The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks Book

Could not have read two more diametrically opposed viewpoints than Buchanan's "Death of the West" and Robinson's book...but both are good, important reads. There were uncanny swaths of this book where I thought the man was writing the book so I wouldn't feel bad that I hadn't-whole sections worded precisely the way I'd always felt about racial issues, but couldn't articulate as perfectly. In particular he has a part where he takes the "life arc" of a hypothetical, newly emancipated slave and traces that slave's probably experience in the South, family life, move up north in the Great Migration, and difficulties with subsequent generations being trapped in the ghettos of Northern cities...He starts out eloquently describing his alienation from all these historic figures in DC museums that he'd like to admire, as an American- but his enthusiasm is tempered when he realizes how these typically lionized figures contributed to the existence and continuance of slavery....his argument for reparations is frankly compelling and convincing- I do not share his fervor for it, mainly because it isn't possible here, despite the compensation given to interned Japanese/Chinese during WWII for, frankly, much less. But he is aware of this, and essentially scolds people like me for confusing what we may deserve with what we think is possible...personally some affirm action, even on socioeconomic and not racial grounds, would satisfy me, lest we think a dollar amount could be put on the loss of capital, potential, and life quality that accumulates when an intellectual genocide is committed against a people...

Anyway, a must read.