African American
In reply to the discussion: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Bernie Sanders, and Reparations [View all]Recursion
(56,582 posts)And mentions with candor that he came to the party late and started out skeptical of the entire idea.
He's not in any academic sense an "expert" on reparations (and he would be the first to say that). He's a public intellectual who has spent the past five years exploring the concept, and has incidentally come up with some of the best writing of this generation on American history and culture in the process.
Side point: it's odd to me that in all the comparisons of Coates to other writers, two that are obvious to me never seem to surface: DuBois and Henry James. James I can get because the black-white crossover can be hard to visualize, but the DuBois connection seems obvious and I almost never see it. I know Coates is often critical of DuBois, but DuBois himself was even moreso.