The MacArthur Foundation gives $625,000 "genius grants" to leaders in the fields of art, history, electronics, chemistry, biology, physics, and fomenting hatred for other racial groups.  This year Ta-Nehisi Coates won the prize for the lattermost category.

Coates's father was a devoted Black Panther who was a firm believer in free love and felt that monogamy is too limiting.  He instilled in young Coates a firm pride in all things black and a resentment of all things white.  Coates studied journalism at Howard University for five years but could not gather enough credits to graduate.

Despite his lack of a college diploma, a wide variety of journalistic jobs were open to Coates, including a writing job at The Atlantic, and he started to write books and articles about race, notably "The Case for Reparations."

Why this qualifies him to be a MacArthur "genius" I am not sure, since he is certainly not the first to call for reparations for a now nonexistent group of individuals.  Perhaps he explored new methods of payment of reparations, such as by credit card or PayPal or Facebook likes.  Or perhaps he scientifically determined the precise skin color at which a mixed-race individual stops being a recipient of slave reparations and starts being a payer.

He is also the author of the well-received book Between the World and Me, where he talks about the evils of white people and their tool of racial oppression, the police.  He also talks about how America is still a country of racial supremacy, even while, as he wrote the book, America has a black president and black attorney general.  America is still racist even as he has just won $625,000 for saying how racist it is – undoubtedly, he considers this only a small down payment on his reparations.  But since he is obviously not 100% African in origin, shouldn't he also be thinking of making some payments to himself?

Coates, who has an Arabic name, "Ta-Nehisi" – perhaps out of admiration for the prominent Arabic role in the African slave trade – is considered a genius, but he didn't even engage in any new race-baiting.  It's all old stuff.

Next time the people at MacArthur want to give away $625,000 to a race-baiter, can they at least find one who managed to graduate college, who at least has a creative way of expressing his white-hating thoughts?

By the way, the MacArthur Foundation has no connection to General Douglas MacArthur.  The founders, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, are simply rich dead white people who evidently had too much money and time on their hands.

This article was written by Ed Straker, senior writer of NewsMachete.com, the conservative news site.