Coates of Arms
In my Whiter Shade of Frail post, I referenced a literary “trilogy of tribulation” - three books that now dominate our national monologue on race. I use the term “monologue” because a dialogue would require two or more opinions, something impermissible in today’s cultural zeitgeist. When it comes to identity, there is only one way to think.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me is one of the pillars of the trilogy, this catechism of America's original sin. HBO describes the work as a letter to Coates’ teenage son: recounting the author’s experiences growing up in Baltimore’s inner city and his growing fear of daily violence against the Black community. The narrative explores Coates’ bold notion that American society structurally supports white supremacy.
Let’s address the white elephant in the room: as a straight, CIS-normative, upper-middle class, Caucasian male, I represent the last word in unearned privilege. Under the principles of modern identity politics, I lack the standing to even have an opinion on Mr. Coates’ writings, let alone express it publicly. As White Fragility makes clear, I and my melanin-impaired peers are the problem of race, and certainly cannot be part of the solution. The best I can offer is obsequious silence, mixed with occasional gestures of self-abnegation and a Black Lives Matter sign on my lawn.
So, like any good federal employee, I will outsource the work to someone truly competent. In this case, I turn to Professor Jason Hill of the University of Illinois. Since the old Freudian phrase “biology is destiny” now governs who is permitted to say what in contemporary America, let’s review Professor Hill’s bona fides:
He is black…
…and gay
…and an immigrant.
As such, he surpasses even Mr. Coates himself on the authenticity scale, requiring engagement with his arguments instead of his pigmentation. In 2017, Professor Hill penned an open letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates, responding to Between the World and Me.
Hill’s letter describes his state of mind upon arriving from Jamaica with his determination to live the American dream, so thoroughly disparaged by Mr. Coates in BTWAM.
I was in the United States of America, the most magnificent land of opportunity, home of dreamers like me. I was a black man who had never met any philosophers or real writers, but I was determined to become a philosopher and write books on ethics, political philosophy, and American foreign policy…I was a gay man escaping the blight of Jamaican homophobia. And I knew that in America I could find peace and true love and be left alone to pursue my dream.
I would make but one demand on my new country: that its inhabitants place no obstructions in my path. I expected no special treatment because, as an American, I was already part of an exceptional process. My ideas, I had decided on the flight over, would one day be taught in colleges and universities.
Professor Hill recounts not only his own experiences in America, but those of his recently-immigrated peers from Trinidad, Vietnam and India. The determination and labor of this motley group, in some cases lacking even command of English, carried them all through to remarkable success.
Professor Hill then calls out Between the World and Me for its greatest failure: the assertion that black people in America can never succeed.
He writes to Mr. Coates:
In the 32 years I have lived in this great country, I have never once actively fought racism. I have simply used my own example as evidence of its utter stupidity and moved forward with absolute metaphysical confidence, knowing that the ability of other people to name or label me has no power over my self-esteem, my mind, my judgment, and—above all—my capacity to liberate myself through my own efforts.
On this matter, you have done your son—to whom you address your book—an injustice. You write: “The fact of history is that black people have not—probably no people ever have—liberated themselves strictly by their own efforts. In every great change in the lives of African Americans we see the hands of events that were beyond our individual control, events that were not unalloyed goods.”
I do not believe you intended to mislead your son, but in imparting this credo, you have potentially paralyzed him, unless he reappraises your philosophy and rejects it.
Here, Hill hits upon the greatest damage that modern politics does to black people: the elimination of agency, the idea that one can take command of at least some aspect of one’s own existence. The debilitating message of Mr. Coates is this: for black people, life is only what happens to you, what is done to you.
Professor Hill rejects such acquiescence. He says further to Mr. Coates:
But this is the United States of America—a country born with a terrible birth defect, slavery, but still a work in progress. It is a country that says to me; to Vanessa, a woman too black to feel at home in her own predominantly black country; to Thai; to Dinesh, whom no one would dare touch in his homeland: I am an open canvas. Write your script on me. Without you and your story and your narrative, the story of America is incomplete. This is America, where you can suffuse the country’s vast landscape with who you are and participate in its dialogue of national becoming. Yet you have told your son that by constitutional design his voice does not, cannot, and will not ever matter.
Between the World and Me imparts upon black youth a fatalism bordering on nihilism. Mr. Coates does not empower black people; instead, he perversely empowers white people by ascribing to us near god-like control over every aspect of African-American life. Euro-supremacy is so pervasive, so omnipotent, that a black body cannot hope to stand against it.
Distilled to its essence, Mr. Coates’ message could not be more devastating if it were crafted by the Klan: America is only for white people. You can’t succeed, so don’t even bother to try.
America’s literati swooned over Between the World and Me; citing both the polemic and the prose as amongst the greatest writing America has ever produced. In reading the reviews from the New York Times and from book clubs across the country, one senses a competition, a determination among white people to outwoke each other by showering Mr. Coates with Ceausescu-like praise. The reviewers appear apprehensive that failure to sufficiently garland his book with laurels leaves one vulnerable to the charge of racist.
But since White Fragility already labels me an irredeemable racist, I feel oddly liberated. If I am condemned to be an agent of white supremacy regardless of what I do, why have any compunction towards expressing my true opinion?
So here’s my take: Mr. Coates is clearly speaking from the heart, recounting a lived experience I can never understand. Yet his writing seems trying to be profound, with the repeated metaphors of “shattered black bodies” striving mightily to evoke an elegance of imagery. There’s a difference between a great actor like Meryl Streep, where we see “this is Meryl Streep acting”; versus a greater actor like Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose portrayals were truly seamless, effortlessly connecting the character, the artist and the audience.
As such, Mr. Coates falls short of such legends as Ralph Ellison, whose Invisible Man painted a masterpiece of the African-American experience that Between the World and Me doesn’t reach. Likewise, James Baldwin’s work easily matches Mr. Coates’ passion, but does so with a natural flow that surpasses the latter writer’s contrivances.
And in both cases, Ellison and Baldwin rejected the hopelessness conveyed by Mr. Coates. Make no mistake, these writers did not pull their punches in depicting the horror of American apartheid. But they also envisioned a transcendence, a surpassing of racism as championed by Professor Hill above. Per Mr. Baldwin, black American history represents “the perpetual achievement of the impossible .”
As a son of Baltimore, I wonder if Mr. Coates has ever seen The Wire, perhaps the finest show in TV history. The Wire presents the Baltimore black experience across the full spectrum of the human condition. Between the World and Me’s binary model of supremacist whites and victimized blacks is far outpaced by The Wire’s more sophisticated take on racism. The Wire rightly calls out the legacy of the past and the bigotry of the present, but also portrays a wider range of cultural, systemic and bureaucratic phenomena that are equally if not more relevant to contemporary challenges. In The Wire, individual agency matters.
Only the heartless would dismiss the despairing disparities between the black and white experiences in America. But like White Fragility’s Robin DiAngelo, Mr. Coates offers no path forward, just a doomed maze that leads right back to where we started. In my next post, I’ll look at the third leg of modern HR's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion triad: Professor Kendi’s How to be An Anti-Racist. Can he offer us a more hopeful vision?