Article in The Atlantic Seems to Cultivate Guilt in order to Leverage Policy

If one looks at the most admirable efforts by activists to overcome racial oppression in the United States, one finds people who yearn for justice, not merely for the advancement of a particular racial group. - Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy, My Race Problem—and Ours

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” - Martin Luther King, Letter from Birmingham Jail

The purpose of public policy in this area can be one of two things. The first is a program focused on trying to improve in real terms the lives of those who are poorly off and those born into circumstances that are likely to lead to their being poorly off adults, proceeding with the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that such programs will disproportionately benefit black Americans, as they should. The second option is a symbolic political process designed to confer a degree of psychic satisfaction on relatively well-off men and women such as Ta-Nehisi Coates. - Kevin D. Williamson, The Case against Reparations 

A personal note: I had always, without particular examination, considered myself to belong to the school of American thought which opposed racism and supported a humanitarian safety net. But sometime around the beginning of the last decade of the last century, I began to realize that many who claimed to belong to that school of thought were telling me, White is bad, male is bad, European is bad. And I began seeking a more liberal outlook, one which did not ask me to practice self-hatred. As seen below, “white guilt” is still alive and well in the pages of a national magazine.*

There are two forms which a citizen's campaign can take in American politics: reform, and revenge. One calls on fellow citizens to take action for the public good. The other seeks to advance one segment of the public, which is valorized; and to adversely affect another segment of the public, which is called out for its sins.**
 
Ta-Nehisi Coates' article in The Atlantic, The Case for Reparations, has been widely praised by well-intended people as a fresh approach to the relationship between the United States and one of the many ethnicities which comprise its population. They believe it to be a worthy addition to other American civil rights movements, such as that which gave American women the right to vote, and the great crusade by Martin Luther King which led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Such crusades act in the name of what George Washington, in the Farewell Address, called "the public good." Their language is universalist, unifying, and uniting: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” King declared. And President Barack Hussein Obama observed, concerning his second inauguration, "we're all in this together."

Mr. Coates' language is radically different from the language of the great reformers:

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. ... What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

Black nationalists, “white supremacy,” white guilt. One can see Mr. Coates' faction, and another faction which appears to be damnably evil. That faction, rather confusingly, appears to be "the entire American people":

The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.

At this point the question must be raised, can an argument which is in many ways incoherent and self-contradictory be considered persuasive? Mr. Coates appears to be asking for altruism—voluntary granting of possibly trillions of dollars in reparations—from people of intentional bad faith. He indicts "the entire American people," among whom his own ethnicity is included. That is self-contradictory. Is he also including Hispanics, Native Americans, and East Asians in the wickedness "fundamental to America?" Are these other minorities also implicated in the "crime" of supremacy he describes above? [PM Carpenter retorts: "I want all my brothers and sisters of other Native-American blood to receive same. In lieu of that, cash will do. Lots of it."]

Kevin D. Williamson, in a splendidly argued post, suggests that Mr. Coates' hidden argument is concealed tribalism: My interests are inseparable from my race, and irrevocably opposed to yours:

A racial disadvantage is only one of many kinds of disadvantages that can be inherited — why should it be the one around which we organize ourselves? ... But dealing with that reality inescapably entails treating people as individuals, and treating people as individuals makes reparations morally and intellectually impossible — even if we accept in toto Mr. Coates’s argument that the brutal imposition of white-supremacist policies is the entire basis for the relative social positions of blacks and whites in the United States in 2014. Which is to say: Even if we accept the facts of aggregate advantage and disadvantage with their roots in historical injustice, the aggregate cannot be converted into the collective inasmuch as neither advantage nor disadvantage is universal on either side nor linked to a straightforward chain of causality. Some blacks are born into college-educated, well-off households, and some whites are born to heroin-addicted single mothers, and even the totality of racial crimes throughout American history does not mean that one of these things matters and one does not.

Once that fact is acknowledged, then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress.

Mr. Coates' position seems to be that only black people's disadvantages and poverty matter, because they come from a moral sin which must be punished—the moral sin of "the entire American people." This faux moralism obliterates all other considerations. One of these considerations is that disadvantage and poverty, which liberal concern for the public good should cause us to want to remedy, are not solely or even primarily, when all of us are considered, confined to Mr. Coates' people, but to all the races of the United States.

A policy which leaves everyone out except one's own in-group does not seek justice. It seeks exceptional status (as his reference to black nationalists may suggest). Randall Kennedy argued, in My Race Problem—and Ours:

Unless inhibited, every person and group will tend toward beliefs and practices that are self-aggrandizing. This is certainly true of those who inherit a dominant status. But it is also true of those who inherit a subordinate status. Surely one of the most striking features of human dynamics is the alacrity with which those who have been oppressed will oppress whomever they can once the opportunity presents itself. Because this is so, it is not premature to worry about the possibility that blacks or other historically subordinated groups will abuse power to the detriment of others.

 Mr. Coates portrays his argument as "healing," but sets his own faction against "the entire American people." He describes the American people as indelibly insistent on a crime, “white supremacy,” but expects the same people to be generous, altruistic, and public-spirited in granting reparations. He has persuaded many well-meaning commentators that his article is in the tradition of reform arising out of the spirit of "we the people," but uses a language of condemnation, guilt, bad faith, crime and enmity utterly alien to that tradition. His is the language of confusion, incoherence, and self-contradiction: No one should be persuaded by it.

/********************************************************************/

(*)According to this doctrine, America had been responsible for numerous crimes and misdeeds through its history for which it deserved punishment and chastisement. White Americans had enslaved blacks and committed genocide against Native Americans. They had oppressed women and tyrannized minority groups, such as the Japanese who had been interned in camps during World War II. They had been harsh and unfeeling toward the poor. By our greed, we had despoiled the environment and were consuming a disproportionate share of the world's wealth and resources. We had coddled dictators abroad and violated human rights out of our irrational fear of communism. [...The punitive left] sought to cultivate guilt in order to leverage policy. [...We should not] "accept the notion that we can only make a better world for others by moving backwards ourselves." - James Piereson "Punitive Liberalism" June 28, 2004
(**)There is a model for the second, us-vs-them approach, but it is not a democratic one. The Communist Manifesto ends: "Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains."


The previous article on this weblog, Ta-Nehisi Coates vs. Lincoln and MLK on "White Supremacy", documented Abraham Lincoln's extensive refutation of Coates' charge that the United States was founded on the Original Sin of intentional slavery. As an Addendum, John McWhorter's observations may be apropos:

Take even two random years a good while ago now. In 2001, a traveling museum exhibit of the Henrietta Marie slave-ship artifacts was launched and broke attendance records in 20 cities, while at a centennial celebration of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, organizers highlighted the racially discriminatory side of the original event. ... in York, Pennsylvania, to counter a white supremacist group that had travelled there to demonstrate, 400 people, white and black, held a unity rally. One could go on, year by year.

Despite frequent claims that America “doesn’t want to talk about race,” we talk about it 24/7 amidst ringing declamations against racism on all forms. ... And let’s not forget recent major release films such as The Help, 12 Years a Slave, and The Butler.

Can we really say that these are signs of a nation in denial about race, racism, and its history?

Yet for writers like Coates, somehow none of this is enough. A shoe has yet to drop. We remain an “America that looks away,” “ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.”