Yes, we might ultimately agree on many of the solutions. I think my key disagreement is that I believe the current #BLM movement and focus on identity is making the problem worse, not better (and reparations would just add more fuel to that fire). It's dividing people on the basis of their tribal affiliations and sending poor and working-class whites -- who would be natural allies of poor and working-class blacks if the problem were packaged economically rather than racially -- further and further to the right, as membership in white identity groups continues to grow as an echo of the growing membership in black identity groups on the left. You can't get one without the other. It just doesn't work that way.
Our two political parties have every interest in polarizing the electorate this way, because the greatest danger to the status quo is a cross-racial alliance of the poor and working classes against establishment elites and large corporations that currently dominate our economy and do everything they can to preserve their class privileges while economic inequality continues to worsen. The left elites running newly "woke" corporations are perfectly happy to offer token gestures of support to #BLM (meaningless statements, a few "diversity" hires, a few more faces "of color" on the corporate brochure, some tax-deductible charitable contributions to local communities, etc.) if it means more public goodwill, more sales and the ultimate preservation of the status quo. Republican elites, meanwhile, will be just as happy to cater to white identity politics and stoke the flames of a culture war if it means that they can ignore the economic needs of the growing millions upon millions of poor white people, especially rural whites, suffering from the opioid epidemic, losing job opportunities and otherwise being left out of our increasingly high-tech, high-skill knowledge economy. And the more the left caters to minorities while the right caters to whites, the less chances there are of these groups seeing their common interests. If you divide people on the basis of race, they'll never be able to unite on the basis of class. By contrast, the kinds of real economic reforms I'm proposing would benefit ALL poor and working-class people (though black people in particular, because they're disproportionately poor) without creating the kind of blowback that results in us running in place year after year and decade after decade, even as the wealth gap between whites and blacks hasn't improved much since the 1950s.
Take my suggestion about reformulating affirmative action to focus on class, i.e., income + assets, rather than on race. I went to Yale undergrad and to Harvard for law school, and virtually EVERY SINGLE black person at these institutions was what you'd called privileged. I have no idea who did or didn't benefit from affirmative action, of course, but to take a typical case of what I saw there, one of my roommates was Nigerian; his parents were both diplomats working for the U.N.; he was brought up in London and attended an elite British boarding school (nothing against him personally, as he's a great person with whom I'm very close friends to the present day, but I'm just using him as an example). Other black people I knew at Yale and Harvard were similar in their origins. They were also children of high-achieving West Africans parents or children of Caribbean immigrants who lived in exclusive neighborhoods in Florida or children of professors, etc. The only black guy I knew at Yale who was from a more modest background was still a solidly middle class guy from a decent town in New Jersey and who'd been admitted to Yale to play on their football team. So if these are the kinds of people who benefited from race-based affirmative action, the needle wasn't being moved at all as far as helping actually needy people get into great universities. And, in the meantime, because everyone knows affirmative action is currently race-based, it's not only a controversial policy that makes poor whites feel justly aggrieved, but it also creates a racial stigma because everyone suspects that if you're at Yale and black, you don't really "deserve" to be there.
This would all work very differently if affirmative action were to be based on actual economic need. Then you would stir the pot on wealth inequality a lot more than you currently do without creating that same stigma because, unlike some wealthy, privileged British-Nigerian boarding school kid who doesn't need or deserve any extra leg up in life, poor kids given that leg up needn't feel ashamed of what's been given to them because when their rich roommate says to them, "Oh, you only got in because of affirmative action," their ready comeback is, "Yeah, and you only got in because you started getting affirmative action from the moment you were born with that silver spoon in your mouth."
Anyway, sorry to go on for awhile, but my basic point is that our current race-based politics are not progressive politics moving us in the right direction, but rather, regressive tribalism entrenching divisions and inequalities and taking us further and further from the goal. Things might get better in the long run, but my suspicion is that before they get better, they'll get a whole lot worse. The racial balkanization that began in this country roughly in the 1990s and that has been brought to a boiling point today and led directly to the election of Trump will keep growing and keep leaving more casualties in its wake until there's either another civil war or some other series of huge blow-ups leading, eventually, to a mass movement of Americans against the racial tribalists on the left and right seeking to divide us from one another.
