Ta-Nehisi Coates Doesn’t Understand Racism
by Benjamin Studebaker
Ta-Nehisi Coates recently attacked Bernie Sanders for refusing to support reparations for black Americans. Coates has been trying to put race reparations on the American political agenda for a while. Coates knows a great deal about the many horrible, immoral ways that the United States government has exploited and expropriated its black population throughout its history. But Coates is a journalist, not a political theorist, and over the last few days I’ve identified some elementary problems in the way he conceptualizes racism as a political force that indicate that there is a lot of political theory he just has not read.
When asked if he thinks reparations are worth considering, Bernie Sanders gave the following reply:
No, I don’t think so. First of all, its likelihood of getting through Congress is nil. Second of all, I think it would be very divisive. The real issue is when we look at the poverty rate among the African American community, when we look at the high unemployment rate within the African American community, we have a lot of work to do.
So I think what we should be talking about is making massive investments in rebuilding our cities, in creating millions of decent paying jobs, in making public colleges and universities tuition-free, basically targeting our federal resources to the areas where it is needed the most and where it is needed the most is in impoverished communities, often African American and Latino.
Coates counters by claiming that Sanders’ willingness to help the poor does not address racism:
This is the “class first” approach, originating in the myth that racism and socialism are necessarily incompatible. But raising the minimum wage doesn’t really address the fact that black men without criminal records have about the same shot at low-wage work as white men with them; nor can making college free address the wage gap between black and white graduates. Housing discrimination, historical and present, may well be the fulcrum of white supremacy. Affirmative action is one of the most disputed issues of the day. Neither are addressed in the “racial justice” section of Sanders platform.
Sanders’s anti-racist moderation points to a candidate who is not merely against reparations, but one who doesn’t actually understand the argument.
Coates thinks that Sanders is ignorant of the racial history or doesn’t understand Coates’ argument. Nothing could be further from the truth–Sanders is not rejecting reparations as policy because he does not recognize the severity of the damage that has been done to blacks and continues to be done to blacks. Sanders is rejecting reparations because he understands that race and class intersect, that race cannot be dealt with separately from class.
Consider an everyday American racist. In contemporary America, most racists don’t very often make their attitudes explicit–they don’t argue that blacks are in some way inherently genetically inferior, like they might have done 100 years ago. Today racism is generally implicit–whites accuse black culture of being violent, they accuse blacks of welfare dependency, they accuse blacks of being lazy. Essentially they ascribe the disparities between blacks and whites in our society to black behaviors and choices rather than systems of oppression. This set of beliefs insulates racists from having to confront their own racism and from having to potentially support policies that might rectify the disparities.
It’s very difficult to stop people from holding implicitly racist views, because the system of oppression generates the conditions that produce the kind of black people that reinforce these negative stereotypes in the minds of white racists. Because blacks have been denied the opportunities and resources they need to succeed in our society, they are more likely to turn to crime, gangs, and so on. They are more likely to be stuck in low income jobs, their families are more likely to succumb to the pressures of poverty and fragment, and their families are more likely to reproduce cycles of abuse. Racists see the results of racism, and they attribute those results to black culture instead of to the racism. This allows them to continue to do nothing, perpetuating the oppression, reproducing the results, and reproducing the false justification for doing nothing. Here’s a visual aid:
See how race and class are both inextricably linked in this account? Racism keeps blacks poor, but racism is also perpetuated and excused by black poverty and its negative social consequences, which are instead wrongfully misattributed to black culture.
So what happens if you do reparations? Reparations give blacks a one time shot in the arm, but afterwards, white people are going to be even less likely to blame systems of oppression for poor black outcomes. They will say “well, they got reparations, so now they have no excuse–it’s like we said, it’s all about their culture, they need to look at themselves”. Before too long, you’re back at square one, except it’s worse because you’ll have an even harder time getting people to acknowledge the problem. To put a stop to racism, we have to break this cycle in a permanent way, in a way that is about creating a good future for blacks in America rather than rectifying a past that can never truly be rectified anyway. How do we do that? Well, we need to eliminate the evidence that racists use to justify continuing to be racist, and that means we need to lift blacks out of poverty. Cutting Will Smith or Bill Cosby a check in the name of reparations doesn’t help us end the cycle of poverty that fuels and perpetuates the cycle of racism. To this point, it’s been really hard to get people to embrace policies that lift large numbers of people out of poverty and keep them out. Why?
There’s another link between racism and classism. As we know, not all poor people in America are black. There are also poor whites. Poor whites may not be victims of both race and class oppression, but class oppression manages to do a number on them too. One of the ways our society prevents itself from doing anything about the poverty oppression creates for both whites and blacks is by using race to divide and conquer different groups of poor people. If you don’t consider class at all, if you instead primarily or exclusively consider race, then poor white and blacks will see each other as competitors for the same slice of the economic pie. You can see this in the presidential election right now. People like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are extremely popular with poor white voters even though their economic platforms will distribute more wealth away from poor whites and toward the rich. Why? Because Trump and Cruz promise to protect poor whites from “those people”, the “47%”, the “welfare queens”. There are many different coded ways to refer to poor blacks and Hispanics, but no matter what term is used, what’s really going on is always the same–poor whites are being told that they have to vote against redistribution because it will go to blacks and Hispanics and thereby perpetuate a broken “culture of dependency”. In this way, poor whites are coaxed into voting against their own interests. In the meantime, poor blacks see that poor whites are opposing them politically and this deepens mutual mistrust between the two groups.
Emphasizing reparations only serves to reinforce this division, because it explicitly only targets blacks. This makes it even easier for implicitly racist politicians to argue that the policies the left proposes to counter racism will expropriate poor and working class whites. It makes it easier for the right to split the left’s coalition for redistribution. This not only prevents additional redistribution from happening, it makes it much easier for extant redistribution to be rolled back. Bill Clinton, who is loved by the black community in the United States, signed welfare reform into law. Welfare reform was about ending a “culture of dependency” by cutting welfare spending so that this money could eventually be returned to the rich in the form of tax cuts (such as those passed by George W. Bush). Welfare reform was passed in 1996, and in the years that followed the wealth gap between whites and blacks increased dramatically:
Bernie Sanders understands that to break the cycles of poverty and racism, the left needs to build a broad, solidaristic coalition that includes significant numbers of white people. One way to do this is to propose welfare spending that is not explicitly race-based. As we can see in the above chart, blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately poor, and welfare spending will disproportionately benefit them, but by allowing poor whites to also be beneficiaries, the left shows that it is committed to opposing oppression in all forms for all people. This undermines the right’s ability to use race to split the poor. Sanders and Trump are competing for many of the same voters–people who feel that the political system is not looking out for them. Sanders invites poor whites to join him in a coalition with blacks and Hispanics to rollback the power of corporations and the wealthy to create a more just and sustainable distribution of wealth. Trump tries to tell those same poor white voters that Sanders will just take their hard-earned money and give it to “those people”. Those who support reparations have the very best of intentions, but in real political terms they are helping Donald Trump.
Why doesn’t Coates see this? The evidence suggests that Coates doesn’t have an intersectional understanding of race, that he sees racism as an independent form of oppression that is disconnected from class. When Coates claims that Sanders’ policies don’t address the fact that blacks make less than whites with similar levels of education, or housing discrimination, or the fact that blacks are more likely to end up in low wage jobs, he shows that he doesn’t understand how racist thinking is perpetuated. These bad things are likely to happen to blacks both because of the cycle of poverty and because of the crucial ways the cycle of poverty reinforces racist attitudes, thereby perpetuating systemic racism.
Coates misses this because Coates is mostly unfamiliar with socialist academic literature and with current debates and discourses within socialist political movements. In an interview with “This American Life” on NPR, Coates was asked to explain the term “bougie”. Most socialist activists can tell you that “bougie” is short for “bourgeois”–a person who is bougie is a member of the bourgeoisie, and an activity or place that is “bougie” is affiliated with the beliefs and attitudes of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie are the capitalist class–they are the beneficiaries of class oppression. This is basic stuff for anyone who is a member of the left or who has read the left’s core literature. Here’s how Coates answered this question:
Neil Drumming: “OK. That’s like–I feel like for This American Life, you’re going to have to explain that.’
Ta-Nehisi Coates: “What bougie means? So ‘bougie’ is a term that black people use–and I guess white people have used it now, ’cause I see white people using it–which I think people think is interchangeable with ‘snob.’ But I actually don’t think [that’s right]…a bougie’s a snob who looks down…bougie people want to be part of a crowd…they want to be part of the right crowd. So for instance, I don’t want to put my son in some exclusive club or something, literally like some sort of societal something or other. Do you know what I mean?”
Drumming: “So bougie is a status thing. It’s about…”
Coates: “Yeah, I don’t care about any of that. I actually don’t care about my status…I don’t go to a nice gym so that I can then tell you I go to a nice gym. I don’t have any concern about being seen with the right people. You know what I’m saying? Like, I don’t have that. I don’t need to be at the right parties…Like, I don’t need any of that…Snobbery, to me, is about, like, things [laughter] And not about people at all. In fact, it’s much worse than bougie.”
It’s very clear from this exchange that Coates doesn’t know what the word “bougie” means, which indicates that he hasn’t read very many socialists or full-blown Marxists, and if he has he certainly hasn’t had very many conversations about this literature with people who have. There’s nothing wrong with that–there are lots of things I haven’t read and there are lots of things you haven’t read. But if Coates is going to accuse a leading socialist politician of not understanding race grievances, he might start by engaging with socialist literature so that he understands where socialists are coming from on race.
There is an important debate going on within the left between those who think that poverty and racism are mutually reinforcing and those who think that racism causes poverty but that poverty has nothing to do with racism. To participate constructively in this debate, it’s important for us to understand that no one in this argument does not recognize the seriousness of racism. No one denies the horrific mistreatment of blacks both by the American government and in American society. This is a debate about how racism works and about what kinds of strategies, tactics, and policies are most effective in combating it. We need a comprehensive understanding of racism that is tied into a theory of how to respond. In all of Coates’ material, he seems to think it is sufficient to point out that blacks have been treated really badly, as if this were itself prima facie evidence that his strategy for dealing with racism is the correct one. We need to have a much more sophisticated debate about how race works, how our politics works, how poverty and inequality work, and how all of these things fit together intersectionally to oppress many different groups of people in our society in ways that are different but also mutually interrelated. We have to consider race, class, and poverty as parts of a system, not as isolates, where causation may go not just in one direction but in both directions. Coates’ work to this point is only important and groundbreaking if you are completely unfamiliar with the reasons why race is still an important issue. Many people on the left, Bernie Sanders included, are far beyond that point–Bernie Sanders marched with Martin Luther King 50 years ago, for pity’s sake. The facts about how blacks have been severely ill-treated for centuries are not new to him or to most educated people who pay attention. We are trying to take this debate to the next level, and people like Coates keep oversimplifying the issue in a reductive and unhelpful way, damaging the very causes they claim to care so much about.
