By Rich Lowry
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
Moses gave us the Ten Commandments. Paul gave us the
epistles. And Ta-Nehisi gave us, Between
the World and Me.
The new book by Atlantic
writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, in the form of a letter to his son, has been greeted
with a rapturous reception that brooks no dissent.
What everyone says about the literary power of Between the World and Me is correct. It
is, in part, the story of the creation of a writer, and one with undeniably
formidable gifts. But if you refuse to simply stare at the book in wonder as
one who admires Michelangelo’s David and subject it to even minimal critical
scrutiny, you will realize that it is profoundly silly at times, and morally
blinkered throughout. It is a masterly little memoir wrapped in a toxic little
Philippic.
Between the World
and Me evokes the terror of the upbringing Coates had in West Baltimore in
the 1980s with a sickening immediacy. His father beat him. Other kids were a
constant physical, perhaps even mortal, threat. Coates lived in perpetual fear
— although largely of other black people.
He argues — although that might be too generous a word;
it’s more like assertion shrouded in a haze of lyricism — that all that other
black people did to hurt or threaten him was ultimately the product of white
racism.
Given how large race hatred looms in the world of Coates,
I was surprised to find the worst thing that evidently happened to him directly
at the hands of a white person is recounted beginning on page 93 of the
152-page book. Coates took his son to a movie theater on the Upper West Side of
Manhattan, and when they were leaving and got off the crowded elevator, a white
woman pushed his kid and said, “Come on!”
This would anger any parent and Coates got into it with
the woman and a white man who came to her defense, pushing the guy in the
resulting argument. Coates interprets this incident as essentially the
telescoping of hundreds of years of racism down to “this woman pulling rank”
and invoking her “right over the body of my son.”
Yeah, maybe. It’s also possible that the woman was a jerk
(there are at least a couple of them on the Upper West Side) and would have
pushed anyone’s kid.
This is the kind of quotidian insight that can’t really
penetrate the closed moral universe of Between
the World and Me: White people are rude to other white people all the time,
especially in New York City.
If you don’t witness a petty dispute there every week or
so that escalates into stupid insults and near blows, you aren’t getting out
enough.
For all his subtle plumbing of his own thoughts and
feelings and his occasional invocations of the importance of the individuality
of the person, Coates has to reduce people to categories and actors in a
pantomime of racial plunder to support his worldview. He must erase distinctions
and reject complexity.
“‘White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its
exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies,” he writes. What is this
white America? Is it Nancy Pelosi or Ted Cruz? Is it Massachusetts or is it
Utah? Is it supporters of affirmative action or opponents? Is it teachers who
work in the inner city, or gap-toothed yokels who chortle over racist jokes?
This white America contains multitudes. Coates blames it
for the death of an acquaintance of his from Howard University, Prince Jones.
He was shot by a black cop from a relatively affluent black-majority area
governed by blacks. This doesn’t make it less awful, but suggests the picture
is more complicated than Coates’ eloquent reductiveness suggests.
His monstrous passage about 9/11 is a good summation of
where he’s coming from. He writes of the police and firefighters who died
running into the burning buildings in a forlorn effort to save all the people
whose bodies were about to be obliterated into dust, “They were not human to
me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire,
the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”
Really? Firefighters go about shattering the bodies of
black people without justification? One doesn’t read about, say, Anthony
Rodriguez, 36, father of six, whose last child was born days after he died in
the attack, who joined the Navy before becoming a firefighter, who coached
youth basketball, and naturally think of the depredations of white America.
Coates does. This isn’t an act of moral discernment on
his part, but a willful effacement of the individuality of Rodriguez and anyone
Coates deems part of the impersonal apparatus determined to dispossess blacks.
He gives the impression of denying the moral agency of
blacks, who are often portrayed as the products of forces beyond their control.
He returns again and again to a kid who aimed a gun at him when he was young.
I’m perfectly prepared to believe that the legacy of racism played a greater
role in that act than I might think at first blush, but surely the kid himself
bears some responsibility? Surely he is capable of heeding the basic imperative
of not threatening to shoot people?
Coates objects to the cliché that blacks have to be
“twice as good.” It’s closer to the truth that they, like all Americans, are in
a much better position to succeed if they honor certain basic norms: graduate
from high school; get a full-time job; don’t have a child before age 21 and get
married before childbearing. Among the people who do these things, according to
the research of Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution,
about 75 percent attain the middle class, broadly defined.
Maybe a writer of the power and moral authority of Coates
should let people in on this little secret? Between
the World and Me feels nihilistic because there is no positive program to
leaven the despair and the call for perpetual struggle. Although Coates made a
stab at one in his famous essay, “The Case for Reparations.” Let’s play along
and say that we adopt a modest, roughly $1 trillion program of reparations,
which would be more than $20,000 for every black person in the country,
regardless of his or her family’s personal history or current financial
circumstances. Would that program be transformative for any individual?
No. For poor blacks to escape poverty, it would still
require all the personal attributes that contribute to success. So Coates is
selling snake oil. Even if he got his fantastical reparations that he has
poured such literary energy into advocating, real improvement in the condition
of black people would still require the moral effort that he won’t advocate
for.
White America is not as devilishly effective as Coates
seems to think. The life expectancy of female white dropouts has been
plummeting. Has white America fallen down on the job, or do social attributes
have something to do with whether people thrive in this country or not?
White Americans don’t even have the highest incomes of
any group in the country that they have allegedly built to serve their
interests with malice aforethought. Asians do. They, of course, didn’t
experience chattel slavery, or the hideous discrimination of the Jim Crow
South. But they still encountered prejudice, overcome with relatively intact
families and high levels of education.
Coates reminds us of the shame of the American inner
city, where kids have so few social supports and live with little margin of
error. His account of slavery and the ensuing discrimination against blacks is
powerful and true. But his is a stunted version of America. Here’s hoping his
son reads more widely.
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