A new working paper. Title above, abstract, contents, and introduction below.
Download at Academia.edu.: https://www.academia.edu/35000608/Ta-Nehisi_Coates_Public_Intellectual_on_the_Dark_Side
Abstract: Inspired by online conversations between Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, I examine the negative message of Ta-Nehisi Coates though comparisons with Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and Barack Obama. Coates has allowed himself to become trapped in the limits of his own experience and uses his intense curiosity about and formidable knowledge of history to mythologize those limitations, elevating them to a near scriptural intensity.
CONTENTS
Introduction: Ta-Nehisi Coates, a failure of imagination 2 McWhorter on Antiracism as Religion, and Beyond 5 Ta-Nehisi Coates, Malcolm X, Game Theory, and Expressive Culture 10 Felix Culpa: The Judeo-Christian Underpinnings of Coates’ Reparations Argument 14 Another take on Coates: As Writer, as Celebrity 19 Coates, Baldwin, Obama and Expressive Culture 20 Coates, Baldwin, Obama and Expressive Culture 2 24 RESET on Coates, Reparations, Wisdom 28 Appendix 1: Lincoln’s Second Inaugural 30 Appendix 2: America’s Original Sin 32
Introduction: Ta-Nehisi Coates, a failure of imagination
Two years ago Glenn Loury and John McWhorter were talking about Ta-Nehisi Coates on Bloggingheads.tv [1]. I watched, I listened, I blogged. I’ve collected those posts in this document.
More recently Thomas Chatterton Williams published “How Ta-Nehisi Coates Gives Whiteness Power” in the Op-Ed section of The New York Times [2]. The article was occasioned by the publication of Coates’s most recent book, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, which is a collection of essays. As Williams’s views resonated with my own, and with those earlier observations of Loury and McWhorter, I posted a link to my Facebook page [3] and went on about my business, figuring that would get about as much commentary as most things I link to my page, little to none.
Wrong! I should have know better, but I didn’t, and I found myself under attack.
One of my interlocutors talked of Coates speaking from “his truth”. That I fear, is the problem. Coates has allowed himself to become trapped in his own life. But his life is not the measure of all lives, not even the measure of all black lives. Nor is my life, nor anyone else’s life. That’s one of the purposes of education, to learn to see, think, feel, and imagine beyond the limits of one’s own experience. As I replied to my interlocutor:
Coates was born in 1975, 11 years after the Civil Rights of 64, 10 years after the Voting Rights Act of 65. Yet he writes as though those things had never happened, as though they didn't play a role in making his career possible. Did that legislation accomplish everything? Of course not. Did it accomplish something? Yes. When Coates makes his own personal experience paramount, that's a profound failure of imagination in someone who gets paid for his imaginative powers. He's writing like it was 1950, not 2017.Writing in Vox [4], Ezra Klein quoted from a recent conversation between Coates and Stephen Colbert:
“You’ve had a hard time in some interviews expressing a sense of hope in this country,” Colbert said. “Do you have any hope tonight for the people out there, about how we could be a better country, we could have better race relations, we could have better politics?”Really?
“No,” Coates replied. "But I’m not the person you should go to for that. You should go to your pastor. Your pastor provides you hope. Your friends provide you hope.”
This wasn’t the answer Colbert was looking for. “I’m not asking you to make shit up,” he said. “I’m asking if you personally see any evidence for change in America.”
“But I would have to make shit up to actually answer that question in a satisfying way,” Coates shot back.
I’m reminded of some of Dan Everett’s remarks about living among the Pirahã [5]. He points out that they have a perfectly sensible, if limited, epistemology. If they haven’t personally witnessed it, or know someone who has, then it isn’t real. Thus, when Everett revealed that he personally had never seen this Jesus fellow, nor did he know anyone who had, they laughed at him. How could he believe such nonsense?
But they would have had the same reaction if he had told them about Julius Caesar, Simon Bolivar, Elizabeth I of England, Genghis Khan, or Beyoncé. He doesn’t know any of those people nor does he know anyone who knows them. Thus they are beyond the reach of his personal experience and of the experiences of people he knows. By Pirahã standards, these people don’t exist.
Coates was born in 1975, well after the Civil Rights movement. It’s not real to him in this sense. He doesn’t doubt the historical record–he calls on it repeatedly in his own work. But his personal experience of racism and racial politics is of something that’s unchanging. When he interprets US history through his personal experience, the record of oppression looms large, while the record of change and progress seems, feels, weak and insubstantial. And so he discounts it. It’s not real, it’s a chimera.
He has had a kind of education unavailable to the Pirahã. His ability to read gives him access to a vast range of information about the world that is unavailable to them. But when Coates writes, he choses to subordinate that information to the emotional range of his personal experience. He uses that information to amplify and intensify his experience rather than as a means to extend his sense of possibility beyond that experience.
And what of hope, Ta-Nehisi, what of hope? We know what he says about that, don’t we? “I’m not the person you should go to for that. You should go to your pastor. Your pastor provides you hope.” And yet one of the points that McWhorter makes repeatedly in those discussions with Glenn Loury is the Coates’s writings are treated more like scripture than like statements and arguments about the real world (p. 5). One isn’t to question them, one accepts and believes.
While religion can be and has been a vehicle for hope – the Civil Rights Movement, after all, was propelled from the pulpit – it can also be a vehicle for resignation to and acceptance of one’s powerlessness – are we not all powerless in the face of death? That’s what Coates seems to provide, a way of all but reveling in powerlessness. It is in that way that, in Williams’s formulation, he gives power to whiteness. He concludes that op-ed with these paragraphs:
This summer, I spent an hour on the phone with Richard Spencer. It was an exchange that left me feeling physically sickened. Toward the end of the interview, he said one thing that I still think about often. He referred to the all-encompassing sense of white power so many liberals now also attribute to whiteness as a profound opportunity. “This is the photographic negative of a white supremacist,” he told me gleefully. “This is why I’m actually very confident, because maybe those leftists will be the easiest ones to flip.”
However far-fetched that may sound, what identitarians like Mr. Spencer have grasped, and what ostensibly anti-racist thinkers like Mr. Coates have lost sight of, is the fact that so long as we fetishize race, we ensure that we will never be rid of the hierarchies it imposes. We will all be doomed to stalk our separate paths.
References
1. URL: http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/36141
2. URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/opinion/ta-nehisi-coates-whiteness-power.html?smid=fb-share
3. URL: http://tinyurl.com/yaz2ame3
4. URL: https://www.vox.com/2017/10/9/16430390/ta-nehisi-coates-podcast-hope-book
5. For example, in Dan Everett. Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious. University of Chicago Press, 2016.