An Open Letter to James Fallows

Mr. Fallows:

You recently wrote:

The real importance of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Reparations article, which is still attracting deserved attention, is that it is not mainly about repayment in a literal, financial sense. Instead, as I understand it, it’s about a larger historical reckoning or awareness. “Truth and reconciliation,” you might call it.

In other words, the value is the moral case—that America has not, as you imply in the following paragraph, "attempted to face its past." But what Coates means by asking Americans to recognize the implications of their history rejects Lincoln's view, which is that that history is of a nation "conceived in liberty." In the video of his reparations debate with Jeffrey Goldberg, Coates at one point says, "You're responsible for the heritage." His discussion of the case for reparations asserts (contra Lincoln, as we shall see below) wasn't just an inescapable historical circumstance which existed at the founding, and alleges "white guilt":

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. (Emphasis added)

In the guise of historical reckoning—as if we didn't know that many of the Founders had slaves—Coates asserts that this fact invalidates the principles Lincoln praised:

Lincoln, in his letter to Henry L. Pierce, noted the universal character of the Founders' principles:

All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression. (Emphasis added)

Coates, by contrast, seems to believe that this is hypocrisy:

The Civil War—the most lethal conflict in American history—boiled down to the right to raise an empire based on slaveholding and white supremacy. What had not yet clicked for me was precisely how essential enslavement was to America, that its foundational nature explained the Civil War's body count. (Emphasis added)

This is well-known invalid inference. To believe that the character of the person—in this case, the Founders—presenting the argument invalidates the argument (as when Hitler dismissed Relativity as "Jewish science") is classic ad hominem.

This is an example of the first way in which Coates' reparations articles constitute terrible journalism: Argument by fallacy.

A second is numerous passages so convoluted that they demonstrate no conceivable point. They "work" for Coates because his readers, for the most part, seem to accept his insistence that they support one of his themes, such as that "Slavery Made America". An example from that article:

The first 200 pages or so [of James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom] show that the War was about not only the perpetuation of "African slavery," but its expansion. McPherson quotes directly from the mouths of secessionists who have no problem laying out bondage as their primary casus belli. McPherson shows the essential place enslavement held in the economy of the South and in America at large. Thus the conflagration that follows does not appear out of thin air. ...
Conservatively speaking, 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in the Civil War, two percent of the American population at the time. Twenty percent of all Southern white men of military age died in the War. Until Vietnam, more people had died in the Civil War than all other American wars combined. An interest which compelled that amount of death and suffering must be something more than vague disagreement over a "way of life." (Emphasis added)

Coates' implied conclusion—that the above passage shows that the tragic Civil War body count reveals that "America at large" wanted the "perpetuation" and "expansion" of African slavery—is crackpot.

He doesn't reject Lincoln's explicit statement, in the Second Inaugural Address, that America entered the war to prevent the expansion of slavery:

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.

He ignores it. (This weblog has documented other instances in which Coates ignores Lincoln's arguments here and here.)

This is the third (and final, for today) example of Coates' flawed journalism: Untrustworthy evidence.

In The Case for Reparations Coates documents criminal exclusion of African Americans from middle class home ownership in Chicago:

The devastating effects are cogently outlined by Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro in their 1995 book, Black Wealth/White Wealth:

Locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history, African Americans who desired and were able to afford home ownership found themselves consigned to central-city communities where their investments were affected by the “self-fulfilling prophecies” of the FHA appraisers: cut off from sources of new investment[,] their homes and communities deteriorated and lost value in comparison to those homes and communities that FHA appraisers deemed desirable.

Coates draws two sweeping generalizations from this. One, which we'll discuss below, is that this applies nationwide. There aren't more liberal areas where middle class blacks live in middle class homes in middle class communities (responsible journalism would call for this to be supported by the various independent nationwide surveys which exist). Coates' evidence, as he published it, is anecdotal.

The other global generalization, which Coates bases on the above flawed evidence, is that adopting middle class values and middle class behavior would have no benefit:

One thread of thinking in the African American community holds that these depressing numbers partially stem from cultural pathologies that can be altered through individual grit and exceptionally good behavior. (In 2011, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, responding to violence among young black males, put the blame on the family: “Too many men making too many babies they don’t want to take care of, and then we end up dealing with your children.” Nutter turned to those presumably fatherless babies: “Pull your pants up and buy a belt, because no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.”) The thread is as old as black politics itself. It is also wrong. The kind of trenchant racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable. The essence of American racism is disrespect. And in the wake of the grim numbers, we see the grim inheritance. (Emphasis added)

Coates offers no support whatever for his absolute assertion that better behavior will never bring a better outcome. He just says it.

As for the previous item, a claimed nationwide racist housing policy, one of Coates' "arguments" was:

What are the roots of our housing policy? White supremacy. What are the roots of white supremacy in America? Justification for enslavement.

Argument by extreme. Jonathan Chait was likewise perplexed by this characteristic tendency to pick one extreme or another, denying the middle, where things usually lie: "I was clarifying that Obama (and Bill Cosby) see the culture of poverty as a part of the problem of poverty, as opposed to its entirety, as Ryan sees it, and also opposed to zero percent of the problem, as Coates sees it."

Does anecdotal evidence refute anecdotal evidence? No, but one falsifying example refutes a claimed universal. At a meeting in Salem, the state capital of Oregon, the speaker, a civil rights activist from the East, asked the audience where black people lived in their town. The audience was puzzled. Finally someone said, "No particular place. They live everywhere, like the rest of us." The speaker, surprised, paused, then said, "Keep them there."