Sundown nation

I came across James Loewen's Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (Touchstone, 2005) in the gift shop of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. At the checkout counter the clerk--in that winning way some clerks have--and who was herself African-American--examined the cover and indicated by her look that, you know, this looked like a subject worth reading about.

I had just spent a whole day at the museum, where I was overwhelmed by the national shame of racism but also made thankful for the enormous and long-suffering contributions of African-Americans not just to the country but the world.

In the moment of the clerk's assessment, I thought about Erwin, TN, the only for-sure sundown town I knew of. Most people only know it as the town that hung the elephant. But I know it as the town that--immediately after lynching and burning a black man, Tom Devert, for accosting a white girl--ran out its African-American population (some 200 people) and told them never to return. All a matter of public record with its own Master's thesis at East Tennessee State University and a blognovel with music--Banshee 3:33 (start at Tuesday, January 02)--somewhere over the domain name on the Wayback Machine. This year will be the centenary of the event. I wonder if the town will observe it.

Now, though, having read Sundown Towns and more or less absorbed its worthwhileness, I now understand not only that the pure Erwin phenomenon--the lynching followed by a racial pogrom followed by an abolition, either nocturnal or absolute--was a practice widespread in the United States especially between 1890 and 1968 that profoundly scarred the social imagination of the country.

A truly and depressingly fascinating aspect of the phenomenon is that it is not found in the traditional South--cotton country, as it were. Its deepest imprint is found in exactly those places where, at the time of the Civil War, slaves had not been in any great quantity: the upland South (like Erwin, in Appalachia; Cumberland Plateau; the Ozarks), the Mid-Atlantic, the Northeast, but especially the Midwest, California, and Oregon.

Perhaps the most tragically ironic example is Springfield, Illinois--Abraham Lincoln's town and the capital of the Union State of Illinois--which tried to "go sundown" in roughly the Erwin manner in 1908, when a white woman claimed to have been raped by a black man, which set off an attempted lynching and two days of rioting, along with the attempted expulsion of 3,000 black residents. The city's business district was destroyed, homes were burned, and two innocent black men were lynched. It was only the "belated" appearance of the state militia in what was after all the state capital that spared the African-American residents of an Erwin-style result. The femme fatale later admitted to fabricating the rape story in order to cover up an affair. There were, of course, no consequences for the reign of terror.

One of the strengths of the book is the use of census data to show towns and counties, across the areas mentioned above, with African-American populations beginning and growing after the Civil War, and then dramatically diminishing and in some cases disappearing from one census to the other.

The exodus was not always accompanied by a riot, as in the Erwin example. In fact, the larger story told in the book is the story of the more subtle means by which whites and African-Americans have been residentially kept apart--in cities, suburbs, and towns nationwide--by real estate and banking practices as well as by civic policy, all the way from the uncodified sundown ordinance to the private suburb with race-based residential covenants required by the Federal Housing Authority.

This is a story that continues up to the present, since--as has always been way, ever since Reconstruction--the correcting law or court decision was not always followed up with enough enforcement to make a difference.

And it goes further, into the national psyche: the carryover effect by which a general and enforced pattern of by-hook-or-by-crook racial residential segregation set in place 1. the template for how Americans understand people should live and 2. the naive idea that the template-casting happened benignly, or maybe willy-nilly, as a consequence of millions of freely-made personal or family-level decisions about where to live.

That whites and blacks in America are segregated by residential community is at least in part because--for a considerable, residential-infrastructure-building portion of recent American history--blacks were not given a choice.

Why did this happen? In general, Loewen's analysis is that the Southern attitude toward blacks-as-a-problem-to-be-dealt-with was exported to the rest of the country after the non-South's war-fueled flush of racial equality idealism wore off. But outside the South, the "answer" to the "problem" was not the Southern-style total control that required rigid servility as the price for limited mingling (you better know your place). Instead, it was a different form of enforced, residential apartheid that later went on, ironically, to determine the approach to racial separation that prevailed in the burgeoning suburbs of the post-slavery ("New") South.

