I’ve spent the past few days reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and posting about it on Facebook. Rather than rewriting those posts as a single piece here, I thought I’d take some screen shots, and share them with some additional commentary. A shout-out to my friend Lizzie Donahue, whose queries to me on our daily walk this morning prompted the last and lengthiest post.
Here’s the first post.
And here’s a short addendum to this post, where I comment further on the theme of education and Coates’s discussion of his time at Howard University.
I say here that breaking with the mytho-poetic view of a heroic African past was the second great trauma of Coates’s life. I should be more precise. I mean disillusionment. But it was a disillusionment that was immensely productive. More than the loss of a specific view of things, the break with black nationalism made Coates suspicious of all master narratives, all collective platforms of totality. As an alternative, he turned to the specificity and concreteness of poetry, “of small hard things,” as he says: “aunts and uncles, smoke breaks after sex, girls on stoops drinking from mason jars.” And in that specificity “I began to see discord, argument, chaos, perhaps even fear, as a kind of power.” The “gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was not an alarm. It was a beacon.” This is a writer for whom the struggle to see what is in front of his nose is a lifelong effort, a hard-won right to see things as they are, without mediation or adornment or chastising authority. So much so that it has made him, as we’ll see, suspicious of all collectivities, all platforms.
One other note on education. Coates has a wonderful passage on translation as living. He goes to Europe for the first time, lands in Geneva, heads for the train station, and here’s what he says:
I surveyed the railway schedule and became aware that I was one wrong ticket from Vienna, Milan, or some Alpine village that no one I knew had ever heard of. It happened right then. The realization of being far gone, the fear, the unknowable possibilities, all of it—the horror, the wonder, the joy—fused into an erotic thrill. The thrill was not wholly alien. It was close to the wave that came over me in Moorland. It was kin to the narcotic shot I’d gotten watching the people with their wineglasses spill out onto West Broadway. It was all that I’d felt looking at those Parisian doors. And at that moment I realized that those changes, with all their agony, awkwardness, and confusion, were the defining fact of my life, and for the first time I knew not only that I really was alive, that I really was studying and observing, but that I had long been alive—even back in Baltimore. I had always been alive. I was always translating.
That passage reminded me of this exchange between Peter Cole, the poet and translator, and Joshua Cohen, the author in The Paris Review:
Cole: People say such dumb things about translation.
Cohen: Such as?
Cole: Such as that, unlike so-called original composition, it’s always a matter of compromise, of negotiation—that translation is inevitably a failed approximation, or like a black-and-white photograph rather than color. But what in life that’s valuable over time doesn’t involve negotiation or intelligent compromise? Where does friendship come from? Or marriage? Education? Commerce? A culture? Would you colorize Stieglitz? And who says that original composition is fundamentally different from translation? “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Beckett isn’t talking about translation there, he’s talking about life, or writing, period. Poetry isn’t lost in translation, it is translation. It’s lost only in bad or gray translation—and in the mindless repetition of the thin figures of speech we use to talk about it.
…
Cole: You have to be desperate, at some level, to write anything, no? To move the magic of consciousness and language from one state or place to another. From an itch or an instinct to a line of poetry, and from that line of poetry to the next one, and from these two in combination to a third, and then to a reader. Translation as we normally think of it only raises all that to a higher exponential power. So, yes, there’s desperation, but even more so, at least for me, there’s desire—for nourishment and for pleasure. Translation isn’t some weakly technical craft. It’s a deeply human activity, an essential part of the art of our lives, whether we’re aware of it as such or not. Of course it exists in relation to something, not on its own, and so we think of it as secondary, but hey, so do we exist only in relation to something, as inheritors and animators or deadeners of traditions of all sorts. But that’s my stump speech—deep translation.
Here’s the second post I wrote, on the surprising atheism of Coates’ book.
In re-reading this, I’m reminded of something else I wanted to say. In the last several decades, intellectuals of a pragmatist bent have often affirmed a kind of politics of struggle amid the ruins of God, Marx, and other master narratives. Think Cornel West. What strikes me in reading Coates, though, is just how visceral and personal and punch-in-the-gut powerful the death of God is for him. There’s a moment near the end of the book where he looks at the photographs of civil rights protester, and he asks his son:
Have you ever looked at the faces? The faces are neither angry, nor sad, nor joyous. They betray almost no emotion. They look out past their tormentors, past us, and focus on something way beyond anything known to me. I think they are fastened to their god, a god whom I cannot know and in whom I do not believe. But, god or not, the armor is all over them, and it is real. Or perhaps it is not armor at all. Perhaps it is life extension, a kind of loan allowing you to take the assaults heaped upon you now and pay down the debts later.
