Simply stated--and to examine the afflicted body for other pathologies--it is an easily demonstrable fact that American history--the other 11 months?--told without "Black" history is not just an empty vessel, it's a body whose soul has been devoured by some demonic spirit. Without "Black" history, American history is worse than a lie.
And lying to itself about history is something America's pretty good at, apparently. Here's a good example of how: a survey in which only 8% of students were able to identify what caused the South to secede. Take a careful look at the survey. It does not ask "what caused the Civil War." It asks about secession. Anybody with any real knowledge about Southern secession knows that the first states to leave the Union--the majority of the Confederacy--did so explicitly and forthrightly over the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln and the threat that supposedly posed to the South's "peculiar institution." It is there in black and white in the secession covenants written by the conventions that enthusiastically decided that it was time pursue their slaveocratic destiny by erasing their stars from Old Glory.
Speaking of which: these days one of the diversions touted by the carnival-barking Traitor-in-Chief (as he will be shown to be) is the kneeling of protesting "Black" football players during the National Anthem. "Those son-of-a-bitches!" he says, and his defenders say, "He says what he thinks!" Haha. Sorry. That doesn't count as "thinking." Nor does most of what he says. Except, ironically, when he's lying: lying is far and away the most thinking he does.
It's not just Trump, though: I know at least one Clinton supporter who refers to the kneelers as "thugs." So, let me ask you: where was "Black" America when the anthem declared the USA to be "the land of the free"? Hint: it was written in 1814 by a slave-owning lawyer who also represented "Blacks" seeking freedom to such an extent that he became known as "the nigger lawyer" AND who promoted African colonization as a way to offshore "Blacks" who had been freed AND who feared racial "amalgamation" (what a future generation would less delicately call "race-mixing") to such an extent that he did everything he could to prevent abolitionist ideas from seeing the light of day.
But chances are pretty good none of this is known any better than the cause of secession.
"So what? We don't have slaves anymore. Everybody's free." Let bygones be bygones, right? Wrong. There ain't no bygone in it.
To wit:
I recently found out, via a virtual high school alumni service, that a former schoolmate of mine just died, someone I lost track of after high school. I have only one real enduring memory of him: that he and I, along with a handful of others, wore black armbands to school (Northside Jr. High in Chattanooga) on the day of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, funeral 50 years ago this year. The school had not been integrated that long and had only a few African-American students. Most of them didn't come to school, but observed the day apart from the "White" multitude. One who did come (brave soul), also wearing an armband, complimented me on being integrated. Solidarity forever, however, didn't save me from being threatened by a "White" thug: "Don't show your nigger-loving face outside at lunch." So, at lunch I kept to the thug-free indoors and made it through the day with armband and face intact. My recently-departed schoolmate wasn't as lucky: as soon as he got to school his armband was torn off.
It seems amazing to me that it's been 50 years since then. As in everything to do with lived experience, it feels like yesterday ... a yesterday at the bottom of a pile of other, younger yesterdays, none of them seeming very real except for the fact that they happened. They engrave themselves in ways you do not know, and with depths you cannot predict. Wearing a black armband that day was the total, innocent naivete of someone who thought, by way of parental influence and the evening news, that Dr. King represented the best way to civilly right some civil wrongs, but in bringing me face-to-face with hate that was incomprehensible to me, it opened my eyes and gave me the merest iota of a speck of a sliver of a glimpse of what might these days be called the "unprivilege" borne by certain fellow Americans day in and day out since before there was even a country to call "the land of the free."
Merest iota of a speck of a sliver of a glimpse. Pretty small, huh? Bring it back to scale by multiplying it by 300 years of slavery, the withdrawal and collapse of Reconstruction, the KKK, sharecropper serfdom, Jim Crow, lynching, "separate but equal," redlining, whites-only New Deal Progressivism, Confederate statues in the 20th century, sundown towns, more KKK, racist law enforcement, and the carceral state. Whatcha got? I don't begin to know, but I'm guessing it's something like the water in Flint, MI: poison.
It's a ton of negatives. It's like a bunch of mice living in a cage with a cat right outside: that ton of constant cat stress is heavy enough to set mouse against mouse. It's science: it would even happen to "White" mice, all ye bell curve holdouts praying for race. If it was a landfill, the only people that would be allowed to live nearby would be "Black," and they'd be forced to live there--quite legally, as is the way of things--until such time as somebody like King would come along and get killed for trying to get it changed.
For me, though, all these years later, remembering back to my brush with "White" hatred and thinking how far I was from being able to gauge the strength of that cat-stress or the depth of that landfill, as luck would have it Cornel West and Ta-Nehisi Coates got in a fight.
