Actually, Italian is the least significant of my ethnic make-up and has little to do with me. The name is a movie reference. Also, it's Northern Italian, which was not the discriminated group to which you refer: Northern and Southern Italians were counted as seperate nationalities in US census data - at the insistence of the former. So I'm not likely to be descended from other victims, nor do I have much empathy or cultural identification with them, nor do I consider such a factor relevant in making an assessment of their situation.

Also, you appear to be as ignorant of idioms as you are of economics and history. I am not trying to trick or scam anyone. The hucksters and race baiters and agitators for reparations, who hint at an end to their endless lobbying for preferential treatment if we will just give them this favor or that holiday or this percentage of government jobs or elect this duskier-than-avergage man as president... they are the ones with the proverbial bridge to sell.

You're talking about something completely different. I would be actually using that argument if Italian-Americans were collectively lobbying for reparations, and I did not argue against giving black people the respect they deserve. In my understanding of the concept, "respect" is not a commodity to be bought and sold, nor is money a substitute for it. Reparations are pretty much completely in opposition to respect, because it implies that without substantial financial support from white people, blacks are unable to succeed and survive, which was one of the arguments the article was making.

And rightly so. "Black culture" is an aggregation of behaviors copied and adapted from the white trash among whom the majority of black Americans lived for much of their history, particularly in the more relevant-to-this-discussion era prior to the Great Migration. A description of Appalachian hillbillies and redneck frontiersmen will match in general many of the worst behaviors of the contemporary inner city culture, which has produced nothing of value. The many decent and successful blacks in America are such as a result of turning their backs on that "culture". Even calling that aggregation of social pathology "black culture" is an insult to both black people and the concept of culture. We look down on white people with the exact same culture as "hillbillies," "rednecks" and "white trash". The black slang for white people "cracker", is another reference to that sort of person, and as most blacks in the US associated only with crackers (as opposed to wops, dagos, micks, krauts or chinks), it became a generic term for white people.
They are given that. Mr Coates is asking for money, of which black people have already received more from the federal government than almost any other group whose lands we did not actually steal. To the extent that blacks were alienated from their homelands and ancestral culture, it was not by the USA. We (to the extent that a minority isolated by their own preference represent the USA as a whole) are simply the recipients of others' crimes. But asking for reparations from the slave catchers and traders at this point in history would be trying to squeeze blood from a stone, so much better to make a stink and try to weasel some money out of the US.