There’s nothing easy or cheap or distant about this atheism. Coates is fully aware of its costs: not just personal—the existential agony of the unbeliever—but also political: “I thought of my own distance from an institution [the black church] that has, so often, been the only support for our people.” And he’s still willing to pay them. Because he has no other choice. One cannot compel belief, whether it’s in God or the revolution. This is why I’ve been slightly discomfited by the critiques of Coates that take him to task for his political fatalism. In part because I don’t think that’s quite accurate, as we’ll see below, but also because I don’t know that you can will someone to believe in something they don’t believe.
And here we come to the third post, broken up into two screenshots.
By way of qualification, as Joel Scott Rutstein pointed out to me on Facebook, I should acknowledge that throughout the book, Coates deploys an arresting phrase: the people who believe themselves to be white. Every time I read that, I was indeed brought up short.
Update, 3 pm
Dammit, I meant to include these in my post but forgot. Tressie McMillan Cottom has one of the very few posts that grapple with Coates’s atheism. It’s very smart, though I disagree with her, I think, on the question of the political fallout. Her post led me to this, by Robert Greene, which I also thought quite smart, on the dangers of asking or reading Coates to be a writer other than he is.
{ 48 comments }
oldster 08.21.15 at 7:04 pm
typo–“vertigo wa snot an alarm”
William Timberman 08.21.15 at 7:23 pm
Coates is his own child. If we had more like him, maybe we could look forward to a post-imperial politics worthy of the name. In the meantime, the very fact that he exists is encouraging — the anti-Fukuyama one can believe in, so to speak.
Corey Robin 08.21.15 at 7:25 pm
Many thanks, oldster. Fixed it.
Peter K. 08.21.15 at 8:30 pm
When I think of Hitchens’s atheism, I don’t think of it as cudgel against Muslims specifically or a brand. Bad example. Hitchens drove many on the left to distraction. Oh how they hated him and hate him still.
Bill Benzon 08.21.15 at 9:31 pm
This is a very interesting set of remarks, Corey. I’ve not read the book, but I’ve been looking at his essay on reparations quite closely and your observations resonate with a remarkable glitch in that essay. First, I note that he has remarked in an interview that the book was conceived while he was writing the essay. He wanted to cover the same ground, but in a more personal way:
AMY GOODMAN: You write it as a letter to your son, Samori. Tell us why.
TA-NEHISI COATES: Well, I hate to disappoint you guys, but mostly as a literary technique, I began Between the World and Me after I finished the draft of “The Case for Reparations,” and I was actually somewhat frustrated with that piece, because it’s a very, very empirical piece, very, very much based in the tools of journalism, reportage, very, very evidence-based. But I thought, at the same time, it made what it meant to live under a system that made reparations essential in the first place abstract. There was a distancing effect about talking about people as numbers, you know, about talking about people across history.
And what I wanted to do with this book is to give the reader some sense of what it meant to live under a system of plunder as an individual, to express that, to take it out of the realm of numbers and to take it directly into, you know, individual people.
With that in mind, as he said, the article is very empirical, lots of facts and figures, but also lots of anecdotes. It’s long, too, about 16K words. And it doesn’t really seem as though he expects or even wants reparations to be paid. It’s more of a rhetorical ploy. Here’s the climax of the essay:
A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.
John Conyers’s HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.
What wisdom of what founders does he have in mind? The founders who held slaves? The founders who wrote the three-fifths clause into the Constitution? The thing is, earlier in the essay he had specifically called out both Washington and Jefferson as slave holders. Had he forgotten that? And what about his editors? Did they just glitch on the inconsistency?
I can only guess at what’s going on, but here’s my guess. Take that phrase, “the founders†(or, alternatively, “the founding fathersâ€). It is mostly used in appreciation and reverence for their various virtues in founding a great nation, etc. As such, it is more closely linked to warm-fuzzy feelings and to vague notions of democracy and equality than to a list of names, much less to the personal histories attached to those names.
