Tag: Ta-Nehisi Coates

Is It Wrong to Read John McWhorter?

Published on by D. G. Hart5 Comments

I understand that German-Welsh-Americans may be selective in the African-American authors they read and quote, but since some of those who ridicule white evangelicals also recommend black conservative intellectuals like Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell, maybe an opening exists for appealing to John McWhorter for a brief moment. Here, the instruction has less to do with how African Americans make their case for racial injustice than with the way that white Americans receive arguments about racism’s persistence and depth:

Coates is a symptom of a larger mood. Over the past several years, for instance, whites across the country have been taught that it isn’t enough to understand that racism exists. Rather, the good white person views themselves as the bearer of an unearned “privilege” because of their color. Not long ago, I attended an event where a black man spoke of him and his black colleagues dressing in suits at work even on Casual Fridays, out of a sense that whites would look down on black men dressed down. The mostly white audience laughed and applauded warmly—at a story accusing people precisely like them of being racists.

This brand of self-flagellation has become the new form of enlightenment on race issues. This brand of self-flagellation has become the new form of enlightenment on race issues. It qualifies as a kind of worship; the parallels with Christianity are almost uncannily rich. White privilege is the secular white person’s Original Sin, present at birth and ultimately ineradicable. One does one’s penance by endlessly attesting to this privilege in hope of some kind of forgiveness. After the black man I mentioned above spoke, the next speaker was a middle-aged white man who spoke of having a coach come to his office each week to talk to him about his white privilege. The audience, of course, applauded warmly at this man’s description of having what an anthropologist observer would recognize not as a “coach” but as a pastor.

Parallels between anti-racism and religion are particularly telling since McWhorter has repeatedly argued that opposition to bigotry has turned into a form of orthodoxy and people who question are heterodox at best, but likely heretics:

I have seen whites owning up to their white privilege using the hand-in-the-air-palm-out gesture typically associated with testifying in church. After the event I have been describing, all concerned deemed it “wonderful” even though nothing new had been learned. The purpose of the event was to remind the parishioners of the prevalence of the racist sin and its reflection in themselves, and to offer a kind of forgiveness, this latter being essentially the function of the black people on the panel and in the audience. Amen.

Some might see all of this as a healthy sign of moral advance. And I suppose if I had to choose between this performativity and the utter contempt most whites had for any discussion of discrimination 50 years ago and before, I’d choose our current moment. But goodness, it piles high and deep, this—well, I’ll call it fakeness. The degree of fantasy and exaggeration that smart people currently let pass in the name of higher-order thought on race parallels, again, Biblical tales.

Coates, for example, argues in one article after another that America’s progress on race has been minimal, despite pretty window dressing here and there, and that there is no reason to hope things will get any better. Yet one can be quite aware of the prevalence and nature of racism in America while also understanding that the recreational pessimism of views like Coates’s is melodramatic and even unempirical. To insist that Starbucks or even Dylan Roof define America’s progress on race is as flimsy as treating certain young black men’s misbehavior as embodying the black essence. Perfection is ever a dream; we are, as always, in transition. Everybody knows that.

The very fact that the modern equivalent of the graduate student I knew reveres Coates’s writing is a sterling indication that America has grown up quite a bit on race even in the past quarter of a century. The fact that this brand of enlightenment has not made it to every barstool and kitchen table in the country hardly disqualifies it as influential. Anyone who really thinks that on race America has merely rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic isn’t old enough to realize that most smart white people as late as 1978 would have found The Wire about as interesting as Chinese opera.

In which case, social media banter about race these days (which also shows up in books that describe how much white churches have perpetuated racial hierarchy) has more to do with the purity of each person and less to do with those people who still experience some of the real consequences of racism in the United States:

This new cult of atonement is less about black people than white people. Fifty years ago, a white person learning about the race problem came away asking “How can I help?” Today the same person too often comes away asking, “How can I show that I’m a moral person?” That isn’t what the Civil Rights revolution was about; it is the product of decades of mission creep aided by the emergence of social media.

What gets lost is that all of this awareness was supposed to be about helping black people, especially poor ones. We are too often distracted from this by a race awareness that has come to be largely about white people seeking grace. For example, one reads often of studies showing that black boys are punished and suspended in school more often than other kids. But then one reads equally often that poverty makes boys, in particular, more likely to be aggressive and have a harder time concentrating. We are taught to assume that the punishments and suspensions are due to racism, and to somehow ignore the data showing that the conditions too many black boys grow up in unfortunately makes them indeed more likely to act up in school. Might the poverty be the key problem to address? But, try this purely logical reasoning in polite company only at the risk of being treated as a moral reprobate. Our conversation is to be solely about racism, not solutions—other than looking to a vaguely defined future time when racism somehow disappears, America having “come to terms” with it: i.e. Judgment Day. As to what exactly this coming to terms would consist of, I suppose only our Pastor of White Privilege knows.