Among these suburbs was the one I grew up in: Signal Mountain, Tennessee, a bedroom community of Chattanooga. There were never any African-Americans in any of my public school classes, nor were there any, anywhere, on the mountain--except for the maids, who every weekday morning came up from downtown on city buses and went back the same way late every afternoon. There were no blacks up on the mountain after sundown, but as far as I know Signal Mtn. was never a sundown town in the classic sense. However, without knowing for sure but having read this book, I'm willing to make an educated bet that the house that my parents bought in 1956--as soon as my father landed his first permanent, full-time, modestly-salaried job--would not have been available to a similarly-situated black buyer, under any circumstances, for reasons having to do with a combination of sub rosa, substantial, and subversive municipal, real estate, bank, and even Federal chicanery.

And this happened all across the United States.

Going back a little further in time, the area where I went to junior high and high school gets a mention in Loewen's book as an example of the high tide of overt residential segregation. In 1915 North Chattanooga (across the Tennessee River from Chattanooga) was at the time its own suburban city. It passed an ordinance saying that no "colored person" could "occupy" an "abode" in a block where white people preponderated, and vice-versa, in true "separate but equal" style. The kicker was that at the time there were only two black families living in North Chattanooga. Even though the two families were expressly allowed to remain, as the Chattanooga Daily Times stated, the ordinance "will consequently make the town practically of an exclusively white population." The newspaper went on to report that the city's mayor "received many compliments on his segregation ordinance."

Such ordinances became unconstitutional in 1917 with Buchanan v. Warley. However, it went largely unenforced, and cities and towns continued passing or maintaining such ordinances despite their unconstitutionality, to the extent that Loewen uses the case to bolster the "scholarly tradition in American legal history that questions whether the U.S. Supreme Court can cause or has ever caused significant social change."

Thus we see in just the last few days a brand-new, fresh look at the 50-year-old Kerner Report that shows the leading indicators of racial inequality in the U.S.--poverty, school segregation, homeownership, and incarceration--getting worse, not better, in spite of legislation and court decisions that should have laid the groundwork for improvement.

There are glimmers of hope in Sundown Towns. Its last chapter, "The Remedy," recounts changes that have occurred, many of them the result of personal factors writ large, as when white families have biracial grandchildren either naturally or through adoption, or when a single African-American school child leads the way to a change in attitudes. In some suburbs, African-Americans followed once Asians or Mexicans--less problematic in general to white sensibilities--broke the mold without triggering white flight, with durable multi-ethnicity as a result.

Still, to read this book is to be awakened to an untold national scandal that is the very definition of "eyes wide shut." Before I read it, I knew of one sundown town. Now I know that the phenomenon in its pure form darkens the entire horizon of my Appalachian vicinage from Grundy Co., TN, to Grundy, VA, and in its attenuated form has likely determined the racial makeup of every suburban neighborhood I've ever lived in.

Furthermore, to read this book is to be overwhelmed by the same kinds of emotions produced by a visit to the African American Museum in Washington: what kind of monstrosity holds up universal ideals only to deny them to an entire set of people?

And as to the modus operandi of that denial, here is a makeshift poem constructed from the words of a 1905 newspaper account--quoted as one of a sickening and infuriating number of examples in Loewen's chapter "Enforcement"--of "the process by which residents maintained Syracuse, Ohio, as a sundown community."

American Heroes

So long as he keeps up a good gait, the crowd, which follows just at his
Heels
And which keeps growing until it sometimes numbers 75 to 100
Boys,
Is good-natured and contents itself with yelling, laughing, and hurling gibes at its
Victim.

But let him stop his "trot" for one moment, from any cause whatever, and the
Stones
Immediately take effect as their chief
Persuader.

Thus they follow him to the farthest reaches of the
Town,
Where they send him on while they return to the city with
Triumph
and tell their fathers all about the
Function:

how fast the victim ran
how scared he was
how he pleaded and promised he would go and never return if they would only leave him
Alone.