At this point in his article Coates is very near the end and is going for the uplift. The specific names of the founders simply didn’t enter his mind, much less the unpleasant biographical details. And perhaps the same is true for his editors and, apparently, his readers as well. What he needed at this point a bit of comforting rhetoric about his country, the U S of A. And reference to the founder’s wisdom gave him that.
He’s dead right about the nation’s need to reckon with slavery and its legacy. But when he talks about a “maturation out of the childhood myth of … innocence into … wisdom worthy” he’s talking about his own maturation. It’s a though he wrote that essay in order to force himself to contemplate America’s original sin* at some length and still come out of it calling himself an American. That glitch about the founder’s wisdom allowed him to do that. After all, as an athiest he couldn’t invoke God, could he? Where could he turn for the moral reference point he needed?
* Obama used this phrase in his remarkable sermon / eulogy on the death of Clementa Pinckney and racism in America. But it’s been around a long time and dates back to an 1820 letter from James Madison to the Marquis de Lafayette. Madison is writing about the possibility of admitting the territory of Missouri to the status of statehood in the nation. He ends one paragraph with a reference to the “dreadful fruitfulness of the original sin of the African trade.â€
Sebastian H 08.21.15 at 9:39 pm
“More than the loss of a specific view of things, the break with black nationalism made Coates suspicious of all master narratives, all collective platforms of totality. As an alternative, he turned to the specificity and concreteness of poetry, “of small hard things,†as he says: “aunts and uncles, smoke breaks after sex, girls on stoops drinking from mason jars.†And in that specificity “I began to see discord, argument, chaos, perhaps even fear, as a kind of power.†The “gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was not an alarm. It was a beacon.†”
I’m not as good a thinker as Coates, nor did I live his black experience. This is however exactly the kind of thing that resonates with me in my break from being raised in one of the first Baptist mega-churches. I have probably an unhealthy overreaction to certain types of group dynamics woven out of grand narratives.
Sumana Harihareswara 08.21.15 at 9:40 pm
Thanks for this post, which I’m thinking about. Is there a way you could link to or otherwise include the text of the Facebook posts and comments that you include in the screenshots, to help my vision-impaired friends who use screen readers?
PatrickinIowa 08.21.15 at 10:16 pm
“The “gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was not an alarm. It was a beacon.†”
I’m looking forward to reading the book. I predict that I’ll decide that what it asks of all readers, including whites, is that we embrace discomfort, chaos and vertigo, hopes that events will impose them on us if we don’t.
Seems to me a lot to ask.
john c. halasz 08.22.15 at 4:39 am
I’ve read some bits of Coates, though not a whole lot. But I’m kinda wondering if the sort of detachment that CR notes isn’t part of his current acceptability (via “The Atlantic”) as a black American spokesman. (The comparison with Baldwin is, er, unfair, not just because of the great difference between the times, but because Baldwin was a child-preacher and always retained something of that collar-grabbing style). There is little that any “single individual” can do, and explaining matters from the standpoint of a “single individual” only re-enforces that quandary. But in this era of enforced neo-liberal atomization, not really recent, does articulating a perspective apart from the “herd”, from the confusions of the great “mass” of people, really serve to identify the structural “causes” of anyone’s observations or experiences? Does it generate any organizing strategies for bringing disparate people together into any common “cause”, beyond “tea and sympathy”?
oldster 08.22.15 at 5:25 am
“…his current acceptability (via “The Atlanticâ€) as a black American spokesman.”
I don’t accept him as a black American spokesman. I don’t think he wants to be accepted as a black American spokesman. Indeed, I feel some confidence in saying that he vigorously resists any such mantle.
He’s a writer and a critic. He has interesting things to say about the world. He is not a spokesman for black America. He’s a spokesman for Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Would any of this be at all controversial if we were talking about white writers? Can you tell me about the organizing strategies generated by Proust or Pynchon?
john c. halasz 08.22.15 at 5:57 am
@10:
Are you tone-deaf?
oldster 08.22.15 at 6:17 am
make some music, and your question may become germane.
steven johnson 08.22.15 at 6:39 am
“There’s nothing easy or cheap or distant about this atheism. Coates is fully aware of its costs: not just personal—the existential agony of the unbeliever—but also political: ‘I thought of my own distance from an institution [the black church] that has, so often, been the only support for our people.'”
Is the existential agony of the child come to unbelief in Santa Claus a personal cost? Isn’t the personal cost of atheism the same kind of “cost”? By the way, is it really sensible to talk about rejecting master narratives but still talk about “the” black church as “an” institution?
