The idea of paying reparations to African-Americans for slavery is not new, but it is usually relegated to the fringes of lefty radicalism or scholarly academic critique. Not anymore. With a piece from Ta-Nehisi Coates called “The Case for Reparations,” a recent issue of The Atlantic magazine has suddenly, if unexpectedly, mainstreamed the topic.

Coates’s article is comprised of ten chapters illustrating the enduring impact of slavery on contemporary African-American families. Coates identifies countless examples of the way whites have benefited from state-sponsored programs including Social Security and the GI Bill, reminding readers that there was a time “when affirmative action was white.” As much manifesto or treatise as conventional reporting, Coates’s piece argues forcefully for the need for America to grow up and repay its outstanding debt to its most vulnerable citizens. Failing to fulfill this promissory note, Coates insists, will leave all Americans morally impoverished.

Among its many exemplary characteristics is the way in which Coates draws directly and extensively on the works of numerous sociologists and political scientists. For example, Coates uses the work of sociologists Doug Massey and Nancy Denton to describe the role of residential segregation in the construction of inner-city ghettos, as well as their wealthier spatial counterparts-the suburbs (in 1993’s American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Urban Underclass, from Harvard University Press). Crim-Soc scholar Rob Sampson’s research on “neighborhood effects” is at the core of Coates’ discussion of the enormous power the ghetto wields in conditioning the lived experiences of its residents (see his 2012 Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect from the University of Chicago Press). And Coates engages political scientists Michael Dawson and Rovana Popoff’s studies of pre- and post-election survey data from 2000 (including views on reparations and racial apologies for Japanese American internment during World War II) to show how racialized views of politics shape public opinion as well as remind us that reparations are not unprecedented (for more on this, see Dawson and Popoff’s 2004 DuBois Review article “Reparations: Justice and Greed in Black and White”).

There’s a lot more where this came from—including Rodney. D. Coates’ 2004 scholarly treatment (“If a Tree Falls in the Wilderness: Reparations, Academic Silences, and Social Justice,” Social Forces 83(2): 841-864). And as you read it, remember that while you may or may not agree with Ta-Nahesi Coates’s opinion on reparations, the social scientific data and research about the social foundations of persistent African-American inequality are not up for debate.