Then the fathers tell how they used to do the same
Thing,
and thus the
Heroes
of two wars, recounting their several campaigns, spend the rest of the evening by the old
Campfire.

ZeNRA

In some dialogue related to my preceding post, I think I may have encountered what I have to describe as the ZeNRA, whose adepts seem to favor disarming the police and replacing them with unregulated, random, concealed-carry civilians who never fire their weapons. At least that's what it seems like. Upon examination I was able to turn up some precepts:

ZeNRA is this: In the mayhem of a mass shooting, quietly sit down, embrace your gun and do nothing. Let the death and chaos become to you as peace and tranquility. Be one with your gun. If you die, you die. If you live, you live. It is all the same in the flower of time.

ZeNRA is this: Aim with your eyes closed.

ZeNRA is this: Death never comes from a gun, because the gun is a scapegoat, and bullets are its droppings that smell like eviscerated targets. Death is only the occasion for a pooper-scooper.

ZeNRA is this: Never pull the trigger; let the trigger pull you. In this way no guilt will ever touch you.

ZeNRA is this: Prying a gun from your cold, dead hands is a dead giveaway. Rejoice after it's too late.

ZeNRA is this: Life never gives you more ammo than you need, but more than 10 rounds starts to look like greed.

Flip the Second Amendment

Parkland, Florida: another atrocity, and of the worst kind: mass murder of school children by a single shooter with an assault rifle.

Students and teachers in agonized grief and anger demand a solution and threaten a national walkout until something is done. The "something" in most of their minds is some kind of limitation on the availability of semi-automatic firearms.

No way, says the other side: such a limitation would be unconstitutional and wouldn't work. A shocking on this side don't even counter with a solution, seemingly willing to accept these massacres as a new normal. The ones that do have an answer call for more armed security in school and for either more mental health screening or for shoring up the family, the breakdown of which is presumably producing the murderous pathology driving school shooters to act.

A few observations:

• There is no single or simple solution. "The answer" does not exist, except as a complex of solutions from the personal to the cultural, but also including legal ones. One hopeful example from the recent past is the decline in deaths caused by drunk drivers, due to this kind of complex interaction.
• That the process was led by the mothers grieving the senseless deaths of children should not be overlooked, particularly by such commentators as Fox's Tomi Lahren who seems to think that there's a sundown clause for this kind of grief, when instead it seems by its very longevity not only to inspire activism but to insist on it. The aggrieved students galvanized into action by the latest massacre understand this: now is the time to act, when emotions are raw, not after people have lapsed into ephemeral passivity. It's no different from the aftermath of 9/11, when grief and rage served to unite the United States at least for a few months.
• The process of determining those responses has a necessary political dimension. Despite the polarization over this issue, voters must hold their elected officials accountable for actual, implemented solutions. Leadership is needed, not passivity, not stonewalling, not kicking the can down the road, and especially not making dishonest excuses about "needing more facts" when at the same time you're preventing the CDC from gathering facts (Paul Ryan).
• Those favoring so-called "gun control" solutions overlook the constitutional dimension of the issue to the detriment of their own cause. They of all people should read the Heller decision, even the ones who are blind with anger, and even if it was written by conservative jurist Antonin Scalia. This is now the mainstream constitutional understanding: the 2nd Amendment guarantees a personal right to gun ownership, regardless of its connection to militia service. It does no good to say--as New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik did the other day--that this "notion is novel, radical, and wrong." Be that as it may, what this ignores is that -- unbelievable as it may seem 230 years or so after the amendment was approved -- the decision serves as a first-time review of 2nd Amendment adjudication and as such establishes a solid precedent. "Liberals" should think of Heller as the Roe v. Wade of the 2nd amendment: subject to being overturned, certainly, but given the partisan curve of judicial appointments, unlikely to be anytime soon. As such, it is a constitutional rock upon which ill-advised gun control measures will founder again and again and again, no matter the number of school children who are butchered by assault rifles.
• UNLESS ... "liberals" read the Heller decision and see that it leaves all manner of avenues for "gun control"--most explicitly licensing, but also other kinds of limitations and regulations, including restrictions to do with civil fitness ("felons and the mentally ill") as well as "laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms." These are the kinds of things that keep the NRA up at night.
• In keeping with its anarchic vision, the NRA will challenge every proposed limitation at every level as "infringement" disallowed by the 2nd Amendment. This is why, in my opinion, the quickest way to safe schools and -- hey, why not? -- a safe society is to develop answers, including legislation, that work explicitly as aspects of the well-regulated militia invoked by the amendment's initial clause. In other words, flip the 2nd Amendment. We can't have infringement, but we can and we must have regulation to maximize public safety.
• (The NRA wants nothing to do with a well-regulated militia. It ignores the very existence of the clause in the amendment. If you don't believe me, follow "Founders intent" constitutional advocate Edwin Vieira, Jr., on Twitter (or just go to his archive and browse). When I say Founders intent, I mean that Vieira wants to return to a metal-backed dollar and do away with the Federal Reserve. Vieira continuously calls out the NRA on his Twitter feed for pretending that the 2nd Amendment is about the individual right and nothing more.)
• I don't say this to advocate a cynical type of camouflage for gun control. I truly believe that the revival of a true citizen militia in which all adults serve as a matter of duty--NOT AS VOLUNTEERS--would have untold, positive ramifications not only on our day-to-day safety but on the health of our democracy. After Sandy Hook, my form of grieving was to write a novel with this kind of theme to try to educate readers out of their 2nd Amendment ignorance. As to its effect, is zero a number? But hey, grief being what it is, maybe it's time to write another one.
• My bonafides aside, let me give you a couple of examples:

School Guards: The favorite idea in the gun crowd is to protect school kids with armed guards. How many? At what cost? "Oh, we'll get volunteers." Really? For every school building in every state? Tennessee, for example, has 1,859 school buildings. In the non-urban area of my county alone, the number of school buildings (22) is almost half the number of county patrol officers (46), so let's say even if the proposal is for one guaranteed officer for each school--there are presently 4 SRO's for all those schools--you're talking about a personnel budget increase in this area of something like 40%. And that's for a tactical response that is entirely inadequate if the goal is to defend a school against sudden invasion by a well-armed, presumably competent criminal. I can't see that kind of increase happening in a low-tax state. In the existing system, an adequate solution funded by public money is just not going to happen.

Now consider an alternative: a universal-service militia, in which all adults between 18 and 65 are obligated to serve. Duty, not voluntarism. The administrative costs for the system would be borne by sales taxes (Tennessee loves sales tax!) on firearms and by arsenal stockage fees paid by those who own more than, say, three guns. Those adults not wishing to own weapons may opt out, but must still perform militia duty in a support role. In my Tennessee county, 60% of the total population falls within this age group; at current census levels, that is 93,600 people. The most efficient administrative model would call for county-wide organization, thus my county's two municipal school system buildings would be added in, bringing the number of school buildings to be covered to 40. Given a school year of 180 days, it would be possible to cover every school with a platoon of 13 people every day that they are open. Not all of these people need be armed: reconnaissance and communications are as significant as firepower in responding to a school invasion: where is the shooter? What are the escape routes? Training would obviously be a significant need, and for this reason the minimum extent of annual militia duty would be 5 days: 4 days of graduated training and one day of live school patrol. Payment for these days would be a statutory amount equal to a progressive assessment of statewide average before-tax income of the militia pool and would at the beginning of every year be paid to the state, pending service, at which point it would be reimbursed.