The Atlantic is a journal of opinion, and Coates is one of their columnists. As such, I should think that the two tend to go together. I’m not sure that The Atlantic is such an outstanding source of political enlightenment. Then again, politics is not a simple unity. Perhaps it is possible for someone to uphold the likes of Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum and still be an insightful and humane political commentator.
Watson Ladd 08.22.15 at 6:46 am
oldster, the whole shtick about Ta-Nehisi Coates is that he’s black, and that he writes about what is like to be black in America, and the politics of blackness. That’s why Baldwin becomes the obvious point of comparison. To ignore that would be to ignore what everything he writes is about. There’s no way to judge him except as political, whereas one can completely forget (and should!) that Victor Hugo was Haitian, and read his work against the tradition he would want it to be read against.
Nine 08.22.15 at 6:56 am
“Victor Hugo was Haitian”
Alexandre Dumas, not Victor Hugo.
Watson Ladd 08.22.15 at 7:15 am
Nine: Thanks for the correction.
Nine 08.22.15 at 7:38 am
Peter K@4 – “When I think of Hitchens’s atheism, I don’t think of it as cudgel against Muslims”
Hitchens was radicalized by the Rushdie affair – Rushdie was a great pal of his – and then 9/11 pushed him over the edge. IIRC, prior to the fatwah on Rushdie he had little, or nothing at all, to say about Islam. Back then his atheistic vitriol was reserved for Christians in general and Mother Theresa in particular.
I doubt Cory has any very unique insights into Hitchens’s atheism. For the well-worn literary technique of praising an author’s work by weighing it against someone else’s Cory needed a patsy on the unfavoured side of the scale, and poor Hitchens was it. It could just as well have been Dawkins.
Bill Benzon 08.22.15 at 11:45 am
A discussion between Glen Loury and John McWhorter on Coates’ emergence as the most prominent commenter on race:
http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/36141?in=06:45&out=19:23
Mdc 08.22.15 at 11:49 am
Political maturity would involve being able to see the founders’ wisdom, and even possess it for oneself, while at the same time never forgetting the depravity and violence of their crimes. And for an American, the latter means bearing the stain of those crimes.
For an atheist, Coates seems to me to understand original sin better than most of his readers. (I think CR’s take here is very good.)
steven johnson 08.22.15 at 4:03 pm
Understanding original sin is rather more likely to be a disqualification for valid political analysis, isn’t it?
Luis 08.22.15 at 4:23 pm
Thanks for sharing, Corey; this is some of the smarter commentary on the book I’ve seen.
What he needed at this point a bit of comforting rhetoric about his country, the U S of A. And reference to the founder’s wisdom gave him that.
Given the rest of his writing, I doubt this is the case – he’s extremely critical about the founders and the founding.
Jim Harrison 08.22.15 at 5:00 pm
About the hypocrisy of the founding fathers: Nobody is the master of what their utterances will turn out to have meant. Jefferson and many others who recognized the immorality of slavery in 1776 thought that it was a dispensable institution. They didn’t know that the cotton gin and the industrial revolution would shortly make it the engine of national growth. Hard to call something a crime when it becomes so irresistibly profitable. Black chattel slavery really was the original sin of American history, but it became the original sin retroactively.
Bill Benzon 08.22.15 at 5:39 pm
@Luis, #21: Given the rest of his writing, I doubt this is the case – he’s extremely critical about the founders and the founding.
Im not sure you get the point. Yes, he is critical about the founders, and early in The Case for Reparations he calls out both Washington and Jefferson as slave owners. But near the end, at the apex of his argument he talks about “America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.” There’s no irony there that I can detect. He’s asserting that the founder’s wisdom is something that we’ll be worthy of (only) when we’ve had this public congressional discussion and debate about reparations. He was going for uplift at the end of that paragraph and founder’s wisdom is what he put in the uplift slot.
@Jim Harrison: I’m not sure of your point. James Madison was calling it original sin in 1820, which is well within memory of 1776 and in the same time-frame as the cotton gin. It’s hard to see his usage as retrospective.
