[...] The nations with which we have warred over the past few decades are, thus, in no position to pressure the US — indirectly or directly — to make restitution to African Americans. Because Coates’s ontological commitment to race can only permit a politics of moral pleading, the specific material and ideological issues that inform political decisions are inconsequential. The only details that matter to him are the grievance and the justness of the cause. Coates’s narrow focus on the righteousness of these cases ultimately allows him to insinuate parallels between them and the case for African American reparations in the absence of a material basis for comparison. And since reparations presumes that whites’ pathological commitment to white-skin privilege precludes political alliances — short lived or otherwise — based on mutual interest, Coates’s case for recompense has to center on special pleading.