In a series of recent articles in the Atlantic, columnist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates criticized US presidential candidate and self-described socialist Bernie Sanders for not supporting reparations. Cedric Johnson responded with an open letter that challenged Coates’s worldview, and suggested that Coates is operating as part of a black managerial elite whose calls for reparations and critiques of redistributive social programs are really about carving out their piece of the American capitalist pie.

There is a lot at stake in this debate — much more than whether Bernie Sanders cares about black people or whether we should support him as a candidate. The more important issue is how the Left views the relationship between racist oppression and the exploitation of the working class. And in this respect, Sanders, Coates, and Johnson all get it wrong.

I think socialists should absolutely support the call for reparations for people of African descent in the United States (and elsewhere). Sanders was wrong to dismiss the issue, and Coates erroneously concluded from Sanders’s position that socialists necessarily adopt a reductionist, “class first” politics. Coates’s error was then confounded by Johnson’s argument, which counterposed the call for reparations to the fight for social-democratic redistributive policies — as if the two couldn’t, or shouldn’t, be part of the same struggle.