plus some more oral-history anecdotes. Not much to really respond to.
X. Suddenly we're talking about the Holocaust and the German reparations to Israel. These are supposed to have been responsible for Israel's new-found prosperity. OK, an argument for once. Certainly the money must have had some impact--but in combination with the high education, training, and social capital of the Israeli Jewish population, the general worldwide economic boom of the 1950s, the general tendency for new settler states to grow rapidly, etc. Has Coates thought about these factors? Then, oddly, we pivot to the real-estate bubble. Coates has spent thousands of words now on the moral evil of banks that refused to lend to black home-buyers. But in the Clinton/Bush era, when they did provide loans at an unprecedented rate, at the behest of the federal government--this, too, is a vast injustice.
He's a skilled rhetorician, but he just doesn't have enough factual knowledge of the world to really make any honest point.