Jim Harrison 08.22.15 at 5:57 pm
@Bill Benzon. I was thinking about James Madison’s remarks when I wrote my comment. The 1820 timing fits my understanding of the sea change in attitudes about slavery that took place in the previous 30 years—the cotton gin was invented in the early 1790s. Jefferson certainly changed his tune though he presumably also remembered 1776. I’m not saying that people didn’t have moral objections to slavery after it became newly profitable—obviously they did—but the terms of the debate changed drastically. Absent the industrial revolution, slavery would have been another interesting fact about our ancestors. We don’t spend much time wringing or hands about the indentured servitude of poor white people because it didn’t become a central fact of our history as slavery did.
Corey Robin 08.22.15 at 6:07 pm
Jim: I think the changes you see in Jefferson on the question of race and slavery actually predate the invention of the cotton gin and the industrial use of cotton production. We got into this in one of my earliest posts here on Crooked Timber. But read the post and the comment thread, and you can see that there was something more than the cotton gin that made the discussion what it became: the very question of emancipation itself forced a change.
https://crookedtimber.org/2012/12/02/thomas-jefferson-american-fascist/
Jim Harrison 08.22.15 at 6:55 pm
@Corey Robin. There was a lot more than the cotton gin that changed the terms of the discussion of race in the U.S. Haiti obviously had something to do with it, for example. I’ve been struck, though, by how drastically the enormous profitability of cotton production affected the political situation and made the creation of excuses/justifications for slavery into an industry. That’s what I chose to underline. That the consequences of emancipation worried Jefferson as they would worry Lincoln is true and important; but as far as I know, the belief that negroes are intrinsically inferior was general in both the 18th and the 19th Century. What changed was the economics of slavery.
thehersch 08.23.15 at 3:59 am
Coates:
More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.
Bill Benzon:
What wisdom of what founders does he have in mind? The founders who held slaves? The founders who wrote the three-fifths clause into the Constitution? The thing is, earlier in the essay he had specifically called out both Washington and Jefferson as slave holders. Had he forgotten that? And what about his editors? Did they just glitch on the inconsistency? (and more, at length, along these lines, in a couple of posts)
Bill Benzon: You’re trying to hang an awful lot of weight on a formulation you discern in Coates’s essay but which he didn’t actually write into it. You point repeatedly to Coates’s reference to the founders’ wisdom, when he makes no such reference. If you don’t see the difference between a current-day wisdom worthy, retrospectively, of the founders, on the one hand, and the wisdom of the founders, on the other, I suggest you try a little harder. When you gloss Coates’s “wisdom worthy of the founders” as “he’s asserting that the founder’s wisdom is something that we’ll be worthy of “, your comment is not well-grounded in the text you criticize.
Boumeur 08.23.15 at 6:27 am
TN Coates reminds me of George Orwell, a good writer, clear thinker, and great essayist who wrote one of the dumbest most self-defeating books ever, Burmese Days, about colonialism. You want to shake TNC by the shoulders and tell him relax, dude, it ain’t that bad. The man has a tendency to confuse himself about the difficulties he faces. Read his relentless soul-searching about how hard it is to learn French, for example. He would be rattling it off happily, if he didn’t put on a hair shirt every time he couldn’t memorize a conjugation or difficult turn of phrase, which is doing it wrong to begin with.
Harold 08.23.15 at 7:14 am
I wonder how his French language experience turned out.
Harold 08.23.15 at 7:23 am
I will answer my own question. He learned it pretty well — amazingly well — for a seven-week course. And he said, very sensibly, there is no excuse for a writer not to know a second language [especially one with a tremendous literary canon, like French, one might add] — so maybe the hairshirt was a bit of self dramatization that provided him with some good copy (as Nora Ephron used to say).
Bill Benzon 08.23.15 at 9:07 am
@thehersch, #27: …a current-day wisdom worthy, retrospectively, of the founders…
Hmmmm… I hadn’t thought of that. But you know it’s not so far from the reading I give his essay in, Felix Culpa: The Judeo-Christian Underpinnings of Coates’ Reparations Argument. As you may know, felix culpa comes into English as the Fortunate Fall, which the Wikipedia glosses:
The Latin expression felix culpa derives from the writings of St. Augustine regarding the Fall of Man, the source of original sin: “For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.†(in Latin: Melius enim iudicavit de malis benefacere, quam mala nulla esse permittere.)[1] The phrase appears in lyric form sung annually in the Exsultet of the Easter Vigil: “O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem,” “O happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer.” The medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas[2] cited this line when he explained how the principle that “God allows evils to happen in order to bring a greater good therefrom” underlies the causal relation between original sin and the Divine Redeemer’s Incarnation, thus concluding that a higher state is not inhibited by sin. … In the appendix to Leibniz’s Theodicy, he answers the objection concerning he who does not choose the best course must lack either power, knowledge, or goodness, and in doing so he refers to the felix culpa.
