"Hopefully a Transitional Stage Along the Way to Something More Genuinely Progressive"

"People loved Coates's article not as politics, since almost no one thinks reparations are actually going to happen. But belle-lettristic concerns weren't the key either: Coates is hardly the only writer out there who has a way with the words. People were receiving 'The Case for Reparations' as, quite simply, a sermon. Its audience sought not counsel, but proclamation. Coates does not write with this formal intention, but for his readers, he is a preacher. A.O. Scott perfectly demonstrates Coates's now clerical role in our discourse in saying that his new book is 'essential, like water or air'—this is the kind of thing one formerly said of the Greatest Story Ever Told."

John McWhorter, in a 2017 Daily Beast article, says that "Antiracism" is a relgion.