If You Add to Scripture, How Do you Stop?

Published on by D. G. Hart4 Comments

Here’s what Jesus said:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ Thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers. You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell? Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Truly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.

Here’s how you update Jesus for contemporary America:

Woe to you, racists and racial moderates, hypocrites! For you hold events to commemorate Civil Rights activists and read books about the martyrs of anti-racism, saying “if we had lived during the Civil Rights movement we would not have taken part with the racists in shedding the blood of the protesters.” Thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons and daughters of those who murdered Martin Luther King, Jr. Fill up then the measure of your slave holding and segregationist fathers and mothers. You racists and racial moderates, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell? Therefore I send you social justice warriors and community organizers and activists, some of whom you will put in jail and some you will call Marxist in your churches and troll on social media so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth from the blood of the righteous Medgar Evers to the blood of Emmett Till who you lynched in Mississippi. Truly, I say to you, all these things will come upon Millennial and GenZ generations.

What if non-Christians wanted (trigger warning) to appropriate Jesus?

Woe to you, black and white Christians and Americans, hypocrites! For you don’t even hold events to commemorate Black Muslims or Black Panthers, and you refuse to read books about black nationalism, saying “if we had lived during the 1960s Rights movement we would not have taken part with the criminal justice system that sent Huey Newton and Angela Davis to jail.” Thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons and daughters of those who murdered Malcolm X. Fill up then the measure of your nationalist and Christian fathers and mothers. You black and white Christians and Americans, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell? Therefore I send you Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michael Eric Dyson, some of whom you will mock and some you will call anti-American in your churches and troll on social media so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth from the righteous Fred Hampton to John Africa whom you burned in Philadelphia. I say to you, all these things will come upon Baby Boomer and Millennial generations.

Or is the idea that only Christians get to add to Scripture?

What if Celebrity Pastors Were as Honest as Ta-Nehisi Coates?

Published on by D. G. Hart5 Comments

Coates’ take down of Kanye West is receiving push back, but it has this very perceptive section on notoriety:

In the summer of 2015, I published a book, and in so doing, became the unlikely recipient of a mere fraction of the kind of celebrity Kanye West enjoys. It was small literary fame, not the kind of fame that accompanies Grammys and Oscars, and there may not have been a worse candidate for it. I was the second-youngest of seven children. My life had been inconsequential, if slightly amusing. I had never stood out for any particular reason, save my height, and even that was wasted on a lack of skills on the basketball court. But I learned to use this ordinariness to my advantage. I was a journalist. There was something soft and unthreatening about me that made people want to talk. And I had a capacity for disappearing into events and thus, in that way, reporting out a scene. At home, I built myself around ordinary things—family, friends, and community. I might never be a celebrated writer. But I was a good father, a good partner, a decent friend.

Fame expletive with all of that. I would show up to do my job, to report, and become, if not the scene, then part of it. I would take my wife out to lunch to discuss some weighty matter in our lives, and come home, only to learn that the couple next to us had covertly taken a photo and tweeted it out. The family dream of buying a home, finally achieved, became newsworthy. My kid’s Instagram account was scoured for relevant quotes. And when I moved to excise myself, to restrict access, this would only extend the story.

It was the oddest thing. I felt myself to be the same as I had always been, but everything around me was warping. My sense of myself as part of a community of black writers disintegrated before me. Writers, whom I loved, who had been mentors, claimed tokenism and betrayal. Writers, whom I knew personally, whom I felt to be comrades in struggle, took to Facebook and Twitter to announce my latest heresy. No one enjoys criticism, but by then I had taken my share. What was new was criticism that I felt to originate as much in what I had written, as how it had been received. One of my best friends, who worked in radio, came up with the idea of a funny self-deprecating segment about me and my weird snobbery. But when it aired, the piece was mostly concerned with this newfound fame, how it had changed me, and how it all left him feeling a type of way. I was unprepared. The work of writing had always been, for me, the work of enduring failure. It had never occurred to me that one would, too, have to work to endure success.

The incentives toward a grand ego were ever present. I was asked to speak on matters which my work evidenced no knowledge of. I was invited to do a speaking tour via private jet. I was asked to direct a music video. I began to understand how and why famous writers falter, because writing is hard and there are “writers” who only do that work because they have to. But it was now clear there was another way—a life of lectures, visiting-writer gigs, galas, prize committees. There were dark expectations. I remember going with a friend to visit an older black writer, an elder statesman. He sized me up and the first thing he said to me was, “You must be getting all the vulgarity now.”

