The Antinomies of Ta-Nehisi Coates

By Christian Alejandro Gonzalez

Wednesday, March 11, 2020

‘American history,” Elias Rodriques writes at The Nation, “has always been a weapon in the hands of Ta-Nehisi Coates.” He’s not wrong. Coates often uses history to undermine America’s idea of itself as a beacon of freedom and democracy. Sometimes he does this by narrating stories of horrible acts from the days of slavery or Jim Crow: a lynching, for instance, or a racist bank deliberately making a predatory loan, or a white mob running a black family out of the home it bought in a majority-white area. At other times he will simply state a historical fact and have it function as a moral indictment all on its own. “Antebellum Virginia,” he writes, “had seventy-three crimes that could garner the death penalty for slaves—and only one for whites.”

Coates in his historical work is a moralist through and through: His historical reconstructions are driven both by a fierce moral commitment to contemporary racial equality and by outrage at the horrors of America’s past. His essays on such topics as reparations and mass incarceration are peppered — and quite impressively so — with references to historians. Before making policy recommendations, he is always careful to consult historical scholarship and make connections between the racial issues of the present and the racist policies of the past.

Studying American history has convinced Coates that America is ontologically — in its very essence — a racist country. In Between the World and Me, a memoir written as an open letter to his son, Coates tells his teenage boy that “the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body.” “In America,” he adds, “it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.” The condemnation continues in his collection of essays, We Were Eight Years in Power. “America is literally unimaginable without plundered labor shackled to plundered land,” he writes. “Slavery and the terrorism that followed were not incidental elements in American history, but at its core.” All of which leads him to conclude that white supremacy is “a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it.”

Yet if Coates the historian is a moralist, Coates the political philosopher is a cynic. Interspersed throughout his work are brief observations about the nature of man and of politics which, if systematically explored, could dramatically undermine his interpretation of America’s essence.

Coates the political philosopher argues that most countries are founded on some crime, some form of oppression. He therefore explicitly rejects the idea that America is exceptionally evil: “There’s a fundamental problem at the heart of this country,” he said in an interview with Isaac Chotiner, “but that doesn’t make this country particularly original. . . . It’s not unusual to have a premise on which a state is founded and to have deep problems in that premise that continue to recur in that state’s history and actually threaten its existence all the way through.”

Coates the philosopher suggests that exploiting the weak is a universal human desire, one embedded in human nature. He believes that whites “are — like any other people — mostly self-interested.” Nobody gives up their privilege willingly; they must always be compelled to do so. Coates asks, “What people anywhere on this earth has ever, out of a strong moral feeling, ceded power? Can I say that I — we — are any different?” The answer, he goes on to say, is no: “If there is a power that has ever surrendered itself purely out of some altruistic sense of justice, I have yet to come across it.”

Coates holds that every nation and individual generates myths in order to obscure the hard truths they do not wish to face. “All of us need myths,” he writes in his memoir, The Beautiful Struggle. Elsewhere he elaborates, arguing that myths fulfill the helpful role of getting us not to see the past as it really was:

I know now that all people hunger for a noble, unsullied past. . . . All of us dream of some other time when things were so simple. I know that that hunger is a retreat from the knotty present into myth and that what ultimately awaits those who retreat into fairy tales, who seek refuge in the mad pursuit to be made great again, in the image of a greatness that never was, is tragedy.

In Between the World and Me, Coates combines his cynical view of human nature with his penetrating observations about the role of myth in sustaining people’s positive conceptions of themselves. He writes that his education, particularly in history, began “the process that would . . . break all dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us.” For Coates, myths never survive contact with the facts of history.

There are, in sum, two sides to Coates: the moralist historian of the United States on the one hand, and the cynical philosopher of human nature on the other. Coates the historian argues that America is a criminal nation, that whites have committed unspeakable (perhaps unforgivable) atrocities against blacks, and that America’s perception of itself as a bastion of liberty is nothing more than a myth. Coates the philosopher seems to respond by saying: Yes, very well, but then all nations are criminal nations, all people with power wield it tyrannically over those beneath them, and all nations — indeed all people — need their myths. Unfortunately, the two sides never actually enter into conversation with each other, so the tensions between them go unresolved.

It is not that Coates has contradicted himself, but that his work leaves readers with a series of positions that do not yield a clear conclusion. It is unclear, for instance, why Coates would continually point out that America is a nation founded on plunder if America is unexceptional in that regard. After all, it is different to say, “American has committed awful crimes” than to say, “Most countries, including America, have committed awful crimes.” Coates has made both types of statements, but the emphasis is always on the former. He rarely mentions the crimes of other nations; his books explore the oppression black Americans have faced, not the oppression suffered by other peoples. Why?

Coates has offered a Chomsky-esque reply to this question, arguing that the reason he focuses on America’s failings is because he is an American citizen. As he puts it, “I’m an American, so I write about America, and race has a place in that.” Conservative defenders of the United States have a powerful rejoinder to this argument. They will readily concede to Coates that the history of American slavery is shameful. But they will point out that the very desire to enslave others is universal, that slavery has existed all over the globe ever since the development of agriculture, and that the movement for abolition only arose in a few European countries (and their colonies) in the recent past. America’s relationship to slavery is special — not for having it, but for destroying it. Our moral assessments of the nation, the conservatives conclude, should reflect this historical reality.

As we’ve seen, Coates (as political philosopher) actually grants most of the conservatives’ premises; he just rejects their pro-America conclusion. But he offers no explanation as to why. If the desire for domination is universal — and both sides of this debate agree that it is — why is it that some societies broke the historical trend by making efforts to diminish oppression and promote the equal treatment of all their citizens? Conservatives have a range of theories to explain this phenomenon: It was the Enlightenment, they’ll say, or the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, or the benign influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Such theories may or may not be compelling, but they are at least attempts to answer a question that Coates has not grappled with.

Coates’s concession that evil is innate to human beings needs to be reconciled in some way with his beliefs about the wicked essence of the United States. He cannot simply concede the former point without somehow incorporating it into his larger worldview. If (as he says) evil is universal, he has to provide an account of why America managed to abolish an evil institution that had existed for thousands of years. What was it about the United States that permitted this accomplishment? Should the fact that America did abolish slavery, in rebuke to the traditions of most past societies, soften our judgment of its history? And what indeed is America’s essence, assuming it has such a thing? Oppression and freedom coexisted at the moment of its founding, but why is it that as time progressed the former withered away and the latter grew? There is much to commend in Coates, but his work does not answer these questions. It merely raises them.