When I watched him what really struck me is that he really just wants to sell books and in the process destroy his son’s notion that there could ever be any good white people. I personally can’t feel that he has truly ever experienced much of what he claims to identify with. As long as the poor and uneducated won’t responsibly plan families they will hold those that do hostage, and thinking people see that, we don’t care what color you are. While I could never vote for Bernie, I do really like him. While I can be very sympathetic and generous to those around me in need, I want it to be my choice, not forced on me by do-gooders who only do good with other peoples money. People are just sick and tired of crybabies who see opportunity in dividing people. If being black and growing up in poverty prevents success, explain Ben Carson. His mother just would not let him let his circumstances be an excuse.
But suppose all poor people did what you propose. Would that lead to a greater amount of total opportunity in our society No, of course not–someone would still be at the bottom. Now, if you’re one of those who believes that all those at the bottom deserve to be there, just come out and say so. As for “forced on you” by “do-gooders”, I guess that means you’re against all public services. No? All right, then.
It’s unfortunate that in America, the problems associated with poverty and lack of opportunity have been largely associated with race by many instead of economic circumstance. At the same time, those enjoying higher levels of prosperity have incorrectly associated it more with internal special ability rather than systemic privileges that grants certain ethnicities boosts while hindering others.
However, exponential advances in technology automation and globalism are removing all built in advantages and those feeling the loss of their status will feel much greater shock than those who have already been deprived.
Economic shock is coming to America and other 1st world countries that will democratize the poverty levels as the middle class is eroded and then it will start to get clearer than it’s an economic problem more than it is racial. Perhaps then the majority will wise up and stop voting against their own interests, and no longer view those who can actually help them as the bogey man.
Presuming that reparations would result in a one-off consumption boost and no lasting changes is implicitly presuming that their culture would drag them back into a state of poverty. You’re parroting the feelings of your so-called “everyday American racist” by damning the black community to a state of poverty post reparations, without defining what reparations might be and why they might not be effective.
I make no such suggestion either explicitly or implicitly–one-off reparations would not give poor people who have had limited access to educational opportunities, often been victims of abuse, and had disrupted upbringings the kinds of skills or experiences necessary to help them find good, high-wage, stable jobs and climb permanently out of poverty. The material disadvantages that poor people suffer from cannot be cured with a one-off cash boost. It has nothing to do with culture–reparations underestimate the strength of the material oppression. It is for this reason that many lottery winners often lose their winnings quickly–in many cases they have not been given access to the educational tools necessary to effectively use their winnings to permanently raise their living standards.
If we were to say that reparations took the form of a more comprehensive and permanent program that lifted black families out of poverty and kept them out on a permanent basis (providing black children with high quality education while providing their parents with good jobs, strong wages, and spare time), how could we possibly justify to poor whites and poor Hispanics their exclusion? What’s more, if this reparations program extends to black families who come from affluent backgrounds, how can we justify to the rest of our poor the extension of further resources to affluent black families while their own families remain poor? This kind of proposal is not serious, it does not engender support from a wide enough social coalition. The right way to deal with black poverty is to deal with it in tandem with poverty more generally so that we can build a broad solidaristic coalition for redistribution.
[…] some free advice to liberal bloggers, the headline “Ta-Neshi Coates Does Not Understand Racism” reveals more about your understanding of race than […]
I agree with your central argument, but I find you title and many of your points condescending and disrespectful.
Provocative titles and claims are a necessary evil because they attract readers.
You take away from your own credibility when you tear others down. I only point this out since I actually think you are making important arguments in your essay, but I was hesitant to share the article on FB because of your title and some of your statements that read less than respectful.
I didn’t fling ad hominem attacks at him–my criticisms are based on positions he has taken and things he has said. I suppose I could have said his ideas were ignorant rather than him personally, but would that really have helped much?
I’m just giving you the feedback that I think many more folks would be reposting the Coates article on FB if it didn’t have that title. Yes, it grabs your attention, but I don’t think it serves you in spreading your ideas to pander towards the eye catching headlines. Your ideas are strong enough on their own.
You might be right about that. I’ll try to remember that going forward.
Also, you use the term “ignorant” without recognizing that we are all ignorant in some ways. I think Coates has brought a perspective on the historical implications of racism and slavery that most Americans are “ignorant” about. To say he is “ignorant” in your realm of academia is condescending and disrespectful. Uniformed perhaps.
What else should I call someone who speaks with authority about a subject that someone knows little about? We are all ignorant about some things, but not all of us claim authority in areas where we don’t have any. Coates routinely overemphasizes how thoroughly he has read about race theory and its intersection with class, and people should be made aware of that.
BTW – Sorry to post only critical comments. Really enjoy your essays and thinking!
That’s totally fine, I am happy to have the reader feedback and appreciate your readership. If my readers always agreed with every decision I made or every position I took, I wouldn’t be as pleased to have them as I am.
Looking at your title I think “What Ta-nehisi Coates Misses About Racism” rather than a more dismissive title could have had the same punch without implying he has no understanding of racism. K. Done ranting. 🙂
Dude, I appreciate you as a white person taking the time to grapple with the various issues associated with racism. You could very easily ignore them and continue on living your life as a white person, but you didn’t and that’s a good thing. While your effort is commendable, this article is a mess and wrong on several fronts.
The title of the article is a joke, but you’ve acknowledged that it’s click bait so I won’t spend time addressing it any further.
The first error you made is, ironically, the same thing you accuse Coates of. You wrote: “Today racism is generally implicit–whites accuse black culture of being violent, they accuse blacks of welfare dependency, they accuse blacks of being lazy. Essentially they ascribe the disparities between blacks and whites in our society to black behaviors and choices rather than systems of oppression.” While prejudiced views are certainly an aspect of racism today, it is not the extent of racism by any means. Additionally, this idea totally disregards the racism faced by blacks who are not poor.
You go on to write: “Racists see the results of racism, and they attribute those results to black culture instead of to the racism. This allows them to continue to do nothing, perpetuating the oppression, reproducing the results, and reproducing the false justification for doing nothing.” The notion that racism is strictly in the minds of racist whites and is the result of seeing black people in impoverished conditions is just silly. And the idea that racism is passive and perpetuated solely by inaction is also quite silly. Unfortunately, racism is both passive and active. Take for example the Tulsa race riot of 1921, in which a wealthy black community was torched by white rioters. That had little to do with images of poor crime-ridden black communities and much to do with reinforcing white supremacy. Further, the idea that the sight of impoverished blacks helps perpetuate racist views, tacitly implies that wealthy or educated blacks are free from racism. Take the Justice Department’s settlement with Wells Fargo over predatory loans that were disproportionately given to black and hispanic borrowers (http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-reaches-settlement-wells-fargo-resulting-more-175-million-relief), as evidence that blacks are in fact negatively affected by racism and white supremacy despite their wealth or education. This glaring omission from your argument displays a serious misunderstanding of racism on your part. And frankly, the assumption that Coates doesn’t understand racism is just condescending and rude.
The other major flaw in this part of your argument has to do with the bubble in your first graph that says: “White people notice how badly off blacks are.” The pervasiveness of white supremacy almost led me to completely skip this error. Did you ask yourself how white people notice the condition of blacks that reinforces their racist views? You couldn’t have, because if you had, you probably would have realized that many if not most of images of impoverished black people are produced and profited on by white people. Let’s consider rap music, which has exploded in popularity over the past two decades. Much of the rap music that reaches white people glorifies crime and violence against women and much of it is written by black artists who grew up in impoverished areas. Rap music is not the entirety of black artistry but only a sliver of a much larger tapestry. Despite the wide variety of less violent forms of artistic expression, rap music is beloved by white owned record labels and sold to white consumers, because it fits an idea that black people are innately violent or poor. White owned record labels literally profit from reinforcing stereotypes. Nightly news also plays into this propaganda by focusing on crime in poor neighborhoods and ignoring white collar crimes, which negatively affect many more people and are largely committed by whites. Your argument is flawed because it ignores the fact that white elites create and profit from propaganda that negatively portrays black Americans.
Ultimately, your own understanding of racism is incomplete because it only considers racism when it intersects with poverty and ignores the fact that racism affects all classes of black people.
Okay, so now, let’s tackle the actual core of your article – reparations. You wrote: “Cutting Will Smith or Bill Cosby a check in the name of reparations doesn’t help us end the cycle of poverty that fuels and perpetuates the cycle of racism.” I love this line because it sums up the flaws in your logic so well. It continues your incorrect idea that blacks who have achieved some amount of wealth are not the victims of a racist/white supremacist society. You then go on to introduce the idea that poor whites are victims of class oppression, which is true, but ultimately that idea is a non sequitur. You’re obfuscating the real topic of your article by bringing in an unrelated problem. The fact that some white people are poor is not a justification for not paying reparations for slavery. Put into simpler terms, American slavery injected centuries of free labor into the American economy and that labor was derived exclusively from black people. After slavery and to this day, black people have been denied full access to the wealth that their predecessors were forced to give to the economy (Please research the FHA, redlining, and the racist policies that prevented blacks from owning property, housing inequality is just a single example.) This historical truth creates the basis for Coates’ argument in favor of reparations and this truth exists entirely outside of the plight of poor white people.
After introducing poor whites as a reason to disregard reparations, you suggest that reparations would cause too much division because poor whites would consider it unfair. That just seems lazy to me. Slavery and white supremacy are unfair, paying reparations would be a step toward creating fairness.
So aside from all of that, your article just has a bunch of other silly ideas, that should be reworded. I’ve listed them below:
1) “Bill Clinton, who is loved by the black community in the United States, signed welfare reform into law.” You should reword that to say that Clinton captured a majority of the black vote during his elections. There is no empirical evidence to support the idea that Clinton is beloved by black Americans. This is an anecdotal fallacy.
2) “The evidence suggests that Coates doesn’t have an intersectional understanding of race, that he sees racism as an independent form of oppression that is disconnected from class.” The first half of this sentence should just be omitted. The second half, is actually true. Racism affects black Americans of all classes.
3) “It’s very clear from this exchange that Coates doesn’t know what the word “bougie” means, which indicates that he hasn’t read very many socialists or full-blown Marxists, and if he has he certainly hasn’t had very many conversations about this literature with people who have.” This is just silly and condescending and wrong. The word bougie is part of black American vernacular and its meaning for black people exists outside of Marxist teachings. When you say that Coates doesn’t understand what bougie means, what you’re really saying is that my white definition of the word is better than yours and I don’t need to understand how you use the word because my white version is better.
Overall bro, I commend you for taking a stab at what is a very complex issue, but ultimately this article is a failure. You’ve attempted to tackle an issue that you haven’t taken the time to fully understand and as a result have written something that comes across as both condescending and ignorant. I would encourage you to do more research on your chosen topics, because your incomplete understanding of Coates’ writing and black American history severely weakened your argument. Also, just a word of advice, you would want to make sure that your thesis is supported by evidence in the body of your writing. In this case, it is not. You presented the idea that Coates doesn’t understand racism because he doesn’t fully understand political theory in the first paragraph, then went on to make a case against reparations, and awkwardly harkened back to your thesis when you erroneously suggested that Coates doesn’t know the meaning of the word bougie. I don’t think writing like this displays the level of rigor that I would expect from students admitted to Cambridge.
The title of the article is provocative, but I do think it’s technically true–Coates may understand racism’s history of oppression in the US, but he doesn’t understand racism as an “ism”–he doesn’t understand how racists think, how they come to hold the beliefs that they hold and how that thought pattern can be disrupted.