What I felt, in all of this, was a profound sense of social isolation. I would walk into a room, knowing that some facsimile of me, some mix of interviews, book clubs, and private assessment, had preceded me. The loss of friends, of comrades, of community, was gut-wrenching. I grew skeptical and distant. I avoided group dinners. In conversation, I sized everyone up, convinced that they were trying to extract something from me. And this is where the paranoia began, because the vast majority of people were kind and normal. But I never knew when that would fail to be the case.

This has to be the experience of pastors who have attained fame and regularly speak on conference circuits. This is also a set of psychological bags that cannot period be good period for pastoral ministry period. How do you separate awareness of how you appear, sound, and come across when you preach merely to a congregation? But how much more is such a sensitivity when you are someone so recognizable?

Celebrity is a burden that some have to carry. It is also an attribute that any serious pastor who wants to get out of the way and let the Word and Spirit do their gracious work should avoid like Donald Trump.

Expiration Date Passed

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

Apparently Ta-Nehisi Coates’ magic has worn off. Several writers have recently taken issue with his ideas about race relations and whiteness (and white superiority). Thomas Chatterton Williams, who was one of the first black authors to take Coates on, returns for another at bat under with the approval of editors at the New York Times (not the New York Post or the Washington Times). This must be serious.

At the Atlantic though, where Coates writes regularly and achieved some of his fame, his editors still think Coates is brilliant and that they bask in the brilliance by publishing and endorsing his ideas. For instance, on a recent podcast about Charlottesville and the Confederate Monuments, Jeffrey Goldberg described President Trump’s reaction, in which he wondered if taking down Robert E. Lee leads to Jefferson and Washington, in cataclysmic terms:

It is an amazing moment when the president of the United States can’t delineate the difference between the Civil War and the Revolutionary War. I think this is a breakpoint in modern American history.

Hasn’t Goldberg read Coates? Someone well before Trump showed a lack of nuance in describing white supremacy in U.S. history:

For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to ta social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization. “The two great division of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is — the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.

You and I, my son, are that “below.” That was true in 1776. It is true today. (Coates, Between the World and Me, 104-105).

So what do the editors at the Atlantic think of a staff writer who cannot tell the difference between the Civil War and Revolutionary War?

How History Makes the World a Better Place

Published on by D. G. Hart1 Comment

Sometimes even boomers know the score. Take Camille Paglia (via Rod Dreher):

Paglia believes there is a causal connection between young Americans’ ignorance of history and their dim view of present conditions. At a conference in Oxford, Paglia stated again, in response to a student who criticized her and others for telling youths not to be so sensitive and snowflaky, “There is much too much focus on the present.”

Or try Rod Dreher:

Imagine that the US was involved in a major overseas war in which over 11,000 American soldiers died in one year alone (1967). For a point of comparison, fewer than 7,000 US troops have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 14 years of combat there.

Imagine that 17,000 US soldiers would die in 1968, and 12,000 in 1969 fighting that war

Imagine that you might be drafted to go fight there.

Imagine what it would be like if you were convinced the war was profoundly immoral, and you had to choose between deserting the country and bearing arms in that war.

Imagine that many college campuses had become hotbeds not of snowflakey sit-ins, but of serious violence.

Imagine that domestic bombings by left-wing radicals had become a routine part of American life (e.g., five per day in an 18-month period in the early 1970s).

Imagine that two of the nation’s most prominent political leaders (MLK and RFK) Bobby were gunned down three months apart.

Imagine that your government and military were lying to Congress and to the American people about the war, and had been for years (as was revealed with the 1972 publication of the Pentagon Papers).

Imagine that major American cities were burning in race riots.

Imagine that cops in a major American city staged what was later called “a police riot” outside a political party’s national convention, and beat the hell out of protesters.

Could it be that Rod Dreher had it rougher than Ta-Nehisi Coates?

The mind reels.

Is Piper Reading Coates?

Published on by D. G. Hart7 Comments

John Piper tells us never to give up in the pursuit of improved race relations:

No lesson in the pursuit of racial and ethnic diversity and harmony has been more forceful than the lesson that it is easy to get so wounded and so tired that you decide to quit. This is true of every race and every ethnicity in whatever struggle they face. The most hopeless temptation is to give up—to say that there are other important things to work on (which is true), and I will let someone else worry about racial issues.

