Discourse of defeat
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ dangerous message that black America is powerless
Between the World and Me
by TaNehisi Coates
Spiegel & Grau
In a Guardian opinion piece from late May, writer Steven W. Thrasher declares summer’s imminent arrival as yet another opportunity for America’s white and wealthy to assert their dominion over the nation’s dark and disenfranchised. As Thrasher sees it, summer vacations today are solely for the rich — while minorities (when not catering to Caucasians) are stuck swarming public beaches or hanging with their homeboys on sweltering Harlem corners.
Although silly and selfpitying, Thrasher’s words should not be dismissed. For they fit neatly into a dangerous discourse currently running through Black America — the discourse of defeat.
Whether it’s holidaytaking or HIV, public schools or police brutality, the defeatists insist that Blacks are almost fated to failure — relegated by decades of racism and public policy to impotence, inequality and underachievement.
And no defeatist has achieved greater prominence than TaNehisi Coates — a national correspondent at The Atlantic magazine who’s made a tidy career from chronicling Black doom. Blending detailed reporting with historical analysis and ample autobiographical elements, Coates delivers audiencefriendly, raceladen missives ideally suited for the current cultural climate. His work is complex and brazen —“bigthink” pieces like last June’s Atlantic cover story outlining the case for slavery reparations or a Fall 2012 feature exploring President Obama’s complex relationship with race.
Coates’ work is politically singleminded: Public policy — rather than personal choice — determines AfricanAmerican outcomes. Criminality, fatherless families, disastrous graduation levels or spiraling HIV rates result from centuries of systematic disenfranchisement — never moments of individual decisionmaking. Whites are bad, blacks are screwed and hope long ago lost its luster.
Coates’ latest delivery, “Between the World and Me,” adheres to this defeatist world view. A slim, almost essaylike volume, the book is presented as an open letter to his teen age son, Samori.
The book is masterfully written. No author could so effectively, so humanly convey the agony of a Black mother losing her son at the hands of the police as when Coates writes: “Think of all the love poured into him . . . the tuitions for Montessori and music lessons . . . the time spent regulating sleepovers . . . and the reference checks on babysitters.”
But for all this powerful storytelling, “Between the World and Me” feels provincial — a message is mired in defeat and despair.
Both elements adhere easily to Coates’ own atheism, which emerges as a wild card throughout “Between the World and Me.” For Coates, America’s ongoing conquest of the “black body” is potent proof that God doesn’t exist. Faith, he says in the current New York magazine, is an act of “optimism” or perhaps even “aspiration” rooted in questionable truth.
Faith couldn’t protect him from the violence of his childhood Baltimore streets. And faith is cheap compensation for the bodies of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown or the Charleston church victims. The problem with defeatists like Coates or Thrasher is they’re unable to offer any suitable alternatives — and unwilling to account for their own achievements. God can’t help Black folk, it seems. But cursed by centuries of structural neglect, they can’t even help themselves. When viewed through the lens of defeat, Blacks are neither responsible for or even participants in their individual destinies. And as a result, their successes are conveniently silenced while their failures are touted as fait accompli.
It’s Coates who renders those “black bodies” powerless on page after page of prose.
Yet with “Between the World and Me” already a bestseller, Coates is hardly powerless and certainly not defeated. Free to chart his own path and craft his own words, Coates is living, thinking proof that Blacks today do have choices — that they can be in control of both mind and body.