Now, I’m not arguing that Coates, an atheist, is really delivering Christian theology at that point. Rather, I’m suggesting that he’s calling on a pattern so deeply embedded in Western (Christian-derived) culture that we can use it without even knowing where the pattern came from.
So, by explicitly coming to terms with the ugly part of the founders’ legacy we make ourselves worthy of the struggle they underwent to found the nation. Their world was different from ours, their understanding was deficient in important ways, though they did have doubts. But they made the compromises they had to make in order to found a nation.
But if that’s what Coates is up, well, it feels like something he discovered in the course of writing that essay and hasn’t fully assimilated.
mdc 08.23.15 at 2:21 pm
“he’s calling on a pattern so deeply embedded in Western (Christian-derived) culture that we can use it without even knowing where the pattern came from.”
Either that, or he’s articulating an aspect of reality intelligible to both believers and non-believers.
Since there is no Redeemer on his account, nor a providential Creator, I don’t think the culpa is felix.
Harold 08.23.15 at 5:58 pm
“Felix” — only in the sense that one learns by making terrible mistakes — or from other people’s terrible mistakes/ misfortunes. One wouldn’t call the idiot’s of the Darwin Awards ‘felix’ (lucky), only that we feel lucky in not having had the stupidity to do what they did. Not that this has much to do with Adam and Eve. But a similar sort of analogy does come up in Gide’s explanation of Theodicy the Counterfeiters, oddly.
Harold 08.23.15 at 5:58 pm
Speaking of French literature.
thehersch 08.23.15 at 6:38 pm
Bill Benzon 31:
Interesting essay (of yours) you link to, although you and the source you quote still err in imputing “the founders’ wisdom” to Coates. It seems to me that what you write recapitulates Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural, although at greater length and with lesser force.
Lyle 08.23.15 at 9:01 pm
You want to shake TNC by the shoulders and tell him relax, dude, it ain’t that bad. The man has a tendency to confuse himself about the difficulties he faces.
Do you say so in regards to what he writes about race and white supremacy as well? If so, I gather that you yourself are white?
Few displays are more ridiculous than that of a white person telling a black person who has made the effort to explain the pains, costs and realities of racism that they’re overdramatizing things.
rea 08.23.15 at 10:07 pm
Alexandre Dumas a Haitian? Well, his father was born there, but was taken to France at age 8. Alexandre himself never went there, as far as I can tell, and of course he was a Frenchman by birth.
Harold 08.23.15 at 10:50 pm
@35 — You’re supposed to pretend that accomplishment comes without stress and effort — sprezzatura — the art that conceals art — I guess.
Bill Benzon 08.23.15 at 10:58 pm
@thehersch, #35: By “the source you quote” I assume you mean the Philadelphia guy. Yes, he’s offering the same reading that I have ostensibly made.
But the implication of the argument I’m making in that post is that it IS Coates (and perhaps us as well) who has the wisdom. He’s the one who’s looked at the historical record and has concluded I can live with this IF we acknowledgle the complexity. He’s the one who has, as I say, undertaken the “re-enactment, a simulation if you will, of the Fortunate Fall.”
Still, if I’d been his editor, I’d have asked for changes. Given all the criticism he has laid at the founders feet in that essay his statement isn’t as clear as you think it is. Clarification would be helpful.
I might have been satisfied with something like this: More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of a childlike myth of its innocence into a hardwon wisdom worthy of the struggles of the founders. But I’d have been happier with a bit more: More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of a childlike myth of its innocence into a hardwon wisdom worthy of the compromises the founders had to make. Their understanding of humankind was inadequate and their need for agreement was urgent. They did the best they could. We have seen and suffered with the results of their decisions and our knowledge of humankind is deeper. To redeem their mistakes and validate the efforts they took to found the first modern democracy we must…
And there’s the rub. We must what? Make reparations? But that’s what the whole essay’s been about. And all Coates has to say about that is that we should pass Conyer’s bill, have this Congressional conversation, and maybe we’ll write some checks, and maybe we won’t. But we’ll have aired the issue in an official way.
