Reparations: Ta-Nehisi Coates' "White Guilt" vs Liberalism and the Unencumbered Self

Charles K. Rowley: In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_01_1_rowley.pdf

In the video of his reparations debate with Jeffrey Goldberg, Coates at one point says, "You're responsible for the heritage." Continuing to harp on blame, his discussion of the case for reparations 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)

Coates "logic." If membership in a constructed group is ascribed to a person, that person is responsible for what that group did in the past. Another example:

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 . . . (Emphasis added)

It is true that scripture (in some places) supports this "reckless dispensation of guilt"*, which blames descendants for a situation which they had no part in bringing about:

Exodus 34:6-7 - And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, [7] Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, ... that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.  (Emphasis added)

But as has been said earlier in these articles, this sort of illiberal thinking belongs to a reactionary interpretation** of religion (Instead, says Ezekiel below, I will judge you ... every one according to his ways), not to public or political reform.

The first post in this weblog asserted that America was founded on liberal principles. According to Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy, one of the meanings of "liberty," and a principle of liberalism, is "the unencumbered self.":

I REJECT the notion of racial kinship. I do so in order to avoid its burdens and to be free to claim what the distinguished political theorist Michael Sandel labels "the unencumbered self." The unencumbered self is free and independent, "unencumbered by aims and attachments it does not choose for itself," Sandel writes. "Freed from the sanctions of custom and tradition and inherited status, unbound by moral ties antecedent to choice . . ." (Emphasis added)

Sandel, arguing for collectivism instead of autonomy, continues: The unencumbered self reflects a deracinated liberalism that "cannot account for certain moral and political obligations that we commonly recognize, even prize" — "obligations of solidarity, religious duties, and other moral ties that may claim us for reasons unrelated to a choice," which are "indispensable aspects of our moral and political experience."

For reasons unrelated to a choice. This is the antithesis of the free American spirit, with its characteristic lack of servility.

Kennedy argues that Sandel's theme (which essentially parallels Coates' theme) promotes "identity" at the expense of the liberty of the single person:

Sandel's objection to those who, like me, seek the unencumbered self is that they fail to appreciate loyalties and responsibilities that should be accorded moral force partly because they influence our identity, such that living by these attachments "is inseparable from understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are -- as members of this family or city or nation or people, as bearers of that history, as citizens of this republic." (Emphasis added)

Curiously, such particularist arguments for "identity" resemble Hegel's line of reasoning in support of German nationalism:

The self-consciousness of one particular Nation is the vehicle for the ... development of the collective spirit; ... in it, the Spirit of the Time invests its Will.  Against this Will, other national minds have no rights: that Nation dominates the World.

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)

The skidding logic of this passage is prime Coates-think. Somehow, what the South wanted in the 1860s (and the North sacrificed its sons to oppose) becomes what the Founders really intended (and Lincoln's disagreement is so trivial that it need not even be mentioned, much less refuted).

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."


The Harsh Illiberalism of The Case for Reparations:

Fritz Stern explained the title of his The Failure of Illiberalism:

It seems to me that the character of Imperial Germany after 1878 can best be caught in the term "illiberal." [[I am using the term as the dictionary defines it: "Not befitting a free man . . . not generous in respect to the opinions, rights, or liberties of others; narrow-minded." The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1967)]] - Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism, p. xvii

Coates, in his unsupported, sweeping, use of such terms as "responsibility," "crime," and "guilt," exemplifies the illiberal mindset, which is "not generous in respect to the opinions, rights, or liberties of others." Such bad writing, when making a case for reparations, was a fatal error.


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(*)Frederick C. Crews, Follies of the Wise, quoted in Tikkun, 1994

(**)Eze 18:25ff:

Yet ye say, The way of the Lord is not fair. ... Again, when the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive.
Because he considereth, and turneth away from all his transgressions that he hath committed, he shall surely live, he shall not die. ... Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel, every one according to his ways, saith the Lord God. Repent, and turn yourselves from all your transgressions; so iniquity shall not be your ruin. ... Cast away from you all your transgressions, whereby ye have transgressed; and make you a new heart and a new spirit: for why will ye die, O house of Israel?
For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord GOD: wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye.