Last month, John McWhorter penned a widely read rebuttal to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Atlantic cover story “The Case for Reparations.” Unlike many of the piece’s dissenters, McWhorter actually read Coates’ sprawling history of, and moral meditation on, three and a half centuries of African-American oppression. He’s therefore aware that an accounting of reparations’ impracticalities would be largely irrelevant to Coates’ call for “a national reckoning… an airing of family secrets… a settling with old ghosts.” Specifically, Coates calls for the passage of HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. He emphasizes that the project of studying the issue, of presenting our legislature with an authoritative account of debts incurred, and potential modes of redress, is as essential, if not more so, than the execution of reparatory transfer payments themselves.

McWhorter argues that such a reckoning would be both unnecessary and unproductive. While acknowledging racism as a scourge in American life both past and present, McWhorter is “perplexed by a depiction of America as somehow blind to it.” In his view, America is “obsessed” with its own racial history. He finds evidence of this obsession in little acts of engagement or enlightenment plucked from two randomly chosen years early in the millennium, noting, among other things, the success of a traveling exhibit of slave-ship artifacts in 2001, and a legislator’s quest to remove Jefferson Davis’ name from a Seattle highway in 2002. McWhorter sees an America eager to engage on issues of race, pointing to the frequent “declamations against racism in all forms” that attended media coverage of Trayvon Martin, Paula Dean, Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling. He notes that among the best-selling nonfiction books of the last three years were Isabel Wilkerson’s history of The Great Migration, “The Warmth of Other Suns,” and Michelle Alexander’s indictment of mass incarceration, “The New Jim Crow.” He reminds us that last year’s Best Picture was anightmarish rendering of American slavery.

In McWhorter’s view, if Coates’ desire for a “national conversation” on race has yet to be sated, it never will be, because Coates’ protest is “less proactive than reactive,” less political than existential:

Four-hundred years of slavery and Jim Crow left us unwhole, and unfortunately susceptible to a baseline sense of existential grievance as a keystone of being black.

Rather than asking white America for an “understanding” that will never feel complete, McWhorter calls on African-Americans to seek their assistance “in making our future brighter than our present.” Better to pursue the end of the drug war than a “settling with old ghosts,” to pursue material comfort in the future than an existential comfort with the past, if for no other reason then because that existential comfort seems impossible to attain:

In exactly what fashion could 317 million people “reckon” or come to certain eternally elusive “terms” with racism? Especially in a way that would satisfy people who see even America’s current atonements as insufficient?

The irony of McWhorter’s argument is that, when assessing America’s racial progress, he’s the one elevating the symbolic over the material. In one sentence he evinces agreement with a book that depicts the incarceration of 2 million black men as Jim Crow reborn; in the next he’s baffled that Coates could be dissatisfied with the “atonements” America made by producing “The Help,” or forcing Paula Dean to take a vacation.

It’s true that part of Coates’ argument is for the immaterial value of a national conversation, but the subject of that conversation is definitively material. Contrary to McWhorter’s interpretation, Coates isn’t seeking an existential “conversation on race” that might force the white majority to contemplate what it is to be The Other; he’s asking for a conversation about what our nation’s oppressive institutions have cost African-Americans, in dollars and cents.

America’s engagement with the evils of white supremacy is not lacking in the context of prestige cinema, museum exhibits or cable news coverage of neo-confederate ranchers. In discussions of best-selling nonfiction, we can stare our history straight in the face. It’s when the discussion turns to budgets that America’s eyes turn away. Coates’ call isn’t for a conversation on “race” but one on reparations. He isn’t seeking an acknowledgment of the effects of white supremacy on our culture, but on our political economy, on our conversations about what is owed to whom.

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In Coates’ own telling, a central impetus for the essay was his frustration with the way our political discourse explains the persistence of the ghetto. To the nation’sunrepentant racists and “bravest” intellectuals, the resilience of black poverty is explained by the hereditary mental inferiority of the darker races. Mainstream Republicansare more generous, casting the urban poor as victims of a government that robbed them of self-respect by helping them feed their hungry children. Even national Democrats, while paying homage to the structural origins of black poverty, signal their political bravery by pinning its persistence on a degenerate culture that glorifies men with loose pants and looser attachments to the mothers of their children. For Coates, an America that had “come to terms” with its racial history would have no need for such hypotheses.

In his view, the privation of our central cities is the inevitable product of three decades of collusion between the government and the private real-estate industry, collusion aimed at locking African-Americans out of “the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history.” In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration, a department tasked with insuring private mortgages, thereby reducing interest rates and the down payment necessary for purchasing a home. This subsidy, coupled with the unprecedented growth of the post-war boom economy, gave birth to the American middle class. As Coates explains, the FHA designed its policies to minimize the melanin in that class’s complexion:

The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated “A,” indicated “in demand” neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.” These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated “D” and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red.

The effect of this “redlining” was to make integration anathema to white society. Even the most racially enlightened white person was made to understand that a black family across the street was a blow to her own family’s wealth. A house ineligible for FHA backing was worth a fraction of one that was. This threat to the foundation of middle-class prosperity spurred white communities to terrorize African-Americans seeking a home in their midst. Even within their assigned ghettos, African-Americans were denied access to the legitimate mortgage market, their frustrated ambition pushing them into the hands of ruthless “contract sellers” who “would sell homes at inflated prices and then evict families who could not pay — taking their down payment and their monthly installments as profit.”

The incipient African-American middle class was thereby kept separate and unequal. Denied access to the spoils of the post-war boom, the stability of asset wealth, well-funded schools and public services, the black community was left uniquely vulnerable to the stagnation and contraction that’s definedthe last four decades of the American economy.

The greatest achievement of Coates’ essay may be the way it elucidates mid-century housing discrimination through deft summaries of sociological research and vivid anecdotes from the lives of those affected. While McWhorter argues that America’s engagement with its own history of racism has been obsessive, our discourse suggests white America is far from fluent in the history of the FHA. I myself, a northern liberal whose childhood best friend was African-American, graduated college with a more detailed understanding of The Bell Curve than of redlining.