Corey has said that his book has no politics in it, that it makes no demands on the reader. Well, his case for reparations is pretty much like that. To the extent that it makes a demand of the reader it is (only implied) that you call your congressman and urge the passing of HR 40. That’s not much of a demand, and it’s not explicit. All that’s really there is that we search our souls and have this national conversation on race ain which we (people who believe we are white) face up to the nation’s flaws and contradictions.
Bill Benzon 08.23.15 at 11:08 pm
@thehersch: Thanks for the reference to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. I wasn’t familiar with it. It’s remarkable: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln2.asp
Watson Ladd 08.24.15 at 12:59 am
rea: Exactly! So what does it say about our society and politics that the African-American is still African, two hundred years after the last slave ship to the US? The problem is that we refuse to permit the black man to be a man, to shed what becomes an indelible mark. And when we do treat the black man as a man, that can only be read by the black man as a signifier of his blackness.
thehersch 08.24.15 at 1:06 am
Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural is probably the single greatest political speech ever given in English. You’re welcome!
Tomh 08.24.15 at 2:02 am
And who here has read the book?
I get the impression that not many here have.
Charlie 08.24.15 at 6:47 pm
Just a note about the Baldwin comparisons: the structure of the book borrows the structure of Baldwin’s essay “My Dungeon Shook.” I think Coates has said he liked the structure but otherwise wasn’t thinking much about Baldwin, but I think the Baldwin comparisons are important to make. (Also, Morrison compares him to Baldwin on the blurb, so it’s going to stick for now.)
Coates doesn’t just share the letter-writing structure, though; he uses generalization in similar ways to Baldwin (compare how Baldwin writes about white and black people to Coates’s use of “the Dream,” for example), and their use of personal narrative is similar. That doesn’t mean we have to see Coates in a line with Baldwin, or as some spiritual/literary heir. But it doesn’t mean each comparison to Baldwin is as meaningless as they sometimes appear.
Matt McKeon 08.25.15 at 11:01 am
Lincoln is delivering a series of gut punches to his own people. Did you think that slavery, the stealing, torture, selling of children, was free? Did you think there wasn’t going to be a price to pay? You’re paying now, and you’ll keeping paying. Coates uses the phrase “dreamer” for the American majority(“people who think they’re white”) indifferent or unseeing. Well, Lincoln wasn’t a dreamer, anyway.
Unlike Lincoln, Coates doesn’t believe history is ordered by God, and that there will be justice. Instead, a tentative belief in the possibility of improvement, and a stronger belief that its possible to live a good life, despite conditions.
Dogen 08.25.15 at 7:31 pm
Wow, I’m with Corey Robin on most of this reading and yet had a completely different take on what seems like a crucial point: Corey says the book “doesn’t seem to ask anything of the readerâ€!
That is a shocking statement to me. My experience (I’m white, cis, male) was that I had to concentrate and focus to inhabit this extended essay. On one level it was easy to read and understand the words and the arguments—but that was a contrast to the effort it took to put myself into the writer’s shoes and feel real empathy. I felt like the author did an incredible job to write in a way that offered me a path in without being condescending, and that if I didn’t make a similar effort to accept that offer I’d be wasting my time and his.
The most obvious example for me was it took me forever to get comfortable with his use of the word “body†in relation to his experience. I’m still not there but I got close I think.
I contrast this with my experience of reading Orwell (say, “Down and Out in Paris and London”). It’s been a very long time since I read it, but I felt total empathy with the writer from word one all the way through with little apparent effort—it didn’t seem to ask much of the reader (at least to me).
Of course, maybe Corey means something entirely different than what I read into that remark. If so, “never mindâ€.
sanbikinoraion 08.26.15 at 1:33 pm
@Corey
We have this great way of sharing text over the internet now. It’s called “text”.
Unlike images of text, text doesn’t require any special hosting arrangements! It’s kilobytes smaller, so people can enjoy it even on rubbish mobile connections.
Text kerns and scales properly on all devices, and is accessible for those with limited or zero vision.
Try “text” today! It’s just a CTRL-C and a CTRL-V away!
Art Deco 08.27.15 at 8:37 pm
‘Immensely productive’? The man is an opinion journalist working on the patronage of one David Bradley, who was not employing his ordinary hiring criteria when Mr. Coates was engaged. His range of interests is exceedingly limited. What’s ‘productive’ about that?
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