Did You Feel Guilty When You Celebrated the Fourth This Year?

No. You didn't. And the guy who conducted the "Reparations" faux civil rights campaign, in the pages of The Atlantic, is summering in Paris.

In The Case for Reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates announces: 

What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

Coates' "White Supremacy" / "Reparations" series of articles appeared to be in the great call-for-renewal tradition of the suffragists and of Martin Luther King's campaign to end Jim Crow. Au contraire. It was civil rights theater. Civil rights spectacle. Designed to increase the circulation of The Atlantic, and to solidify Ta-Nehisi Coates' standing as a premiere print-media commentator.

Americans got it. They humored him. They watched his puff-ball televised "interview" with Jeffrey Goldberg. They responded in the hundreds to the comment site set up by The Atlantic. And they had the grand hot dogs, baked beans, cherry-bomb-detonating Fourth they usually do.

And that's a good thing. There's much to be said for the wised-up, ironic response to egregious dastardy. Very little that is good, constructive, and bettering about "this good free country of ours," escaped the wide swath of destruction, wreaked by Mr. Coates' campaign to seek justice for the "crime that implicates the entire American people."

This is how Coates, by implication, invalidates his nation's inspiring founding:

One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one’s ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte. A nation outlives its generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delaware, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, but we are still paying out the pensions. If Thomas Jefferson’s genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally Hemings’s body. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.

By contrast, 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)

One of the great glories of being human is that the good men do lives after them, while the evil is oft interred with their bones.* Lincoln was stirred by the poetry of the Founding; Coates is deaf to it. All he sees is the Founders' personal flaws. Our wisdom literature is profound when it says, "Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest; ... if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."

That is how you get a better world. That is why I am glad we Americans went right ahead and celebrated the Fourth, even though Ta-Nehisi Coates said we shouldn't.

And to what purpose Coates' reckless act of destruction? By his logic we would be hypocrites to celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday.**

"Ben," one of the commenters, noted:

The article's prognosis doesn't follow from its diagnosis. Given that ... African-Americans were systematically denied economic participation and security, and that that oppression continues to happen in ever-changing forms in the present day, the solution is: . . . a national dialogue? About coming to grips with America's past? So we don't have "a la carte patriotism" anymore?

No. What is needed to combat what the article documents is for African-Americans to meaningfully participate in the day-to-day political economic life of the US. But that would require an analysis of political dynamics and economic institutions which the article is completely silent on. What forms of economic organization for African-American workers that would allow capital accumulation without having to go through multi-national institutions that are racist and, in any case, constructed to steal as much as possible from the non-elite? What kinds of political behavior, both inside and outside the electoral system, would be most likely to get that system to change in favor of more equitable treatment?

Calling for a national dialogue and an honest accounting with America's past, with George Washington the slave owner, is not about answering the above questions. It is treating cancer with prayer.

I suspect Coates knows this. And I don't want my hunch on why he didn't publish that article to be true.

From a previous post:

J. D. Vance: "Coates cherry-picks data to score emotional points instead of carefully building an argument for reparations."

Coates' intent is apparently to fix the blame rather than fix the problem. Vance again: "There’s no talk, however, of what to do now, how reparations would help, or why we ought to focus on settling an old score instead of charting a new course. ... But it must be said: breaking hearts is far easier than healing them." (Emphasis added)

Ta-Nehisi Coates' Reparations series bore little resemblance to our nation's civil rights campaigns. It was more like trolling.

America, your ironic response to someone who threw "white guilt" in your face was wise and good. May you still be able to recognize, and honor, a real civil rights campaign when one appears.

Where there is no vision, the people perish. - Proverbs 29:18


(*) Apologies for egregious misquote of Shakespeare. - Act 3, Scene ii, "Julius Caesar"

(**) Wikipedia mentions: "A tape recording of several of [Martin Luther] King's extramarital liaisons, excerpted from FBI wiretaps . . ."

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."