This still doesn’t really grapple with what I feel Coates et al are really saying. What I believe they are saying is “What is causing all the crime and poverty and sucidide?”

And the accepted answer is that its not usually a racist white person, in a hood, muttering the N word as they pull the trigger. It’s systemic, it’s economic, it’s passive racism.

Just because Coates didn’t quote some absolutely horrific data about black youth suicide doesn’t mean he’s a moron who doesn’t realize it’s black people killing themselves. It means the author here missed the entire point. Of course the kid with no food in the fridge at home will be more likely to kill himself than the kid who does. Of course the family whose dad was sent to prison for drug possession will have less food/resources than the family whose dad was not sent to prison for his drug possession.

Its a straw man. And it is stupid. Of course I might turn to crime/suicide if I have no other options and of course I might have no other options if me and my family have been completely ignored by a society set up to serve mostly white or otherwise already rich people.

Have you ever read about redlining? Or the civil rights movement? Or any study or other evidence in the past fifty years that racism didn’t just end at the end of the Civil War? Have we no clue how our economic system is set up to choose winners and losers?