The main reason for the temptation to quit pursuing is that whatever strategy you try, you will be criticized by somebody. You didn’t say the right thing, or you didn’t say it in the right way, or you should have said it a long time ago, or you shouldn’t say anything but get off your backside and do something, or, or, or. Just when you think you have made your best effort to do something healing, someone will point out the flaw in it. And when you try to talk about doing better, there are few things more maddening than to be told, “You just don’t get it.” Oh, how our back gets up, and we feel the power of self-pity rising in our hearts and want to say, “Okay, I’ve tried. I’ve done my best. See you later.” And there ends our foray into racial harmony.

My plea is: never quit. Change. Step back. Get another strategy. Start over. But never quit.

While Piper thinks there’s hope, Ta-Nehisi Coates doesn’t (as summarized by Thomas Chatterton Williams):

It’s not just black kids in tough neighbourhoods who are hapless automatons. In Coates’s view, no one has agency. The young black shooter doesn’t have to think too hard about what he might do because ‘the galaxy was playing with loaded dice.’ What’s alarming, though no doubt comforting to his white readership, is that in this analysis whites aren’t individual actors either. When an irritable white woman leaving an Upper West Side cinema pushes the young, ‘dawdling’ Samori and impatiently screams, ‘Come on!’ Coates, who is a tall, imposingly built man, erupts:

There was the reaction of any parent when a stranger lays a hand on the body of his or her child. And there was my own insecurity in my ability to protect your black body … I was only aware that someone had invoked their right over the body of my son. I turned and spoke to this woman, and my words were hot with all of the moment and all of my history. She shrunk back, shocked. A white man standing nearby spoke up in her defence. I experienced this as his attempt to rescue the damsel from the beast. He had made no such attempt on behalf of my son. And he was now supported by other white people in the assembling crowd. The man came closer. He grew louder. I pushed him away. He said: ‘I could have you arrested!’ I did not care. I told him this, and the desire to do much more was hot in my throat.

Coates sees this woman not as a morally fallible person with her own neuroses, but as a force of nature, she is ‘the comet’ in his scheme. It doesn’t occur to him that she may not be an avatar of white supremacy but just a nasty person who would have been as likely to push a blonde child or a Chinese one. Coates doesn’t realise that his disproportionate reaction – ‘my words were hot with all of the moment and all of my history’ – is bound to be seen as objectionable to those ‘standing nearby’. And it doesn’t strike him that as long as black people have to be handled with infantilising care – for fear of dredging up barely submerged ancestral pain – we’ll never be equal or free.

Whom do you believe? The white pastor or the black author? The earnest New Calvinist or the recipient of the MacArthur genius award? (Odd how Coates sounds far more deterministic than the Calvinist pastor? But just because it’s depressing doesn’t mean it’s false.)

Would Jesus Set Mumia Free?

Published on by D. G. Hart33 Comments

Since the missus and I have no children, no parents, relatives are 700 miles away, and friends are out of town with families, we have few Christmas traditions other than to watch a lot of movies. Last night gave us the chance to see Let the Fire Burn, a documentary about Move, the Afrocentric organization that used Africa as the surname for members and tried to go back to nature — get this — in West Philadelphia. They even dug up the sidewalk in front of their row house. You can imagine how the neighbors — mostly black — thought about that. John Africa was the founder of the group and he became the inspiration for Mumia abu Jamal, the most famous person ever convicted and imprisoned for killing a cop. The movie’s title refers to the decision of the Wilson Goode administration to drop an “incendiary device” on Move’s home during the final showdown with police, a decision that led to a fire that destroyed almost two entire city blocks of row homes. If Goode had been a white mayor, what might have happened?

On one level, this depiction of black separatism almost forty years before Ta-Nehisi Coates’ writings about institutional racism makes you appreciate how deep seated the despair is that haunts the African-American experience. Combine that with the way kids in Coates’ W. Baltimore neighborhood chose to make a living — by selling drugs — and you also begin to think that almost nothing can overcome the barriers that race relations have erected in U.S. history. Transformationalism? Great Society? War on Drugs? Morning in America? As if.

But in some ways the problems are even larger than the troubling history of white dominance in North America. Big institutions are failing and Hollywood is warming up to the theme. Spotlight exposed the failures of the episcopate in Boston. The Big Short — very, very good, by the way — shows the inadequacies of federal bank regulators. Let the Fire Burn and The Wire document the severe handicaps of urban governments.

Put no hope institutions. Good thing Jesus came, died, went away, and will come again.

(At the risk of sounding pietistic, tonight’s viewing will likely be either Family Man or About a Boy, two underrated Christmas movies.)