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Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer for The Atlantic and a National Book Award winner who often focuses on racism, published a stinging critique of Senator Bernie Sanders on Tuesday over his opposition to reparations for slavery.

Mr. Coates’s piece in The Atlantic, where he published the widely read “The Case for Reparations” in 2014, comes as Mr. Sanders is trying to gain the support of black voters who could play an important role in helping him win the Democratic presidential nomination.

Last week in Iowa, a host at a minority-focused Brown and Black Forum asked Mr. Sanders if he would be in favor of “reparations for slavery.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Mr. Sanders said. “First of all, its likelihood of getting through Congress is nil. Second of all, I think it would be very divisive.”

Mr. Coates wrote that Mr. Sanders’s opposition to reparations because it was not likely to get through Congress didn’t make sense because many of the policies the senator is proposing — such as tuition-free public colleges, single-payer Medicare for all, and a $1-trillion jobs and infrastructure bill — was also not likely to be passed.

“Sanders says the chance of getting reparations through Congress is ‘nil,’ a correct observation which could just as well apply to much of the Vermont senator’s own platform,” Mr. Coates wrote. “If this is the candidate of the radical left — then expect white supremacy in America to endure well beyond our lifetimes and lifetimes of our children. Reparations is not one possible tool against white supremacy. It is the indispensable tool against white supremacy. One cannot propose to plunder a people, incur a moral and monetary debt, propose to never pay it back, and then claim to be seriously engaging in the fight against white supremacy.”

Mr. Coates, whose “Between the World and Me,” about his experience as a black man in America, won the National Book Award for nonfiction last year, also more broadly criticized what he called Mr. Sanders’s “class first” approach to racial inequality.

While Mr. Sanders, in the same response in Iowa, said the answer, instead of reparations, was creating jobs, making public colleges free and directing more resources to poor communities, Mr. Coates wrote that this view addresses “black people not so much as a class specifically injured by white supremacy, but rather, as a group which magically suffers from disproportionate poverty.”

Mr. Coates wrote that Mr. Sanders “should be directly confronted and asked why his political imagination is so active against plutocracy, but so limited against white supremacy.”

“Raising the minimum wage doesn’t really address the fact that black men without criminal records have about the same shot at low-wage work as white men with them; nor can making college free address the wage gap between black and white graduates,” Mr. Coates wrote. “Housing discrimination, historical and present, may well be the fulcrum of white supremacy. Affirmative action is one of the most disputed issues of the day. Neither are addressed in the ‘racial justice’ section of Sanders platform.”

Mr. Coates wrote that he had hoped to talk directly with Mr. Sanders before publishing and that he had reached out to Mr. Sanders’s campaign over the last three days but did not receive a response.

Reached by phone Tuesday afternoon, Symone Sanders, Mr. Sanders’s national press secretary, held off commenting on the article but said that Mr. Sanders was always open to having conversations.