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 . . ."