It’s absolutely true that there are many rich white people who profit off of showing poor white people how badly off blacks are. I think most of these people are motivated more by the profit motive than they are by any explicitly racist ideology, but their interest in profits nonetheless propagates the racist ideology.
I don’t deny that Cosby and Smith are negatively affected by racism, but I do deny that the way they have been negatively affected can be addressed by cutting them a check. The racism that affects rich blacks is a product of the stereotypes and negative associations whites have with blacks because white people still associate rich blacks with black culture, and they associate black culture with poverty and misbehavior. So to undermine those attitudes, you have to break that association in their minds, and the way you do that is by lifting the poor blacks up so they aren’t poor, they aren’t pushed into crime, and so on. Once the association between blacks and poverty is broken, blacks further up the wage scale will also be treated better. You can see a similar thing happen with the Catholics. Protestant whites used to treat Catholics very badly because the Irish and Italians were associated with poverty and crime, and then in the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s the Catholics were lifted out of poverty and these associations began to break down. Today median Catholic wealth is in line with the national average and while there’s still some stereotypes, it’s much, much better. No one today would regard a white Catholic in America as disadvantaged, but they definitely were 60 or 70 years ago. With racism, no one has yet closed that wealth gap between blacks and whites. That’s what we have to do, but we don’t do it with reparations, because it gives money to blacks who are already out of poverty (which is wasteful for this particular purpose) and it takes money from poor whites and alienates them. So instead we design a redistribution scheme that helps all poor people (but will in actuality disproportionately help blacks and reduce racial disparities).
Class is not unrelated to race–class is intimately bound up with race. Rich right wing guys encourage poor whites to be racist because it helps get them to vote against not only policies that address racial injustice, but also policies that address their own class injustice. Poor whites have to be integrated into the left for the left to be effective in advocating for racial justice. They have always been part of the left’s coalition historically. In the US they’ve been split off from the left beginning in the late 1960’s, when Nixon used his “southern strategy” to convince poor whites that they had to support the right because the democrats want to take stuff from poor whites and give it to black people. This is an important obstacle that you have to deal with to fix racial injustice, and reparations only help the right keep poor whites on their team because they don’t help poor whites to see that they too will benefit from redistribution.
If you prefer to say that Bill took the black vote, that’s fine. It doesn’t undermine my argument in any way.
Racism affects black Americans of all classes, but the only way to stop racism (and thereby relieve the negative effect on higher income blacks) is by eliminating black poverty, because black poverty feeds white people’s destructive negative perceptions and stereotypes.
There is no different black version of the word “bougie”, it’s the same word and the same usage. Many black civil rights leaders have historically had deep ties to Marxism (e.g. MLK, Cornel West, etc.). If you don’t know that, you gotta read some more black Marxists, because there are loads of ’em and they’re smart guys with interesting views.
Also sorry you had a hard time getting your comment on here–the spam catcher goes after the really long ones. Unspammed your original and deleted the others.
I’ll just reply by paragraph:
1) Yes, the title of the article is provocative, but that statement is not technically true. The statement “Ta-Nehisi Coates does not understand racism” is an opinion and technically can never be true. Your explanation of the statement – that Ta-Nehisi doesn’t understand the way racists think – is also an opinion. Also, the way a group of people think is inherently unknowable. These statements are fine as opinions, but don’t try to force them into a true/false binary.
2) Eh I don’t think this topic is worth debating. It would be a fool’s errand to try to understand the motivations of rich propaganda creators. That again is inherently unknowable.
3) I think you’re mistaken in believing that reparations are meant to end poverty. Poverty is a byproduct of capitalism. Disproportionate poverty among black Americans is a byproduct of what reparations are meant to make amends for, which is slavery. Take reparations that were paid to Japanese Americans for Internment during WWII for example. The purpose of those payments was not to lift Japanese people out of poverty, but instead to right the wrong of internment. The same applies to reparations for slavery.
4) Class is unrelated to race. Class and race are only intimately bound when you view society through a white supremacist lens. If you believe that poor whites need to get something from reparations in order for reparations to be worthwhile, you’re giving in to a white supremacist world view. The feelings of poor whites have nothing to do with a discussion about reparations. Wealth redistribution that benefits poor whites is a totally different topic.
5) The phrase “Bill Clinton, who is loved by the black community in the United States” doesn’t undermine the part of your argument that you’ve couched it in, but it does undermine your argument overall. First, it’s not a factual statement. Second, it has nothing to do with the argument that emphasizing reparations is divisive, and nothing to do with your stated thesis about Coates’ understanding of racism. Third, the statement is a stereotype and displays a willingness on your part to spread ideas about groups of people that aren’t true. The statement doesn’t undermine your argument directly because the statement is irrelevant, but it does undermine your credibility.
6) Again reparations aren’t intended to stop white people from being racist. Reparations are meant to clear an outstanding debt. Lifting black people out of poverty isn’t going to stop white people from being racist, hence the Tulsa Race Riot and Wells Fargo Settlement examples. You can’t argue that those incidents and other racist acts wouldn’t happen if there were no poor black people. There will always be poor people. Poverty is a byproduct of capitalism.
7) Here you just don’t know what you’re talking about. Bougie is used among black people as a slang term and there is no official definition. For you to say so confidently that there is no different meaning of the word among black people, when you have two black people (Coates and myself) telling you, that yes, it does have a different meaning, is utterly ridiculous. I don’t get how you can so casually negate black peoples’ description of their own culture and still claim to support a vision of unity.
I know this is going to be a hard pill to swallow, but some of your views are racist and some of your views support white supremacy. I’m not saying that you’re a bad person, I don’t know you; and I’m not saying that you’re racist because you don’t support reparations. What I’m saying is that from birth Americans are inundated with images and ideas that help perpetuate racism, and you’ve shown that some of these ideas have infected the way you view the world. Specifically, I’m referring to the ease with which you suggest that Clinton is loved by black Americans. That is a stereotype, an innocuous one, but a stereotype nonetheless. Also, the confidence with which you can tell me that I misunderstand my own culture, with regard to the use of the word bougie, is a white supremacist viewpoint. Referencing MLK and Cornel West’s Marxist viewpoints doesn’t change that.
Overall, it’s great to hear how white people feel about racism and I would encourage you to talk more about it. I would just hope that you’ll actually listen when confronted with views that contradict your own. But if you don’t and you find yourself telling a black person that their views of their own culture and condition are wrong, you’re doing more harm than good.
Opinions can certainly be true or false. There are loads of philosophers who believe that value statements are true or false. Derek Parfit is one of my favorites, he’s a cool guy.
If you don’t understand people’s motivations, you can’t devise an effective political strategy to change the system. This is precisely what I accused Coates of being ignorant about–the motivations that perpetuate racism.
The wrong of slavery cannot be righted by any financial payment–many of the people negatively affected by slavery are dead, and racism today hurts many people who have plenty of money and would not benefit much from more. Redistribution makes sense from an anti-racist standpoint only if it’s tied to poverty and is about breaking the negative associations and stereotypes that motivate racist beliefs.
The issue is not that poor whites need to get something for reparations to be worthwhile, it’s that poor whites need to get something for any effective transfer to be politically feasible because of the distribution of political power in contemporary societies. Theories of justice are concerned not merely with the ideal (what is the just distribution) but with the nonideal (what is the most effective and just way to get to the just distribution). Real world political obstacles are a legitimate concern of nonideal theory.
It is an open question whether Bill is loved–that’s a fact claim, it’s true or false. There is some reason that Bill was able to capture the black vote–he was popular with black voters, or at least more popular than his opponent. It’s a factual statement–this is the second time you’ve made a claim about what truth means that flies totally in the face of how most contemporary analytic moral and political theorists think about truth. Derek Parfit would not approve, and I’d be inclined to agree with him.
Any policy that is not meant to stop white people from being racist will just perpetuate racial injustice, because once white people have paid reparations they will consider the issue closed and they will no longer consider more constructive forms of action that confront racism as an ideology. Black poverty is a byproduct of capitalism and racism operating together.
The question of what the origin of the word “bougie” is has an objectively correct answer. If some people are taking the word and using it in a different way, those people are ignoring the origin, which is appropriation. I don’t mind appropriation, but we should call it what it is.
Your inability to see the ways people are motivated to be racist and your unwillingness to support the policies that confront racism as an ideology makes you far more of an all of racism than I am, even though you yourself are a black person who is, as you rightly say, a victim of racism.
I hold race categories to be constructions–I don’t regard “black culture” or “white culture” as real things, but as amalgamated behavioral stereotypes of black and white people. Your commitment to maintaining black culture as a distinctive category helps racism because it helps racist attach specific behaviors to black people purely on racial grounds.
Another point I was trying to communicate with you – that Victim of White Supremacy, expressed so eloquently:
Overall, it’s great to hear how white people feel about racism and I would encourage you to talk more about it. I would just hope that you’ll actually listen when confronted with views that contradict your own. But if you don’t and you find yourself telling a black person that their views of their own culture and condition are wrong, you’re doing more harm than good.
While I understand that people feel strongly about oppressive systems, these feelings all too often get in the way of effective political strategies for confronting racism as an ism. I am not prepared to accept people’s personal feelings as a substitute for rigorous analytical understanding of racism and oppression and systematized and structural.
Read my other reply, no amount of rigorous analytical understanding addresses the issues I discussed in my other reply.
Wow! This was an incredibly helpful, clearly written response to a fairly persistent strand of economic-reductivist thought by white leftists, of which I am one. It’s tempting to settle for this simplistic “class is everything” line, but you’ve detailed much of what’s wrong with it. Thank you for taking the time. If you blog anywhere or publish, I’d love to follow more of your writing.
I think you may be overestimating the extent to which implicitly racist thinking can be disrupted. You may be right that lifting Catholics out of poverty helped to break prejudicial associations, but Catholics mostly looked like other white Americans.
You define implicit racism (in part) as the mistaken belief that “black culture” causes maladaptive behavior. Ergo, if better economic policy reduces maladaptive behavior, fewer people will hold this mistaken belief.
This seems logical, but people are not logical. Plenty of whites THINK they hold this belief about black culture, but subconsciously they just don’t trust people who look different. The distrust may be learned, but that doesn’t mean it can be un-taught.
I suspect that if everyone were equally wealthy, implicit racism would not change much. To the extent that implicit racism isn’t actually caused by the “evidence” its practitioners use to justify it, removing the evidence will have little effect on the implicit racism.
We all have “friends” on Facebook – otherwise perfectly nice people – who post news stories about black-on-black murder and comment “but black lives matter, right?” Maybe these people are all merely ignorant and in need of “disruption,” but maybe they’re just assholes. And unapologetic explicit racism is not as hidden as you suggest. One look at Kristin Howerton’s Twitter feed can tell you this.
If we accept that we may not be able to un-teach racism, we might as well do the right thing in policy. I’m not sure what that is. I don’t know if I agree with Bernie Sanders; I’m open to listening to people who know more than I do. But I don’t think “won’t that make racism worse?” should enter into the calculation. Racism is already worse.
If someone says “we are hurt, and here is how you can help us,” the patronizing, privileged response is “no, you are incorrect, I know a better way to help you.”