Harvard professor and progressive pundit West started it by calling Coates--in an opinion piece in The Guardian--"the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle" who "fetishizes white supremacy" by making it "almighty, magical, and unremovable." While giving Coates some credit as a "talented wordsmith" for his work in The Atlantic that "rightly highlights the vicious legacy of white supremacy," West tore into what he perceived to be Coates's pessimistic fatalism and his failure to connect racism with the structures of "domination" like imperialism, capitalism, sexism, and homophobia.
What really seemed to get West's goat was Coates's application to Barack Obama of "twin honorifics" once applied to Malcolm X (after his assassination): "our living Black manhood" and "our own Black shining prince." West fumes at this "gross misunderstanding" that "speaks volumes" about Coates's neoliberalism.
What did Coates do in response? He ... disappeared: after tweeting "i didn't get in it for this," he deactivated his Twitter account, which had over a million followers (which for some reason makes me feel better about not going outside for lunch with my black armband).
"White" people on Twitter warned other "White" people not to get involved or have opinions because it was a "Black" thing. Wait a minute, I thought, this is about important ideas. In a different era those same people would've counseled ignoring W.E.B. DuBois taking on Booker T. Washington. As long as the "problem of the color line" beats at the heart of America, if you're not making some effort to take the pulse, you're still living in the la-la land of the free you learned about in high school history. I want to live in the real one.
As one who had followed Coates in The Atlantic ever since being blown away by his article on reparations (which I would require every American voter to read if I were Benevolent Dictator for Life), I was taken aback by West's assault. From my reading of Coates, West's "neoliberal" tag seemed like a cheap shot with a trendy progressive insult. But at the same time I was delighted by it, because it held out the promise of a savory, dialectical exercise: I couldn't be fair to West--familiar to me up to this point only as a media pundit--without reading his standard Race Matters (now in a 25th anniversary edition), and since West's column was in effect a damning review of Coates's We Were Eight Years in Power, I really needed to close the circle by reading it as well.
Having completed the exercise, I now have to give West a great deal of credit not so much for his critique of Coates (more on that in a bit) as for a political posture that stands on unequivocal moral ground beside and in support of all those whose lives, liberties, and pursuits of happiness are foreshortened, robbed, and obstructed by powerful forces that need to be resisted in the public arena--and defeated there as well. Race still matters--and it deserves creative problem-solving in not only the political but the cultural realm as well (West is particularly incandescent in illuminating the cultural dimension)--but so do poverty, sexism, homophobia, and imperialism. It seems to me that MLK himself would have wound up in this ideological neighborhood, had he lived, a supposition that at least to me is greatly to West's credit.
But there remains the matter of how to resolve the West-Coates dissonance; or can it be resolved?
<aside>One of the fun things about reading West is his jive style of high seriousness. I mean, he bops the rhetoric. He invokes jazz as a cultural force, but it's also obvious that he takes it to heart as a personal, stylistic one as well. As for Coates, he talks about having hiphop songs as models for his writing, but--maybe ironically--to me his prose goes down as smooth as a Mozart symphony.</aside>
A good approach to the problem is to compare West's chapter "Malcolm X and Black Rage" (the ultimate chapter in Race Matters) with Coates's chapter "The Legacy of Malcolm X--Why His Vision Lives On in Barack Obama," perhaps the chapter in We Were Eight Years in Power that more than any other sparked West's vitriol in The Guardian.
I personally benefited from reading both takes on Malcolm X. One problem with focusing on history in my reading, as I do, is that I seem to require a 50-year remove before I trust that the archival realm has been built up enough to make writers trustworthy enough to read. Well, the 50 years is up on Malcolm X, so that I can finally try to understand, as a "White" person, what he means to "Black" people.
Whatever their differences, Coates and West agree on the essential meaning of Malcolm X: he held up "Blackness" as a transcendent device for self-definition over and against the dominant, "White" power structure, be it political or cultural. The "rage" of West's chapter title was already there in the African-American psyche and was Xplicit (as it were) in the Malcolmian doctrine, but its real value was that it channeled that rage into a constructive, Black-positive approach to personal renaissance free of oppressive, "White" influences.
From here on West and Coates diverge. West, ever the professor, enumerates point by point the various ways that Malcolm X's "doctrine" (my word) possessed 1. an inchoate, apolitical nature that made it insufficient as a political platform to direct a cohesive, collective struggle and 2. a deep suspicion of American cultural hybridity--cultural race-mixing?--which West, like MLK, celebrates as "the past and present bonds between blacks and whites."
Coates, by contrast, chronicles (riffs?) a personal curve on the theme of Malcolm X: how the fresh, proud Afrocentric culture of Coates's youth was put aside (literally, as in a poster of Malcolm X that went into storage) as he navigated the project of establishing himself in the hybrid American culture. "Raised in de facto segregation," Coates writes, "I was carried by my work into the mostly white world, and then to the blasphemies of having white friends and howling white music." What brings him back to himself is "Election Night 2008," which, Coates asserts--contrary to those who proclaim that it cast Malcolm X's "naysaying" permanently into the trash heap--was effected not only by "black people's long fight to be publicly American," but also by "those same Americans' long fight to be publicly black." The success of that "latter fight" can be laid at the doorstep mostly of one person, concludes Coates: "Barack Obama is the president. But it's Malcolm X's America."
