The MacArthur Foundation gives $625,000 "genuis grants" to leaders in the fields of art, history, electronics, chemistry, biology, physics, and fomenting hatred for other racial groups. This year Ta-Nehisi Coates won the prize for the lattermost category.
Coates' father was a devoted Black Panther who was a firm believer in free love who felt monogamy was too limiting. He instilled in young Coates a firm pride in all things black and a resentment of all things white. Coates studied journalism at Howard University for five years but could not gather enough credits to graduate.
Despite his lack of a college diploma, a wide variety of journalistic jobs were open to Coates, including a writing job at The Atlantic, and he started to write books and articles about race, notably "The Case for Reparations".
Why this qualifies him to be a MacArthur "genius" I am not sure, since he is certainly not the first to call for reparations for a now non-existent group of individuals. Perhaps he explored new methods of payment of reparations, such as by credit card or Paypal or Facebook likes. Or perhaps he scientifically determined the precise skin color at which a mixed-race individual stops being a recipient of slave reparations and starts being a payor. ...
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