Here’s the helpful response, the response you’d give to someone you truly see as an equal: “I’m not sure I agree with you. But because you have lived your experience, you likely understand things that I do not. Tell me more.”
I don’t think most people recognize their own racist beliefs for what they are. I don’t think it’s a logical or conscious process. There’s a long history of racist or xenophobic attitudes growing in strength after a large influx of poor people from a different background or serious crime. Look at the Cologne rapes in Germany–this has dramatically intensified racist hostility toward Muslims in that country, because they are being culturally associated with rape.
Unfortunately, just because someone has been seriously wounded by a system of oppression that in no way implies that they understand how that system operates. Emotional pain is not a substitute for studying social science. I make my analysis and my arguments on the basis of empirical evidence, not personal accounts or people’s gut feelings about what’s going on. I don’t trust gut feelings. I don’t trust my own gut feelings, I don’t trust oppressors’ gut feelings, and I don’t trust the gut feelings of the oppressed.
I thought you might say something like this. Your piece on the minimum wage speaks from a logical frame of mind; that’s what I like about it. My husband is the same way. He too gets deeply frustrated by other people’s stubborn refusal to follow logic.
Here’s the problem: Empirical observations by humans about humans are never truly empirical. As a fellow human, you interpret observations through your own lens. As long as other people DO trust gut feelings, you can’t dismiss feelings as untrustworthy if you want to fully understand human behavior – and, by extension, social science.
As an example, you can argue the logical absurdity of the anti-gay-marriage position all day, but more people change their minds about gay marriage once they know and love someone who is gay. The love causes the change, not realization of the logical absurdity. Nor did public opinion fully turn against the Vietnam War until they saw the picture of the little girl running from the napalm attack.
People are not racist because their observations of “black culture” lead them to this conclusion logically. Those observations are confirmation bias, justifications for the gut feelings they already had. When emotion is the processor, changing the input won’t yield a different output.
So how’s this for an alternative origin of racism?
The origin of racism is a feeling that people who look different from us are scary. Could be an evolutionary holdover from caveman or ape days, who knows? But it’s a gut feeling. You won’t understand it any better than you think Ta-Nehisi Coates does, until you are willing to engage with gut feelings as legitimate explanations for the behavior of human systems.
If you are born into a group that the other groups have (incorrectly) deemed to be inferior, what’s your emotional human response? You say, “screw it, I’m [oppressed minority] and I’m proud!” You make art – writing, music, fashion, pictures, personal expression – about your experience. Art that speaks not just to your experience as one particular evolved ape, but to your experience as a member of an oppressed group. You transform oppression into creative expression. That’s how you survive.
So we’ve established that reparations don’t eliminate racism. How’s this for an alternative idea?
Your art, your personal expression, every once in a while, actually does help someone understand you and change their feelings about you. Keep doing that, little by little, and you can chip away at racism in a way that works. Takes forever, but it can fix racism in a place no logical theory or government policy can reach: people’s hearts. For the majority of humans, the emotional processor is far more powerful than the logical one.
Racists who are capable of change are more likely to change when they get to know and like someone from another race. Getting to know someone requires listening to him, and trying to understand his pain.
Now suppose someone comes along saying your art, your personal expression that you created to explain who you are, speaking to your experience as an oppressed person – the very thing that helps people get to know you and understand you and change their feelings about you – should be abandoned for the larger goal of achieving a society without racial divisions.
A Vulcan would say “that does seem logical.” A human would say “WTF?!?” Your method only works in a world full of Vulcans.
(Read Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Lathe of Heaven” for a picture of this post-racial world.)
Empirical analysis is a perfectly OK thing to do, but if you really want to “make the world a better place by writing things,” consider that ending racism might require changing people’s gut feelings. Which empirical analysis is pretty terrible at.
I don’t fully disagree here.
I’m not saying that other people don’t respond based on gut feelings, I’m saying it’s often unhelpful and it often prevents us from seeing the whole picture. My account of racism assumes that gut feelings are central to how racism operates (racists see behaviors, and based on gut feelings they generalize and universalize). That said, I agree with you that people are much more likely to do this when the people in question don’t look like themselves for the evolutionary reasons you lay out. But until we can change the biology, all we can do is try to break the negative associations sociologically.
I don’t have a problem with people making art to express themselves, and I certainly don’t have a problem with people encountering this art and adopting a more compassionate attitude, but I don’t think this is sufficient without material policies that help to disrupt the associations with poverty and criminality that enable and feed biological fear. And when people tell me this is sufficient, or that my emphasis on material conditions is wrong and they must be right just because they are part of the oppressed group, I see that as a sociologically understandable but normatively fundamentally mistaken response.
Reese’s responce is brilliant!
“Now suppose someone comes along saying your art, your personal expression that you created to explain who you are, speaking to your experience as an oppressed person – the very thing that helps people get to know you and understand you and change their feelings about you – should be abandoned for the larger goal of achieving a society without racial divisions.”
There are too many flaws in your logic to regard you as anything other than an amateur who’s blind to his own racist views.
First, you can’t force someone to not be racist via policy. It’s just not possible. Outlawing slavery didn’t stop racism, but it was outlawed because it was the moral thing to do. The same applies to reparations.
Second, as for the use of the world bougie in the black community – you as a non-black person, who does not engage in conversations using black vernacular have no right defining what the term means when used among black people. If you want to consider the use of the word appropriative, fine, but by that same logic, all slang is appropriative and American English is appropriative of British English. That of course is ridiculous, as is your goal of trying to police and correct something to which you have no access.
Third, the fact that I’m not interested in understanding what motivates someone to be racist does not in fact make me racist. You’re asking me to justify someone’s hatred of me. That makes literally no sense. Also, I’m not unwilling to support policies that confront racism, I just realize that a policy cannot confront a thought process, but can only address the result of a racist act. You as a self-styled political theorist should understand that.
And last, if you think black culture (and white culture for that matter) is just an amalgamation of behavioral stereotypes, you’re willfully ignoring centuries of cultural capital. You’re totally disregarding the work of tons of authors, scholars, musicians, artists, and politicians who have created work that speaks directly to the experience of black Americans and is in conversation with other creatives from the rest of the African diaspora. Black American culture is part of American culture and forms part of our shared history as Americans, but to say that it shouldn’t exist as a distinct category because it enables racism is absurd. You’re placing the blame for racism on its victims. Instead of acknowledging that you’ve misunderstood and misrepresented black American culture, you’ve just doubled down on the most problematic parts of your argument.
In your last comment you wrote: “I don’t think most people recognize their own racist beliefs for what they are.” And honestly, I think you’ve summed up my views on your writing so perfectly. Instead of creating a cogent and dispassionate argument on why you think reparations aren’t necessary, you’ve written a deeply flawed attack on a leading black intellectual and in the process spewed stereotypes, suggested that you have a better understanding of black vernacular than black people, and reduced black culture to an “amalgamation of behavioral stereotypes.” I can’t take writing like that seriously.
No one is talking about outlawing racism–I’m talking about understanding what causes it and perpetuates it and cutting it off at the source. You don’t seem to have an alternative account of where racism comes from. Without that account, it’s really not possible to claim to understand racism.
All racial communities are constructs, no racial or ethnic subgroup owns any term, behavior, or practice. Associating behaviors with race is the fundamental mistake racists make. It is completely racist for you or anyone to claim that there is a sense in which people of one color use a term that is exclusive to them. It’s appropriation because it does not acknowledge its origins in the Marxist class discourse. But personally I don’t really mind appropriation, because I don’t consider identity groups to be real–the fact that people associate with identity groups at all is regrettable, as they are all constructs that limit individuals.
I’m not asking you to justify anyone’s hatred, I’m asking for you to have an explanation for it, for you to understand where it comes from so that you can devise an effective strategy for eliminating it. Your refusal to engage in that project makes you part of the problem. We need to have dialogues about racism as an ism, not merely as a series of oppressive actions.
“The experience of black Americans” is also a constructed category that is racist in origin, same as “the experience of white Americans”. We are trying to build a society where it does not mean anything to be born white as opposed to black and vice versa. We are trying to build a society where a black person is a treated as a person, not as an example of black culture or “the way black people are”. Do you see how associating behaviors with a black experience or a black culture only buttresses the racist premise that people should be grouped based on race? We pay attention to racial categories not because they are legitimate but because they are illegitimate–the reason the inequalities between blacks and whites are so unjust is that race is a completely arbitrary basis for grouping people. So why do you want to perpetuate this distinction so badly? The idea that there ought to be a black people separate from a white people, that we can associate different cultural practices with the one than the other exclusively on the basis of race, that is the core racist fallacy we are supposed to be fighting against, and you’re making it over and over.
Honestly I’m deeply frustrated, because this fixation on identity, this unwillingness to see race as part of an intersectional system of oppression, nothing helps racism perpetuate itself more than this.
1) Understanding what causes racism is a waste of energy if your ultimate goal is to correct the harm done by a racist act. Each racist person has their own motivations. To suggest that you understand how racists tick as a whole is just silly and not possible.
2) I’m not saying that black people own the term bougie. I agree it is not possible for a group to “own” a term, what I’m saying is that you cannot define the meaning of a word when it is used colloquially among a group of people that you are not a member of. For example, I use terms with my friends from college that have a specific colloquial meaning based on our shared cultural experience of attending the same university. You as someone who did not attend that university, do not have a right to tell me what those terms mean when I use them among my friends with whom I have a shared cultural experience. Your statement: “It is completely racist for you or anyone to claim that there is a sense in which people of one color use a term that is exclusive to them,” basically asserts that dialects of all forms are racist.
3) Again, to ask the victims of racism to explain why they are victimized is ridiculous. And again, the purpose of reparations is not to eliminate hatred, the purpose is to right the wrong of slavery for the descendants of its victims. Did we ask Jews to explain anti-Semitism and the Holocaust? No, we acknowledged that those things are evil and we worked to compensate the victims. Reparations were paid to victims of the Holocaust.
4) You wrote: “We are trying to build a society where a black person is a treated as a person, not as an example of black culture or “the way black people are”. Do you see how associating behaviors with a black experience or a black culture only buttresses the racist premise that people should be grouped based on race?” You keep pushing this idea that culture is behavior. Culture is literature, music, food, language, etc. not a set of behaviors or stereotypes. It’s very easy to appreciate a culture that is not one’s own without disrespecting it or using it to disparage the group that the cultural output comes from. Also you keep suggesting that because of culture, individuals become spokespeople for the culture that they have access to. When I travel abroad, I don’t speak for all Americans, but I am in fact still American and American culture is still my culture. The same applies to me as a black American when I interact with other people domestically. You’re pedaling a fantasy, when you say that ridding ourselves of cultural distinction will eliminate racism. Why should any cultural group have to sacrifice it’s identity to be free from racism and white supremacy? And also, if we were to eliminate cultural distinctions, why keep any kind of distinction between people at all, and let’s all just have a single world culture. That almost sounds nice, but who determines what comprises that world culture? Instead of trying to create an impossible world where there is no cultural distinction, just don’t disrespect other people’s culture. It’s actually pretty simple.
My goal is to get rid of racism so that no more harm is done in the future. It is impossible to “correct” past harm.
There is no “group” of people that I am not a member of. The group is constructed and the construction is pernicious.
