“I think Elizabeth Warren is probably serious,” Coates said on The New Yorker’s “Politics and More” podcast this week, in response to a question about which of the multiple 2020 Democrats who say they support reparations Coates believes are sincere. He did not mention any other candidates in his answer to the question.

The one-on-one meeting that followed between Coates and the Cambridge liberal, long before she declared her presidential ambitions, led the author and journalist to conclude now that Warren’s vocal support for reparations for slavery is more than just lip service in search of black voter support.

Not long after The Atlantic published his groundbreaking essay “The Case for Reparations” five years ago this month, Ta-Nehisi Coates heard from Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.


“She had read it, she was deeply serious, and she had questions, and it wasn’t like, ‘Would you do XYZ for me?’ ” Coates recounted. None of the other Democrats now vying for the 2020 presidential nomination reached out to him, he said. Coates added that he has not heard from Warren since that meeting.

Warren was among the earliest of the 2020 Democratic contenders to announce her support for reparations.

Specifically, Warren has said she backs HR40, a bill written and introduced every Congress for more than two decades by former representative John Conyers of Michigan, that would establish a commission stocked with experts to study and catalogue not only the harm inflicted by the US government on slaves and their descendants but also how the US government can make amends, both in the form of financial reparations and a formal apology.

California Senator Kamala Harris and former US housing secretary Julián Castro also declared support for reparations early in the primary, and many other of the Democratic contenders for the White House say they support HR40, too.




Embracing HR40 is exactly what Coates advocated in his essay five years ago. And the issue continues to come up on the campaign trail today.

“It’s a complicated problem on both who gets it and what it’s going to look like,” Warren said Friday on “The Breakfast Club,” a popular New York-based morning radio show, explaining why she supports the HR40 approach.

“Why is it complicated?” interjected one of the hosts, Charlemagne Tha God, who also questioned Warren on her past claims of Native American ancestry and whether she benefited from identifying as a minority.

“I’m not a person of color, I’m not a citizen of a tribe, and I shouldn’t have done it,” Warren responded. She also said that nothing about her family background affected any job she ever got.

On reparations, experts on the issue have different points of view on how to approach it, Warren said. “Let’s really push a more national, bigger, more front-and-centered conversation about this.”

Charlemagne continued to press her. “I don’t think it should be a conversation. I think that America systemically did things to put black and brown people in a terrible place, and they need to systemically do something to get us out,” he said.

“I think that’s right, but the question is what,” Warren replied.

Victoria McGrane can be reached at victoria.mcgrane@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @vgmac.