Ta-Nehisi Coates Sums Up All The Conservative Arguments Against Reparations As The Work Of Immature Ahistorical Children (Just As I Do)

Government intrusion in American lives is wrong - unless it happens to blacks?

Coates gets the same lame answers I do, from whites over at the Althouse blog, defending the same white supremacist scheme:

I began to see the entire device—a method by which you exploit a people and then clean yourself of all responsibility. An act is committed—enslavement, for instance. The victims make a credible claim. The claim is disputed with poor logic. (“They have been taught Christian civilization, and to speak the noble English language instead of some African gibberish. The account is square with the ex‑slaves.”) The people making the claim eventually die. At that point the claim is acknowledged as having been credible, but because the claimants are dead, nothing can be done. 

The counter-strategy to reparations has always been to run out the clock,...The vast majority of the responses to "The Case for Reparations" are not so much responses, but evasions. The respondents prefer to ignore the details of the claim ("The people to whom reparations were owed are long dead."), to ignore the facts of history ("What about...Japanese Americans, interned during World War II?") or to simply flail around like a six-year-old ("OK. Whatever. Reparations scholarships to Middlebury for all!") 

One popular response to reparations is to say "I didn't own any slaves, so I can't be held responsible." Other versions of this include "My ancestors came over in 1920, I can't be held responsible." Or, "My great-great grandmother was half-black, I should not have to pay." The first flaw in this logic is to believe that the reparations claim is rooted in the allegedly distant past. I now knew that it wasn't. But the second flaw is to conceive of reparations as a claim made against individual white people, as opposed to American society itself. 

Kim Forde-Mazrui's scholarly article "Taking Conservatives Seriously: A Moral Justification for Affirmative Action and Reparations" was crucial in understanding this question. The article notes that the state, necessarily, outlives its individual citizens. Americans pay for things, all the time, that they are not individually responsible for. If the "I didn't do it" argument was followed to its logical end, the state would effectively dissolve.

Racist whites think they're each speaking as individuals - while parroting the exact same white supremacist lines as their racist ancestors

I'm starting to feel sorry for these poor white racists:

Whites telling of history doesn't hold up - without obvious revision

They have to come up with new arguments now - and quick:

January - when HR40 is triggered - is right around the corner,...