It’s not ridiculous if you want to solve the problem and stop more people from being victimized. Anyone who wants to end anti-Semitism should think about it in this same way. As you can see, there are still lots of anti-Semites despite reparations, so they have clearly failed.
Literature, music, food, language, etc. are examples of behaviors. There are no such things as cultures, what we call culture is just amalgamated behaviors crushed into a reductive stereotype. You don’t have a culture. I don’t have a culture. What we have are a set of behaviors and attitudes that the people who lived near us had that we were exposed to, and as individuals we embrace or reject various elements of that experience. There is no value in having cultural groups at all, they just limit individuality by creating racist expectations for the individuals trapped inside their false narratives.
I don’t respect arbitrary group distinctions, I respect individuals.
spot on!
Spot On! to Victim of White Supremacy, just to clarify
1) Actually, it’s impossible to eradicate a thought process. It’s not impossible to compensate someone for a past harm. That notion completely undermines all systems of law and justice.
2) There are many groups that you are not a part of and you and I both know that. If you truly subscribe to the idea that there are no distinctions between people then your argument that poor whites should be considered when redistributing wealth doesn’t really work anymore. If there were no distinctions of any kind between anyone, government and politics wouldn’t work at all. Distinctions between people are not inherently pernicious. They become pernicious when they’re manipulated by white supremacy to maintain wealth and power between a certain group of people.
3) You keep misunderstanding the purpose of reparations. Reparations are not meant to end racism. There is no policy that can be enacted by any government that can change a thought process. Bernie Sanders’ policies don’t claim to end racism because he’s smart enough to realize that that is not possible. Reparations were paid to Jewish people to acknowledge the evil that was the Holocaust, not to end anti-Semitism. The fact that anti-Semitism still exists does not mean that reparations that were paid because of the Holocaust were a failure. That’s like saying that because of recidivism we should do away with justice.
4) You wrote: “There are no such things as cultures, what we call culture is just amalgamated behaviors crushed into a reductive stereotype.” This statement is wrong, that is how YOU conceptualize culture. To say that the writing of someone like Toni Morrison or the music of someone like Fela Kuti is just part of a reductive stereotype and not in fact part of a rich cultural tapestry is lazy. You’re making a conscious decision to reduce culture into something you can dismiss and in the process you’re employing the same tactics that were used to dehumanize Africans during slavery.
You went on to write: “You don’t have a culture. I don’t have a culture,” then wrote “I don’t respect arbitrary group distinctions, I respect individuals.” Do you see what you did there? You claimed to respect individuals right after telling me that I how define myself is incorrect. You are correct in your belief that you do not have a culture. You as an individual are free to define yourself and who you associate with. But you are incorrect in asserting that I as an individual do not have a culture and various groups of other individuals with whom I bond over a shared experience.
You can’t achieve your stated goal of getting “rid of racism so that no more harm is done in the future,” by erasing other people’s culture. You can however rid yourself of racist views and appreciate the value of diversity.
It may not be possible to completely eradicate a thought process, but ideologies and ideas certainly become more or less influential depending on policies and context. Most principles of justice in moral and political philosophy have nothing to do with compensating people for past harms and everything to do with creating conditions for future equality.
On the subject of groups, you’re conflating two different kinds of groups. On the one hand you have groups of people who have been negatively affected by an oppressive system or network of systems. On the other hand you have groups of people whose group membership is based on their skin color and what behaviors we associate with that color. The former is based on a critical moral fact which makes it non-arbitrary. Blacks have been harmed by discrete systems of oppression, and it’s the fact that you were harmed that makes you “black” in that political sense. But all the cultural attributions that go beyond this are arbitrary.
I don’t see any purpose in any anti-racist policy unless it combats racism as an ideology. As far as I am concerned, a policy is only anti-racist insofar as it succeeds in reducing the influence of the racist ideology. I don’t approve of retributive justice and don’t think we should be attempting to right past wrongs (this is impossible)–we should instead be trying to prevent future wrongs and alleviating discrete contemporary suffering.
If you define yourself by cultural, ethnic, racial or other such arbitrary associations, you are not respecting your own individuality. Now, I’m not saying that art or music is not valuable, I’m just saying it’s not an expression of culture–it’s an expression of the artist as an individual. We tend to enjoy artistic works that we identify with, or that help us understand another person’s perspective, and that’s great. But I don’t need to attribute Toni Morrison’s work to a culture to appreciate it, I can attribute it to Toni Morrison as an individual. I argue that this is normatively the best attitude we can have toward art because it liberates us from constraining and arbitrary group norms and stereotypes instead of reinforcing them. If you prefer to reinforce these groups, you’re free to do that, but I don’t understand why anyone would want to do so. The chief privilege enjoyed by white people is the freedom to be judged as an individual. When a white person makes a piece of art, it’s credited to them individually rather than merely to their culture. By attributing great art created by black people to black culture instead of black individuals, we deny black individuality. This is a major form of racism experienced by affluent blacks, the tendency for black art to be treated as niche by putting it in a black cultural box. It’s a big part of why Hollywood doesn’t cast enough black actors in leading roles.
No one is saying don’t create policies to lift people out of poverty. No one is saying it’s wrong to emphasize material policies with the aim of reducing racism as an ideology. I’m arguing that the specific material policies you recommend can reduce poverty, but do not actually reduce racism.
I’m arguing that racists would still generalize and universalize negative stereotypes, even if they never saw behaviors associated with poverty.
I’m also saying it’s paternalistic to tell people how they should want to be helped, instead of taking the time to ask them.
When you tell a whole race of people what they should want for their own good – even if you are identifying them as “people who were harmed by slavery” instead of “people with Black racial characteristics” – you’re still engaging in the very group generalization you claim to eschew. In your ideal world where people are judged on their own merits, people should also be trusted to understand their own needs.
The question of whether a wrong can be or has been “righted” is inherently subjective. But if there is an objective answer existing apart from seven billion subjective answers, I don’t believe you have greater access to it than Ta-Nehisi Coates does.
(As a side note, your understanding of the relationship between art and culture seems as rudimentary as my understanding of political science. You may want to do some reading on ethnomusicology.)
I’m not saying my policy would completely 100% cure the problem, only that it would be helpful because these associations are perhaps the only part of the causal mechanism for racism that the government has the power to change at this time.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with paternalism–I think people worry too much about that. It’s clear that people often operate under false consciousness and that we can either raise consciousness or act in spite of it where possible. I don’t mind either approach. I don’t see the connection between judging people on their own merits and trusting them to know their own good. These seem to me to be very different propositions–I could judge most individuals to be operating under false consciousness, and I could then hold that there is no realistic short-term path for raising this consciousness, and then I could argue that justice requires we take action in spite of it.
My attitude toward art is driven by the position that even in social science, cultures are just ideal types, just shorthand ways for referencing people created under various sets of social conditions. It’s certainly possible to look at a piece of art and see it as reflective of those social conditions, but this is tricky because we risk essentializing people on the basis of the cultural groups and the ideal types we associate them with. So I think it is generally safer to see a piece of art as an anecdote that may reflect elements of some common experience, but may also reflect the specificity of the case of the individual artist.
1) It can be argued that compensating someone for a past harm, does create conditions for future equality. That’s the basis of the concept of damages in the American legal system.
2) First, I’m not conflating anything. You wrote: “There is no “group” of people that I am not a member of.” I was responding to that suggestion. Second, there’s nothing in this paragraph that contradicts my point that distinctions between groups are only pernicious when manipulated for economic gain.
3) Reparations are not retributive justice. Retributive justice would be the enslavement of white people. No one is suggesting that. You say that you don’t think we should attempt to right past wrongs, but what sort of approach to justice is that? You’re saying that no criminal is responsible for their actions after the action has been completed.
4) Okay there’s a lot to unpack in this paragraph. First, you wrote: “If you define yourself by cultural, ethnic, racial or other such arbitrary associations, you are not respecting your own individuality.” I define myself, in part, by my education. That is a cultural association that doesn’t rob me of my individuality. I define myself, in part, by the region in which I grew up, that doesn’t rob me of my individuality. But when I define myself, in part, by an ancestry that I’ve made a choice to embrace, that somehow robs me of my individuality? That doesn’t make sense to me.
You wrote: “Now, I’m not saying that art or music is not valuable, I’m just saying it’s not an expression of culture–it’s an expression of the artist as an individual.” These two ideas are not mutually exclusive. As a writer, what I produce, is an expression of myself as an individual, my Americanness, my maleness, my blackness, and is an expression of a ton of other groups that I associate with.
As far as your appreciation of Morrison’s work, you’re free to appreciate it for whatever reason suits you. That doesn’t change the fact that her writing speaks to a shared experience between a cultural group. And as far as your inability to understand why anyone would want to bond with others based on a shared experience, that lack of understanding displays your white privilege.
You wrote: “By attributing great art created by black people to black culture instead of black individuals, we deny black individuality. This is a major form of racism experienced by affluent blacks, the tendency for black art to be treated as niche by putting it in a black cultural box.” You do realize that this is done by white observers of black art? When I view art created by black artists, I can appreciate it for the various experiences that it speaks to without reducing it to a stereotype. You shouldn’t assume that a white or mainstream approach to black creative output applies to all people. It only applies to the lens through which you view the world.
In the American legal system, the damages are for an isolated event, not a system of oppression that will continue into the future indefinitely. And on a normative level I think even this is focusing on the wrong thing–often times victims should get some financial help, but it should be future-oriented rather than past-oriented.
I think these group distinctions almost always either purposefully or by accident reinforce systems of oppress that result in political and economic power and resource disparities.
I think the aim of justice should be to create the conditions necessary for injured parties to thrive going forward. This should not be tied to how severely they were hurt, it should be tied to how great their need is right now. We should give more material aid to a homeless guy than to Clarence Thomas, even though in theory slavery may have affected them to a similar degree.
I think all group associations diminish individuality to some degree, even associating with your education demographic or the place you’re from. It can be difficult to avoid doing it in all circumstances, and I fall into sometimes myself, but I think it’s normatively regrettable because of the role it plays in facilitating unjust distributive systems. When you identify with your ancestry (or with any other group), you are inviting people to assign the stereotypes they associate with that group to you. I don’t deny that there are many people who identify with Morrison’s writing because they have had similar experiences, but I’m sure not every single black person identifies with it. So to call her work part of “black culture” or the “black experience” silences and generalizes over those people.
I understand the impulse to bond with others over shared experiences–I’ve bonded with people because they’ve been in the same academic program I’m in, or from the same school, or what have you. I just think it’s regrettable because it creates us versus them mentalities and invites us to stereotype both insiders and outsiders. It should be avoided where possible.
I agree with you that white observers of black are are the people who most often do this. This is because they are thinking of art by black artists as an example of black culture. They don’t think about white artists’ art that way. White privilege often consists in being able to think of yourself and other white people as individuals while being able to think of blacks and other people of color as examples of a culture. By breaking down these cultural distinctions, we break down the basis for these racist attitudes that many otherwise well-meaning liberal white people have.
OK, I concede that the government has little power to affect racism independent of poverty. So why slam Ta-Nehisi Coates so hard for trying to affect racism with words? It’s not like any other strategy has been super-successful. Why not leave him alone and let him try?
