[started off as followup to rmrd on Coates & Sanders]

1) there is no path to a Democratic presidency without the black base. Hispanics are important, and of course whites are still the majority, but for the Democratic core, African-Americans are the sine quo non. Which makes New Hampshire and Iowa largely humorous.

2) Sanders hired a BlackLivesMatter activist as national press secretary, so Flint should have been a no-brainer, as should responding to Coates - though maybe the the BLM playbook calls for resignations, rather than pressure to solve problems. 

3) I've come to think (just now) of considering reparations as important as whether they ever happen. Feeling it till it hurts, thinking about how inconvenient it would be, how complex, how embedded - and then relating that to the human suffering caused and still being caused. But more important, thinking about how to effectively do it as a complex fair and helpful measure is an excellent mind-exercise for our racism-saddled new-idea-bereft society. Building up inner cities, programs for the poor, other blah-blah-blah, is impersonal - it's a level of abstraction above actually taking any direct responsibility. Been there, did that, the t-shirt sucked.

4) I'm thoroughly amazed and appalled that the situation for minorities is as bad and progress-free as it is today. Bad as things were in the 60's, 80's, 90's - there was always signs of improvement, some progress, some hope. Today's feels like "this is as good as it gets", and any flareup is room for some band-aid, but there won't be any big change coming. Mistake.

5) Dealing with racism is one of the great challenges over the next century. All of our new techno-gadgets and medical breakthroughs don't mean shit if we can't accommodate say 1/5 of the global population just because of their skin color and our inability to adjust learned behavior and embedded structural inequality. Africa has the only significant population that's still growing today - many countries heavily - and we can't just leave it as our global ghetto in an age of globalization and expect it won't impact us, same as we can't have neglected ghettos scattered across the US as our goal and status quo in 2050 and 2100. It's more absurd than the problems of reparations they claim to be worried about.

6) Of course if blacks and Hispanics are a huge part of the Democratic base, and the GOP is much better tied to monied interests, we can imagine that any talk of reparations has to come from our opponents. That *will* be a huge fight - it doesn't sync well with government you can drown in a bathtub, it doesn't jibe with our exceptionalist never-apoligize cowboy veneer, it doesn't fit with our still racist build-a-bigger-wall approach which applies as much to Flint and Hamtramck and Anacostia and East St. Louis as it does to the Rio Grande. The "wrong side of the tracks" neglected shit-upon communities have to be integrated economically as well as racially. While we rail against Israelis bulldozing houses in the West Bank, there's not much moral superiority to letting their houses fall down through lack of upkeep and bank repossession. MLK addressed poverty as much as racism - economic opportunity is the linchpin to rising out of racial neglect and abuse.

7) We have to figure out what it means to grow jobs past poverty, in an economically meaningful way, as a productive and innovative segment of our workforce. It's gotten harder - offshoring means a lot of jobs can go to lower-paid workers abroad (though those foreign wages are rising and the transaction costs of doing business remotely are significant). .Manufacturing and government jobs were traditional paths in reach for the poorest - and these have been drastically reduced. We have new fast-training possibilities for a lot of work, but that training doesn't necessarily reach the bottom most-challenged segment, and that training doesn't wipe away the inherent bias and racism that keeps many of those from getting the chance, 3 chances, 5 chances needed to rise up the tilted busted ladder.

8) On what may be a sour note, I'd expect that dealing with structural racism and economic opportunity in the new millennium will also require a more engaging, thorough, acceptable, loquacious figure to lead the effort - a MLK for a new generation, one that will be more consistent than Coates, better able to present and dig into complicated economic solutions than BLM at a bureaucratic government policy and economy-wide level. Maybe this is a job Obama can do post-presidency, but my guess is it takes someone less cautious, more of a think-outside-the-box type. We can't just keep dealing with racism and economic imbalance in crisis mode, because the needed structural requirements aren't a quick fix - they're much like our dilapidated highway system where we kicked the repairs down the road for 10 years but think we can just retroactively do a few quick fixes and the problem's solved.  Somehow we need a new more effective way of looking at these issues and a real plan.