An Open Letter (and an Awesome Rebuttal) to Ta-Nehisi Coates

Coates believes that white racism is an immovable force that prevents American Blacks from achieving the American Dream. Writing on the Commentary site, Jason D. Hill rebuts Coates's angry twaddle by referring to Hill's own experience as an immigrant from Jamaica. He also points to the example of another people who, though once enslaved and frequently reviled, managed to succeed:

I do not believe you intend to mislead your son [to whom Coates's book is addressed], but in imparting this credo, you have potentially paralyzed him, unless he reappraises your philosophy and rejects it. In your misreading of America, you’ve communicated precisely why many blacks in this country have been alienated from their own agency and emancipatory capabilities. The most beleaguered people on the planet, the Jews, who have faced persecution since their birth as a people, are a living refutation of your claim. When they labored in slavery in Egypt, clamored in Palestine, made magnificent contributions to human civilization in European capitals, sojourned in Africa and Asia, and founded the modern State of Israel, no one gave these heroic people an affirmative-action plan to work anywhere. In spite of vitriol and invidious comparisons to vermin and pigs, and despite being subjected to countless pogroms and mandated ghettos, they thrived and flourished because not for one moment did they ever believe that their struggle for liberation lay in any hands other than their own.

Something tells me that Coates will failed to be swayed by such an argument.

Just a hunch, mind you.