[...] Coates’s commitment to racial ontology, however, precludes any serious attempt to either ground racism in the material world or to historicize liberal policy prescriptions beyond their failure to redress disparities. But if the endgame is to address the economic disadvantages that blacks face and, by extension, the attendant social problems that afflict lower-income black and brown communities disproportionately, it is difficult to see how the neoliberal consensus — which is antagonistic to the notion of government intervention for the public good — could engender targeted initiatives that benefit poor and working-class blacks rather than elites. Indeed, it is no coincidence that affirmative action’s focus shifted from material redress to diversity at the dawn of American neoliberalism. It is likewise no coincidence that in an era in which neoliberalism has become hegemonic, social justice has come to merge with entrepreneurialism — producing a “progressive” politics that not only casts charter schools, NGO s, and sundry internet startups as alternatives to state action, but lionizes black/brown businesspeople (including the occasional rap and R&B mogul) as the new generation of civil rights leaders.