Because, in your opinion, he’s recommending a course of action that would set back his own cause? Because he just doesn’t understand like you understand, and it’s up to you to correct him?
Here’s my problem with paternalism: what happens if Ta-Nehisi Coates judges YOU to be operating under false consciousness? What if I think you are the one who doesn’t understand, and it’s up to me to correct you? As a white female, do I get to tell a white male what is helpful for his own good? How many black queer female immigrants with disabilities get to influence national policy for YOUR own good?
By what qualifications do you judge who is or isn’t operating under false consciousness? And what if it was really you all along?
See the problem? You assume you are part of the “we” choosing whether to “raise” consciousness or act in spite of it. Not everyone gets the luxury of that assumption. The problem with paternalism is who gets to assume the “pater” role.
Ethnomusicology is based on the idea that music is not reflective of culture, music actually IS culture. It’s a mind-blowing concept; I highly recommend reading about it.
Because the words he’s using and the policy strategy he’s advocating for are rhetorically helping the right oppose redistribution by making it easier for the right to convince poor whites that the left only cares about poor people if they’re not white. This isn’t true, of course, but it’s a false narrative we must never ever feed.
Coates is free to argue that I’m wrong about my own interests. So are you. If you have good reasons for thinking I’m wrong, I would really want to be corrected because it would be in my interest to have a better understanding of my own interests. You absolutely can tell me what is helpful for my own good. I may not like it if you tell it to me in a really patronizing way, but even then you could be correct and I could be wrong.
As for how we know when someone is operating under false consciousness–that depends on our normative moral theory. Some religious people believe that every person who does not follow their god is operating under false consciousness–they will go to hell because of their mistaken beliefs, and that’s not in their interest. So they try very hard to convert people to their beliefs. As unpleasant as it is to be told by a deeply religious person that you are going to hell and should adopt their beliefs, I absolutely respect that when religious people do this they are genuinely doing it because they believe their beliefs are true and they want to help me. I have respect for any person who has deeply held normative beliefs and advocates for them. I am much more disturbed by relativists and subjectivists who claim that just because a person feels a certain way that person must necessarily be correct. If I believed that, I couldn’t write about politics, because every political position I have rests on the idea that certain normative principles are correct irrespective of how people feel about them.
If the claim is that the behavior of making music is what culture is or what it consists in, that doesn’t sound too different from what I believe–I think that “culture” is a name we give to a behavior or mix of behaviors that we associate with particular groups.
That’s not quite what I meant, but… whatever. At least you are internally consistent.
So OK, I’ll bite:
Personally, I engaged with this post because I think it’s refreshing to see someone arguing the left-liberal side from a logical mindset. Too often the left gets branded as touchy-feely, and the right gets to be the hard-headed intellectual.
Nevertheless, I could just as easily argue that your writing feeds the narrative of the Left as a bunch of smarty-pants eggheads who bought their way into fancy colleges, did a lot of book-learnin’, then came back thinking they know what’s best for everybody… without ever once LISTENING to the people for whom they keep prescribing policies.
That’s another pernicious narrative we have to avoid feeding.
If your interest is actually making the world a better place through writing, it’s not in your interest to say things like “I only trust empirical data, not personal accounts,” because most readers only HAVE personal accounts. Most readers will only keep reading and commenting if they think you actually care about – and might even be swayed by – their personal accounts.
I’m not even sure I’d put social science research on a higher plane than personal accounts anyway, given that the subject of social science research is really just seven billion personal accounts.
Certain scientific principles are correct regardless of how people feel about them. But political principles are made of people, and people are made of feelings. Political principles, and indeed politics itself, wouldn’t exist on planet Vulcan.
See how annoying that is, when someone thinks they know your interest better than you do?
He must have changed his mind as I have just read that he is endorsing Bernie.
He says he will vote for Bernie, but refuses to call himself a “supporter”. I’m happy to have him on side, even if reluctantly.
Reparations are about restoring justice by 1) the liable party publicly admitting to a past wrong and 2) the liable party taking some concrete steps to repair the damage caused by the wrong they did. Neither of those steps should involve a general anti-poverty program.
Reparations say: the current state of affairs (in Coates’ argument, the distribution of wealth) is unjust because of how that state of affairs came about; now let’s do something to try and end this unjust state of affairs by acknowledging the injustice and doing something (housing program? cash payments? etc.) to bring things closer to where they would be had we not wronged population P.
You’re arguing that reparations would only work politically if they were class-based – OK, but that’s an argument about whether we can or cannot implement reparations, not an argument for or against the moral necessity of reparations.
Also your knock on Coates for defining the word bougie in the way that everyday black people use it is an absurd charge. Go find a black person and see if they use bougie to refer to the class that owns the means of production etc. etc. etc. Your attempt in the above comments to pivot to some strange charge of appropriation is equally ridiculous. Just admit that this was a bad tactical move, and quite uncharitable at that. Coates is a black person in America. Black Americans use bougie in a certain way. He explained that use for the wider public. This says nothing about his failure to understand what bourgeois means in the traditional Marxist context, much less about his knowledge of socialism, political theory, and so on. You’re claiming way, way too much on quite shaky grounds here.
If I was somehow on public radio and asked to explain how I just used the word carpetbagger (not the greatest example but please stay with me) when explaining why I was being critiqued for running for whatever elected office in an area I wasn’t from, and I then didn’t give a definition that reflected a strong understanding of Reconstruction because I was attempting to explain its popular use these days, would that mean I had never read Foner and the like? No, not necessarily. Give people the benefit of the doubt occasionally, especially with someone as intellectually honest as Coates, who’s always willing to admit to the gaps in his learning.
There are two broad points I’m making. One of them is the political point about what’s possible (which I think cannot be ignored–if you are advocating for policies that are not politically feasible and have no chance of becoming feasible, you’re not helping the victims of oppression). But the other is a larger point about dealing with racism as an “ism” rather than as merely a set of oppressive facts. I charge that reparations does not address the system that produces racism as an ideology, because it is a one-time transfer rather than a broad, systematic anti-poverty program. On my account, “racism” is the core justificatory idea appealed to by racists to justify oppression or to justify doing nothing about oppression. The content of the racist idea is that it is possible to associate behaviors, beliefs, or attitudes with individuals purely on the basis of their race. So when we talk about “black culture” or “white culture”, we are implicitly lending aid to the racist idea by perpetuating the notion that certain cultural behaviors, beliefs, practices, or institutions are and ought to be associated with individuals purely on the basis of their race.
The use of bougie stripped of its historical context is appropriation. I don’t mind appropriation, but in this particular case the fact that Coates is seemingly not familiar with the historical origins of the term indicates a general ignorance of Marxist race theory, which is a problem when you are trying to engage in an argument with people whose conceptions of race are influenced by Marxism. Perhaps he is familiar and perhaps he was just trying to explain an alternative use, but this is not suggested by his general unwillingness or inability to engage with Marxism. This alternative use of the term is also quite problematic from a Marxist perspective, because it’s stripping the term of its class content and diminishing its usefulness in raising consciousness about class oppression.
These arguments about Coates are not just being made by white leftists–Adolph Reed is making similar arguments about Coates.
Cornel West is echoing the same sentiment:
“In Defense of James Baldwin – Why Toni Morrison (a literary genius) is Wrong about Ta-Nehisi Coates. Baldwin was a great writer of profound courage who spoke truth to power. Coates is a clever wordsmith with journalistic talent who avoids any critique of the Black president in power. Baldwin’s painful self-examination led to collective action and a focus on social movements. He reveled in the examples of Medgar, Martin, Malcolm, Fannie Lou Hamer and Angela Davis. Coates’s fear-driven self-absorption leads to individual escape and flight to safety – he is cowardly silent on the marvelous new militancy in Ferguson, Baltimore, New York, Oakland, Cleveland and other places. Coates can grow and mature, but without an analysis of capitalist wealth inequality, gender domination, homophobic degradation, Imperial occupation (all concrete forms of plunder) and collective fightback (not just personal struggle) Coates will remain a mere darling of White and Black Neo-liberals, paralyzed by their Obama worship and hence a distraction from the necessary courage and vision we need in our catastrophic times. How I wish the prophetic work of serious intellectuals like Robin DG Kelley, Imani Perry, Gerald Horne, Eddie Glaude commanded the attention the corporate media gives Coates. But in our age of superficial spectacle, even the great Morrison is seduced by the linguistic glitz and political silences of Coates as we all hunger for the literary genius and political engagement of Baldwin. As in jazz, we must teach our youth that immature imitation is suicide and premature elevation is death. Brother Coates continue to lift your gifted voice to your precious son and all of us, just beware of the white noise and become connected to the people’s movements!”
Thanks for the response, and the elaborations on your reparations points. But I would push back and say that some element of “black culture” very well exists despite race being a biological fiction – maybe i misread your points on black and white culture, though.
Yeah, I heard Adolph Reed’s critique, and I know Black leftists are challenging Coates on this – the recent piece in Jacobin, by Cedric Johnson, went pretty darn hard.
But I think West’ critique is off-base (not to mention quite condescending in tone). For one, Coates has been quite vocal on the subject of police shootings. He’s also done good work pushing back on the “culture as pathology” narrative that conservatives and liberals use to suggest that something other than wealth redistribution / police reform / etc. should be the solution to black suffering (see: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/race-culture-and-poverty-the-path-forward/360081/, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/other-peoples-pathologies/359841/, others). Maybe these arguments aren’t Marxist, maybe he’s not considering class and such, but his words surely contain some truth. Truth that we can use, even if he isn’t a Marxist. Can’t we acknowledge that racism has its own and singular power, while also acknowledging the centrality of class and class warfare alongside? “Intersectionality” doesn’t tell me anything about how they relate, but I don’t think the vagueness of that popular term should lead us to subsume racism in favor of class.
Generally though it does seem to me that Coates’ refusal to be an “activist” holds him back a bit. I mean, he says “do HR 40,” but then doesn’t he have some idea of other policies that could do something to wound white supremacy? His call for a “spiritual renewal” (or words to that effect) seems super broad and unhelpful. And, he’s written approvingly of Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom before, which pretty much places the origins of white supremacy in the successful effort of colonial landowners to divide the white and black laborers who weren’t getting land of their own. Doesn’t this say something to Coates about the salience of class, and the need for a united working front? I don’t know, but you would think it might…
Finally, I don’t see the significance of appropriation here, but “bougie” is not equivalent “bourgeois.” They don’t mean the same thing. Coates shouldn’t have to account for the latter when asked to explain the former. This just makes no sense to me. You’ve obviously thought a lot about the necessity of winning over poor white people, how to confront racism in the American public generally, etc. I don’t think you have to put down Coates as ignorant of socialist thought, and do so via a really unconvincing claim centered on this word, to add to your otherwise argument.
But if the Marxist cause is harmed because slang is emerging out of Marxist terminology, then we are well beyond the point of being fucked. I mean, what are we going to do? Start lecturing the youth on proper jargon? Jesus, this is making me feel hopeless. I haven’t read my Frankfurt in a minute but surely we aren’t about to be stopped by the word bougie (not to mention, how many Americans used the word bourgeois in its Marxist sense before bougie came onto the scene? We used bourgeois in my entirely Marx-free high school history courses…)
The word “bourgeois” was far more common historically before “bougie” became popular slang among activists:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=7&case_insensitive=on&content=bourgeois&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cbourgeois%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bbourgeois%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BBourgeois%3B%2Cc0
Among left-wing activists, “bougie” still means “bourgeois”–in my years at university on both sides of the pond, I have frequently heard it used in the Marxist sense.