Concealed Carry: To me nothing reveals the bankruptcy of public security thinking among individual-rights gun owners more than concealed carry. All of these presumably good guys with guns cannot be discerned by the general public they are said to be protecting. Given a live shooting scene, who's the bad guy? Who are the good ones? Expect chaos. Look what happened in Parkland: the shooter was able to mingle with his targets and get away. It is simplicity itself to imagine a shooter killing people and then proclaiming himself to be a good guy and literally getting away with murder (should it be left to an unread novelist to imagine such things?). For this reason, open carry is much to be preferred to concealed carry, but even better than open carry would be militia open carry, in which open carry would be regulated (with statutory exemptions for hunting, etc.) to coincide with periods of training mentioned above. Militia carry would involve wearing some kind of identifier -- a hat, a badge, a uniform -- to inform the public and also to achieve whatever deterrent effect armed presence has. Come to think of it, militia identification could be used for those who for whatever stylistic reason prefer concealed carry. Identification is key--and could even introduce an unintended "more eyes on the street" effect in that unarmed militia members--those in training awaiting their day of duty--would also be walking around. Sparta, here we come!

This sort of thing constitutes regulation, not infringement. It was not only expected by the authors of the 2nd Amendment, it was called for. There are plenty of historical examples of these kinds of regulations from back in the days when there actually was a well-regulated militia in the US (1790 - 1830). Without this the 2nd Amendment is at present doubly a bad deal. Not only do we not have a well-regulated militia, we have a public sphere that is awash with assault weapons abetted by anarchic attitudes towards their purpose.

Flip it or repeal it. If you're not going to use it for its intended purpose, why have it? As Scalia said, the right to appropriate self-protection to individuals was already protected by common law before the 2nd Amendment. The Founders approved the Second Amendment in order to secure an arsenal, provided by the people themselves, for what was to be the most important component of an occasionally-Federalized military and--while you're at it--a support for state and local law enforcement. It would be on a Federal scale such a conception of militia duty as every state already had at the time the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were approved. Solid militia duty, structured at a Federal scale, would prevent reliance on a standing army, which not only would be expensive but would also be a temptation away from the patriotic duty of participating in your own common defense.

"To provide for the common defense." {Does my idiot-calling-naysayer know where that comes from? If I must be an idiot, please let me be a most unuseful one.) We have an internal enemy. Common defense is needed to defeat it. The internal enemy is not the law-abiding gun owner. The internal enemy is the law-UNabiding gun owner. No one wants a law-UNabiding gun owner to commit mayhem. That "no one" includes law-abiding gun owners. The 2nd amendment, flipped properly, contains its own cure. Drink from the purple bottle of folly. :-)

Cold dead hands

It's not a great time to be an American in the Elysian Fields. The Spartans especially are having the time of their deaths hooting in derision at the American "well-regulated militia."

"You can put a man on the moon but you can't regulate a militia? What's with the land of the free that it's so rotted by mistaking libertinage for liberty that it knows nothing of DUTY?" roars Leonidas, still buff after all these years after Thermopylae.

Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Antonin Scalia, et al (Gallatin) just hang their heads.

"It was you, Tom, and all your fantastic notions about the virtue of the yeomanry," mutters Adams.

"It's the Christians selling out to the End Times. End Times! End Times! How many End Times have there been since Jesus died? One for every wild-eyed doomcaster that ever lived," spits Jefferson in fierce response.

Antonin Scalia tut-tuts, "Look, if people will actually read what I said in Heller, they will understand that regulatory remedies for firearms are readily available in the militia scheme. Why every governor of every state doesn't make it the top priority to regulate the statutory unorganized militia -- meaning at present (if you will pardon my obiter dicta) every adult fucking male who isn't in the National fucking Guard -- I do not understand. Licensing, annual inspection, muster requirements, weapons classification with varying levels of permission: all such things are possible. Where is the creativity of the American political class at the state level?"

Al Gallatin says nothing, but nods over in the direction of where Charlton Heston shambles by, dragging a musket by the butt, its muzzle in one of his cold, dead hands, holding a tattered Valentine from the NRA in the other.

Jefferson, Adams, Scalia, et al (Gallatin) just hang their heads. 

It's all right there in "Black" and "White"

Ah, Black History Month (a.k.a. February for you non-Americans). I understand the need and the purpose, but it makes me sad, the way affirmative action makes me sad: for the reason that it is a paltry fraction-measure of what's needed to eradicate the cancer of metastatic racism in this country.

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.]