The current stirring of emotions in Black America in response to his cold candor about reparations is exactly what we needed. It's a punch to the gut. This toxically elegant love affair that we have with America is what Booker T. Washington so eloquently characterized in his Atlanta address: "When we love, we love hard." Coates is loving Sanders hard by highlighting a critical issue at the heart of the Sanders platform. Outside a strong argument for restitution, he's also reminded many that class-based reform does not equal the racial justice African-Americans have labored, it merely provides a bandage. Race will still matter, even with Sanders shutting down plutocrats. On a macro level, 2008 painted this picture very well with a housing crisis that left the top half of African-American families with less than half of their original wealth in 2007, as opposed to white families in the same category losing only 14 percent. It would also do us justice to remember the assault of ex-tennis pro James Blake, to see how racism waterboards class whenever it sees fit. Journalist Van Newkirk offered recently, "[I]f a goal of anti-poverty programs is to lift black people out of poverty into the middle class, it must grapple with this peculiar fact; that black people of all income levels are less likely to make it to the middle class than are the poor people of other races."