I am concerned that many people in the identity politics movement have completely lost touch with the role played by class. We have this false dichotomy now between “race first” and “class first” approaches that obscures the intersections. This new use of “bougie” seems symptomatic of that, though I certainly don’t think it’s causal and certainly don’t think anything would be achieved by making the word the center of any campaign.
I agree with you that Coates’ writing has some positive value. He is very good at describing the history of oppression, the various ways in which blacks are, have been, and will continue to be oppressed. But without an engagement with racism as an ism, as an idea that is used to justify or motivate behavior, he isn’t giving us the tools we need to subvert racism as an ideology going forward. Many bourgeois whites are taking Coates’ account of racism to be exhaustive and consequently they’re not understanding racism in this ideological way. If they did, they would see that they need to do far more than just cut black people checks to make up for past injustices. They have to reject racism as an idea, which means understanding black people as individuals rather than as merely representatives or embodiments of a black culture.
Interesting article, Benjamin. Clarifies the impact of reparations VS reducing poverty on minorities.
Though I have to do some more research on reparations, I believe lifting the poverty level absolutely makes sense systematically. The atmosphere of the country is such that multiple issues such as growing income inequality and racism must be addressed together. The problem is the continuation of right wing political media outlets encouraging millions of Americans to view racism as the result of Black Americans and those living in poverty as “welfare queens.” They say black-black murder is skyrocketing at ~90% black deaths, but they never mention the white-white murder rate of ~85% white deaths. And while there may be some “welfare queens” out there, the vast majority of welfare recipients are genuinely in a vicious cycle of poverty.
In order to discredit these biases to the average American surrounded by such manipulated stories, we must treat all races as equal when it comes to addressing high poverty levels (disproportionately affecting Black and Hispanic Americans). There must be a clear sign from the democratic government that their policies are not racially partial as Fox News claims.
Now, this does not address racism on a personal or social level. However, restructuring the platform of the system through quantifiable empirical evidence can dramatically improve race relations over time. Or, at the very least, the systematic turnover changes the conversation on racism in terms of the percieved image of “black people” by the majority of racist people. In fact, even the portrayal of black men and women as stereotypical characters in movies could evolutionize towards the individual first, rather than race.
On the personal and social levels, racism is very much influenced by this change in conversation. While the effect may not be immediate, behavioral patterns will progress towards further understanding of “black culture” and “hispanic culture” through social interactions with individuals identifying with that culture.
However, in my view, the root of the problem should be addressed systematically. The government, legally bribed by wealthy individuals and corporations, directly caused the sizeable income inequality that exists today. The refusal to raise the minimum wage due to natural inflation, lack of consequences of corporations storing billions offshore, and mass incarcaration leading to sparse job opportunities.
I had a conversation with you on twitter, concerning your use of language.
To be honest, I quit reading this article when I read “blacks” plural. Now that I’ve read more, still not all, I can see that your world view is so slanted by your white privileged position, that you cannot fathom what the movement really is.
I agree with you that systematic oppression pits poor white people against poor black people, but your diagram about the causes of poverty/racism assumes that culture does not play into poverty, and that individuals from poor black communities, want to be like white people. It disturbs me that you look at issues of race, class, and poverty seem so cut and dry.
Did it ever occur to you that there is a certain pride that comes with being marginalized and yet still being creative in how much joy you derive in life. This is my experience in the black community, and I have tried for over 20 years to convince my white relatives, to stop hating black culture, and to stop allowing the media to influence their dislike, and instead to join the cause, and learn how to passively resist oppressive conditions and continue to love themselves and each other. That is something that poor white people do not do, and whats’ worse, is that they disowned me because I live the lifestyle of my black influence. Meaning I find joy and a reason to love life, despite unfair conditions, and want them to quit hating fellow oppressed people and start fighting the oppressor.
This is an issue that has affected me my entire life, and I resent that you write about it so cut and dry, like only you have the answers, as an outsider of living a life under oppression. You wanna impose your magic formula on the movement, but refuse to engage in dialog with someone, (me) who has a unique and inside perspective on what race and class warfare is.
btw, Victim of White Supremacy, sums up exactly the points I was trying to communicate to you about the importance of learning language:
“Here you just don’t know what you’re talking about. Bougie is used among black people as a slang term and there is no official definition. For you to say so confidently that there is no different meaning of the word among black people, when you have two black people (Coates and myself) telling you, that yes, it does have a different meaning, is utterly ridiculous. I don’t get how you can so casually negate black peoples’ description of their own culture and still claim to support a vision of unity.”
I tweeted back and forth with you quite a bit yesterday–“dialogue” does not mean that I accept whatever you tell me uncritically. It sounds to me like you’ve had some bad experiences with your relatives and that you’ve universalized those personal experiences. Oppression is propagated by impersonal systems that must be understood in a cut and dry analytical way to be effectively confronted.
oppression happens on an individualized basis. My fear of your mentality of not recognizing individual, or collective experiences, is that it will lead to an equally oppressive system, if merit is decided by scholars, who have read much but experienced little.
An example is Bernie Sanders, being applauded for his EXPERIENCE, as a civil rights activist in the early 60’s, part of what qualifies him in his merit. His EXPERIENCE, is credited to him and who he is today; but, when someone’s experiences are favorable in a culture that is misrepresented by record labels and other media tactics, those individual experiences are overlooked, by scholars, and not given merit in their studies or solutions. What I fear is that erasing cultural impact on individual experiences, will lead to being held to the same standards, as poor white workers, who hate themselves and everyone else, for being at the bottom of the pecking order without a collective form of emotional and artistic support to make that plot in life tolerable and even a source of pride. I apologize for generalizing in such a way, but this is the reason that I feel so strongly about identifying with my cultural experience, and subsequent work ethic.
Way off topic maybe, but an example of what I’m trying to convey: I work physically challenging jobs, and apply African Dance breathing practices, and rhythmic movements, so that my muscles don’t fatigue while engaging in repetitive tasks. I never need a break, or complain how much the job sucks, or hate on the boss. My white co-worker, clangs things around, when my steady pace is more productive, than her race to complete the tasks, and gives me the evil eye, talks trash behind the bosses back, and speeds up her production when the boss is watching, making my pace look slow, which over the course of a shift, it is not. She gets recognition for looking like she works hard, I get barely a greeting from superiors. I would invite my co-worker to practice my work style, but she disbelieves that she has rhythm. It simply isn’t true, it is her belief that her work ethic is superior to mine, that makes it impossible for her to learn anything I’d like to share with her, to make a boring job more enjoyable, rewarding, and ultimately productive. Instead she desires to see me clang things around and race while being watched, and run my mouth when not being supervised.
The fundamental differences in work styles, can be attributed to how immigrants had to compete for jobs, verses how slaves took a collective rhythmic approach to complete tasks they were required to, without any “wages”, and it’s what keeps me identifying with a work ethic that doesn’t cause me undue stress just to complete tasks. If cultures are not credited or even recognized for their contributions, like the scenario that I just described, then racism will continue to be a problem, especially for all of us at the bottom of the pecking order.
I hope this cuts to the heart of what we were discussing. I don’t have fancy language or scholarly studies, to back my ideas, just my own personal EXPERIENCES, living in a segregated society, while belonging to neither group exclusively.
This kind of thing happens all the time both in racial and non-racial contexts. If I’m an introverted employee and my employer is extroverted, my employer is likely to have a different view of what productivity looks like than I am and that makes my job harder and less pleasant. Would it be great if all employers understood the pluralist ways by which different people with different personalities go about their work? Sure. But this is not something that we can reasonably expect, and it’s certainly not something the government can address with policy, because reasonable people disagree about whether a given person is productive in their own way or using personality as an excuse. The only way to know for sure who is productive and who isn’t is with objective measures, and not all fields are amenable to that.
The fact that one could attribute your difference in behavior to culture rather than personality really doesn’t change any of this. Our personalities are in large part a result of our upbringing too.
If you were to behave the way your co-worker behaves, would you be treated the way your co-worker is treated? If you would, the issue is about behavioral compatibility with what the employer wants. If you wouldn’t because the employer views you as necessarily less productive because you are black (and your employer thinks blacks are lazy), that’s racism. But that would have nothing to do with the way you’re behaving–racism comes into play when you are being penalized because of your employer’s preconceptions about black people’s work ethics, irrespective of the way they behave.
If I’m an introverted employee and my extroverted employer fires me because he fails to see how my introversion is productive, I could say we have clashing work styles. I could even say that my employer is myopic and intolerant of diverse work styles. But would my employer be a bigot? He wouldn’t, because he’s judging based on my behavior, not the fact that I am an introvert as such.
You stated,” Our personalities are in large part a result of our upbringing too.” and if our upbringing is culturally influenced, than it’s also possible that we are marginalized due to this observation, not just based on how we appear, but how culture has impacted our personality.
If I style my hair in such a way, and posture my body is such a way, and change the inflection of the tone of my voice, I might be given many of the privileges that white workers are often given, without real merit based on actual productivity. I, however, am not willing to do that, because it would deny the part of who I am, that has taught me to love others as I love myself, by using rhythm, pacing myself and breathing, to complete tasks. I conclude that they dislike my culture, not based on how much melanin my skin produces, but because they arbitrarily judge my work ethic to be inferior to the worker who works to be seen as “working hard.” Any priviliages that I may be given as a result, if I were to conform to their work ethic, would not be worth harming my health via loss of stamina, endurance, and posture.
I often think that many employers enjoy the superior position they can exert over workers who shudder when they enter the room. These same workers work in unhealthy ways, not only that, but expect other workers who ARE just as productive, to do the same. They are often willing to back-stab co-workers who complete the same amount of tasks, without straining.
This is why recognition of cultural contributions is so important, in my opinion. For, if the differences in work styles, based on cultural upbringing was recognized, on the whole, underprivileged white workers could be encouraged to work less strained and more productively as well.
Does it really matter if behavioral differences are the result of culture as opposed to any other means by which people learn behaviors? What makes culture more valid than these alternatives? To be clear, I don’t think it’s fair for employers to judge people on the basis of any behaviors that are disconnected from output, but it doesn’t seem like it’s really different from cases where the behavioral difference is the result of any other learning/sociological process. People should be more tolerant of different work styles in general.
Well they are often culturally based, due to the way that the elites and even upper middle classes have pitted the underprivileged against each other.
The main purpose of my dialog with you, is because I think you have good intentions and you wish for many of the same outcomes as I do, but you seem hell bent that only your scholarly methods have merit. I’m attempting to get you to JOIN others who have been fighting this fight for decades thru their experiences, and be open to their ideas.
Many of these people who have been fighting these fights for decades broadly agree with me about Coates–Cornel West, Adolph Reed, etc.
I’m talking about individuals who have been fighting like I have, with my life and the way I live it. My experiences prove that racism is more than just about the amount of melanin, racism is also about culturalism, which is dismissed in your discourse.
