Arguing "a nation is both its credits and its debts - if Thomas Jefferson matters, so does Sally Hemings," writer Ta-Nehisi Coates offered searing testimony at the House hearing on possible reparations to black Americans long and still confronted by state-sanctioned violence for simply trying to be equal citizens of this country. Until we reckon with a past that's of a racist piece - slavery, Jim Crow, incarceration, poverty, violence - he says, "America will never be whole."