As to the conflation of Obama with Malcolm X that so outrages West, it is a mere extension of the central point about X that West and Coates agree on: his self-invention as an explicitly "Black" person. In Obama's case it was an important key to his ability to enter fully into African-American culture and project an identity and style that enabled him to communicate so broadly and successfully to that culturally hybrid nation that West himself describes.
West's prickliness at Coates's rendition of Xness to the Obamasphere is an extension of West's politics that brings all the big progressive issues together under one big tent. Because of these linkages, according to West, if Obama is wrong (or too moderate) on the economy or on imperialism, he necessarily vitiates his credibility when it comes to race. But to paint Coates himself as an Obama-style neoliberal is to misread Coates.
Coates is certainly no Obama henchman. If one thing is clear from his book, it is that Coates disagrees with Obama on a great number of things, even if he provides an objective account of Obama's positions. To understand this, West need only review the last sentences of Coates's book:
[T]here can be no conflict between the naming of whiteness and the naming of the degradation brought about by an unretrained capitalism, by the privileging of greed and the legal encouragement of hoarding and more elegant plunder. I have never seen a contradiction between calling for reparations and calling for a living wage, on calling for legitimate law enforcement and single-payer health care. They are related--but cannot stand in for one another. I see the fight against sexism, racism, poverty, and even war finding their union not in synonymity but in their ultimate goal--a world more humane.If that is not a progressive platform, I do not know what is. Yet that platform--which is West's bread and butter--is neither Coates's forte nor his focus. Coates views the world through the prism that is downside of "White" racial oppression, which is a force unto itself. It is not a derivation or an unintended consequence or an externality. He is its balladeer, as it were. Coates is as lyrical in his writing as he is obsessive with his focus as he is thorough with his documentation as he is unflinching (or generous) with his personal history. It all comes together in his writing.
Nothing is sadder to this reader than this sentence in Coates's book: "For most African-Americans, white people exist either as a direct or indirect force for bad in their lives." I, as "White," am of course in no position to say. I do, however, take Coates to be a reliable narrator of this particular ballad. How reliable? Documentation is one of his strong points, and it's not like he's without anecdotal support (in an interview published just the other day, for example, Quincy Jones momentarily left the juicy gossip to say that racism is the worst it's ever been).
Beyond its value as a chronicle of "Black" experience vis-a-vis "Whiteness," it has value in providing the basis for an empathetic appreciation of the social psychology of prejudice on a broader scale: what adjustments do women have to make to face sexism every day? The same question applies to hispanics and Muslims with regard to xenophobia, atheists with regard to rampant fideism (especially in the South), indigenous peoples, LGBT people, disabled people. Oh, and I almost left out poor people.
But this is just me channeling my under-employed black hispanic atheist lesbian with hearing loss alter-ego, so no big deal, right? Yeah, I can hear the Nietzscheans grumble: spare us the victims; give us Superman. Fuck that. I'll take Jesus Christ any old day: love thy neighbor and the golden rule. This, by the way, is where West shines. He trumpets the need for a moral basis for social uplift, not just in the "Black" community, but among all humanity. And then he goes out and walks the talk, while Coates sinks into despondency at the Trump election. I wouldn't doubt it if he were considering a move to France.
So this is how I resolve the West-Coates dissonance: to see both as, in West's own words, an "interplay of individuality" that, "as with a soloist in a jazz quartet ... is promoted in order to sustain and increase the creative [emphasis West's] tension with the group--a tension that yields a higher level of performance to achieve the aim of the collective project." The arc of justice is one slow rainbow, but both are involved in the effort to advance it. West might be more laying down the beat, so to speak, but Coates is soloing away to excellent effect, reaching people with a powerful message that otherwise might not be heard. Put another way, even if West is out playing in the square and Coates is blasting from the insulation of a isolated sound booth, there is a return from both venues.
If we have to have "Black" History Month, for god's sake don't whitewash it by leaving out the whole messy context and pretending that we're through with all that. In this regard I very much hope Ta-Nehisi Coates returns to print to provide challenging analysis that hoists William Faulkner with his own petard: the past isn't dead; it isn't even past.
Meanwhile my ninth grade dude self will continue to abide inside the lunch room. After all, as Ishmael Reed said, "writin' is fightin'."
[My usages "Black" and "White" are meant to punctuate the reality that these concepts, however universally used in the US, are conceptual grotesqueries: they are cultural categories the gross imprecision of which serve only to divide. Furthermore, their direct and recent lineage to discredited notions of biological human categorization lends itself to the survival of those very notions in popular, nonscientific thought. But that is a subject for tomorrow's lunch room.]
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