I honestly don’t see the relevance. Of course different people will associate different behaviors with work ethic in the absence of objective data depending on what they’re accustomed to seeing, and what they’re accustomed to seeing will have a lot to do with how they’ve been socialized. There is little politically anyone can do about that.
I hate reality TV , but I’d like to see a reality TV show that followed the productivity of the kinds of work scenerios I described, just to prove that you don’t have to work “hard” to me more productive over the course of a shift than someone who works rhythmic. Problem is, those who claim to work hard would kill themselves just to appear victorious so cameras would have to be candid. I’d be up for it, if it was an option. I’d even challenge white men in their 20’s or 30’s, shoveling snow, if they didn’t know they were being recorded.
Michelle,
You might want to investigate “time and motion studies,” “method engineering,” and “human motion analysis.” These articles with their references in the footnotes and at the bottom can get you started:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_motion_study
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_engineering
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_analysis#Human_motion_analysis
“Human motion analysis
“In the areas of medicine, sports, video surveillance and kinesiology, human motion analysis has become an investigative and diagnostic tool…. Human motion analysis can be divided into three categories: human activity recognition, human motion tracking, and analysis of body and body part movement.” [Think of Tiger Woods trying to end his slump.]
Reading “Cheaper by the Dozen” or watching the 1950 film of the same name could be a fun way to start learning about the field.
With your dance and work experience, you might be interested in training for a position in this field. (I think you’re wasting your talents working in a warehouse!)
I’ve found the last few weeks of comments very enlightening so thank you all.
Benjamin, I like a lot of what you’ve said here, but I also think a lot of what you said is very over simplified. I’m afraid I’m far from knowledgeable enough to go over your original post point by point but a few things did jump out at me.
The first point that leaped out at me was when you said that Coates “doesn’t have an intersectional understanding of race, that he sees racism as an independent form of oppression that is disconnected from class.”
I would argue that it both is and isn’t separate from class. There are all sorts of types and meanings to the word “racism” now (a bit like the word, “bougie” in that way (; ). Systemic and Individual racism being two such opposing examples that come readily to mind. So to try and talk about all forms of racism in one go without at least acknowledging the other forms of racism is, in my opinion either showing lack of research, lack of clarity, or lack of understanding. This might or might not be the same thing you are accusing Coates of doing with, again, the term “bougie”.
Some examples of racism that I hope you might agree have nothing specific to do with class (but instead are based on either actual race, culture [how ever you define this], or something else) would be the very well documented fact that films where the lead roles is a person of colour do less well in the global film market (http://www.theroot.com/blogs/the_grapevine/2014/12/sony_execs_were_warned_not_to_cast_denzel_washington_because_black_leads.html), black women body features are more ‘acceptable’ on white women (http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-racist-row-on-macs-instagram-shows-that-were-only-happy-to-celebrate-black-features-on-white-a6887371.html), and all the racism that Jews have to contend with on a global level.
None of these are caused by, or due to, class systems specifically. Yes I might, and do, agree with you that by addressing class issues we will have an effect on race issues, and that it is far more likely and politically possible to have a real life impact on racism by addressing class instead of racism directly, but racism can and does exist quite separately from the class system. Ultimately racism doesn’t need a reason or a why. Yes, it will usually try and hide behind one or another pseudo reason, but ultimately it is without reason beyond that of a form of oppression.
Racism, and most other forms of ‘-ism’s are all about oppression – about setting up the oppressors against the oppressed. Oppressors will always take (time, money, resources, opportunities, etc) from the oppressed because they think they are more deserving. By belonging to the oppressor class, no matter what we do we will never understand on a subjective level what being oppressed is like. We may support the oppressed, but we can never fight from their position and understanding.
That’s why what anything we do to try and help will almost always be from within the system to try and change the system, whereas from the point of view of the oppressed (think the occupy movement if you don’t want to think in terms of racism) is the way to change is about scrapping the old system and creating a new, better, fairer one for everyone.
This is my understanding of a lot of this, but reparations are owed because, although legal at the time, people were stolen from and it’s morally right we give back to them. What form these reparations take depend on from where you are standing. From within the system, direct reparations are impossible as you have to work within the system, so instead we talk about giving them in the form of improving equality (by reducing racism). But if you are not an oppressor and are instead from outside the system, then of course you’re going to want to change the whole system – the current system is corrupt and needs to change. In this case, direct reparations are not about substituting for equality, because equality will be imposed BY the new system separate to any reparations that will be given.
Basically, reparations is only part of the concept, but it’s the only part of the concept that can be talked about in the system because no one who is part of the system will want to hear about the rest of the concept as it deals with completely changing the system that everyone who is part of it is happy with.
And if the oppressed want to change the system to make it fairer to all, then equally, most oppressors will end up fighting this change in some way because real equality means the the oppressors, ie ‘ruling’ class (and this is where the class system rears it’s head for real) are loosing what they are used to having.
Because, as the quote goes: “when you are used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
Finally, out of all the comments I particularly liked the comment made about paternalism. I agree that the problem is who gets to assume the “pater” role. I think that there are probably many different types of solutions that could be followed to reduce/remove racism and other forms of -ism, but as I hope I’ve explained, I feel they are very mutually exclusive.
As ironic as it may seem when referring to Bernie as ‘establishment’, Bernie Sanders is far more part of the establishment than many members of the black movement and their views on reparations. These views are left of Sanders so if it is a choice between this way (full reparations) and no way (no reparations), of course the right-wing, ‘no way’ will win. And worse, if the reparations way DOES win out, it’s not a change of the whole concept (ie the scrapping of the system on the whole). Instead it is an isolated change so of course it will fail as it won’t work within the established system, and that will play right into the hands of the right wing groups, as was pointed out.
This means that those of us who both are and are not part of the establishment have to assign Bernie Sanders the role of “pater” in this case to get some kind of resolution. That doesn’t mean that Bernie’s way is the only way to solve it, hell, it’s great that he’s actually suggesting one, it just means that his way is the only one that comes even close to a way the establishment will accept, and that would work within the establishment as well.
And this is why I think Coates says he is voting for Bernie but is not a supporter, because although yes, Bernie’s change is better than none, he is still propping up a system that many feel needs to be torn down and changed for the better.
To be specific, that is, torn down even more than Bernie will do.
Honestly, I think my opponents’ view is more simplistic–my opponents are reducing systemic racism to a question of subjective personal experience. This makes it impossible to engage in a meaningful discussion of its objective causes, which are many and complicated. It also gives us no basis for adjudicating who is right when people disagree aside from appeal to anecdotal personal experience, which is a deeply misleading guide.
I absolutely think all forms of racism have some connection to class–black people are less popular in films because blackness has acquired negative associations due to the historical and contemporary socioeconomic status of blacks. Same thing with body features. Slavery itself only became possible in the first place because of the historical gap in economic power between Europeans and Africans.
I also disagree with your moral argument–the dead cannot be repaid. We should focus on alleviating contemporary suffering and injustice in all its forms for whomever is affected irrespective of background or identity.
Reparations is not to the left of Bernie Sanders because reparations excludes victims of class injustice and politically serves the interest of the capital owning class by helping the right push a false narrative on the white working class. All forms of politics that serve the interest of the capital owning class are reactionary and right wing, whatever their pretensions otherwise. It is the politics of Coates and of reparations–dividing the working class along racial lines and delivering voters into the hands of the right–that ultimately protects the status quo.
You’ve gotten a lot of comments on this, and I’ve admittedly only read about half, so forgive me if I say something that’s already been said or bring up a point that’s already been refuted.
It seems two questions are being debated here: are reparations a good idea, and how accurate is what Coates called the “class first” approach to racial issues, the latter of which I discuss below. In terms of reparations, I think “Victim of White Supremacy” is correct when they state that reparations transfer back wealth blacks have been denied but themselves created; thus, reparations are deserved *regardless* of the effect on black prosperity that they have. I don’t know why the choice is often framed as being between reparations and systemic change—perhaps both are needed (whether or not this is politically feasible is a separate issue; if only one were doable, I too would endorse systemic change over reparations, although I’m not sure I’d think it’s fair).
While I definitely agree with you about how only paying reparations might be seen as a “one time shot in the arm” that might make it even harder to address systemic racism, I’m still going to defend Coates here, since I think he makes a point that’s not being properly acknowledged.
You write that Coates “sees racism as an independent form of oppression that is disconnected from class,” yet your consideration of the “everyday American racist” actually seems to suggest this too. If racism is fueled by economic conditions that were themselves created by racist policies (which stem from racism), then doesn’t it stand to reason that racism existed prior to the policies that perpetuate racist attitudes today? In other words, how did racist policies develop if people were not racist to begin with? I mean, there’s *plenty* of scientific evidence to suggest that people are naturally racist as an atavistic protection measure. That mindset may not be useful in the modern world, but who’s to say it’s still not operating today?
Coates brings up how “black men without criminal records have about the same shot at low-wage work as white men with them” and that there exists a “wage gap between black and white graduates.” Thus, it seems that even those black individuals who do not exhibit the patterns racists associate with blacks (i.e, they’re just as educated and peaceable—if not more so—than whites) still do not have the same outcomes as their white counterparts. Even when class, education, and criminal distinctions are eliminated, blacks fare worse. What can be to blame for this besides inherent bias against blacks? Now, it may not be biological, it may just be that employers assume black applicants have those negative traits they associate with blacks, even when presented with an applicant who provides evidence to the contrary.
I see your point: if we eliminated class distinctions, then people would have no negative traits to ascribe to blacks, and thus individual racism wouldn’t occur. But given the fact that racist policies developed in the first place, is it naïve to assume that only eliminating economic distinctions will be enough to eradicate racism? Furthermore, does Coates (in the very little excerpt that is provided here) suggest that reparations would not only repay the wealth blacks have been robbed of in the past, but seek to provide for the fact that having black skin—regardless of your class, education, or credentials—is itself economically deleterious in a racist society and thus worthy of a reparation?
I identify the origin of racism in the material economic differences between the Europeans and the peoples from the various territories they colonized and expropriated. Racism is a bad answer to a series of questions Europeans often asked:
1. Why are other peoples poorer than we are?
2. Why are we able to dominate other peoples?
3. Is it morally okay for us to treat other peoples this way?
Racism is an easy answer–it seems to explain the poverty and the domination, and it can be used to justify the domination (e.g. the argument that other peoples are “natural slaves” or need to be “civilized”).
In truth the different in wealth and power between Europe and other regions was due to a series of geographical and political accidents all of which facilitated more rapid economic growth in Europe than in other regions. So economic conditions do not merely perpetuate racism, they are also its origin.
Consequently the policy solution is to eliminate economic divides among the races to break the false associations with poverty, criminality, savagery, and barbarism that date back to the imperial period. The way to do this is through redistribution which targets people at the bottom of the wage scale irrespective of race, because that kind of policy can get broad social support and makes it more difficult for racists to misleadingly argue that the rise in black living standards is due to an explicit state bias toward blacks. Reparations is politically unfeasible and it distributes resources to blacks who are already affluent and do not require additional resources to effectively undermine racist stereotypes. It generates a racist backlash in the low income white population and deepens racial animus. It does not make sense.
Thanks for the response!