Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 32

Tales From The Shutdown

As always, I learn more from the Horde then they learn from me. First from our own moderator Kathleen: I'd like to advise everybody to keep a safe distance from each other until our national public health institute is back up to full strength. "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are facing a reduced ability to detect and investigate disease outbreaks. The annual influenza program - the one that tracks the flu and helps people get flu shots - has been shut down. The CDC has also stopped offering its usual assistance to state and local authorities, who rely on the agency for help in tracking unusual outbreaks." So, the flu program has been shut down right as flu season begins. And we just have to hope there are no unusual outbreaks of disease, since we won't be able to adequately track or respond to them. Gee, what a worthwhile risk to take, even if just for a few days!  I do appreciate James Fallows' point that: As a matter of substance, constant-shutdown, permanent-emergency governance is so destructive that no other serious country engages in or could tolerate it. The United States can afford it only because we are -- still -- so rich, with so much margin for waste and error. However, some of the idiotic and noxious consequences of the shutdown, like our inability to adequately monitor infectious disease, have no respect for wealth. It's a roll of the dice that everything will be fine. I know I'm preaching to the choir, but Lord, what a pointless gamble.Some science from the folks who keep us safe in the skies:I work as an air traffic controller in a facility just outside of Washington, D.C. Our airspace extends from South Carolina to the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, and then along the southern half of Pennsylvania into New Jersey. By the time an airplane departing an airport in that area leaves 10,000 feet or is more than 30 miles from its departure airport, it enters our area of responsibility. Last year, we handled just over 2.5 million flights, which makes us third behind similar facilities in New York and Atlanta for total flights handled. If you are an air traffic controller with a current flight physical and any current position certifications (i.e., the ability to work a given piece of airspace unsupervised), you are part of the exempted or essential employee base, and therefore are expected to come to work. However, there is no plan for how we are to be paid during this time, since all of our payroll employees are furloughed (and the Department of the Interior's people who actually cut the checks/EFTs for most of the other federal agencies are too). Any leave for vacations, illness or personal emergencies is to be counted as a voluntary unpaid furlough until the government is funded again. If you had booked a wedding and a honeymoon a year in advance, you can still go, but you apparently won't be allowed to use accumulated leave to ensure that you are paid for that time. If a family member is sick and requires your help for an extended period, the same conditions apply. I would imagine this is playing out the same at the FBI, Customs Service, TSA and several other agencies where people are too valuable to furlough but not valuable enough to pay on time and in full. Contra Fox News, calling this a "slimdown" is bullshit, and it's dangerous bullshit. I am in a position to go a few pay periods without borrowing money to live, but I don't know that I am the rule rather than the exception among exempted federal employees. If you want to see how well government services function when the providers are worried about paying the mortgage, you need only wait through October 13 to find out.More coming. As always if you've got particular experiences, like our commenter above, feel free to email me.

       

Your Shutdown Thread

Part of writing is figuring out whether you have anything interesting to say. I'm following the shutdown as much as the rest of you. But it's not my lane. I should not pretend otherwise. With that said, a couple of hits. 

Check out Terry Gross interviewing Robert Draper a few years back. You can see the seeds of today in Draper's reporting:

GROSS: You're writing a book about the House. So I'm wondering if watching how the House dealt with, you know, passage of this debt ceiling deal, if a lot of members of the House now admire President Obama for his willingness to compromise with them or if they just see him as weak and easy to take advantage of.    Mr. DRAPER: I haven't seen any sign of admiration for President Obama in the Republican camps. If anything, there is a belief that President Obama was not always good on his word at the negotiating table.    There was this suggestion that another $400 billion in revenue should be considered that President Obama sort of sprung on Speaker Boehner, which he felt was untenable, given how — the difficulties he was having in his Republican conference to convince them to accept any kind of revenue package.    No, I don't see that any of them have viewed Obama's willingness to compromise as a virtue. I think that they recognize it, but they don't see this as something to be admired or even to be emulated. I think that if anything they've calculated it as a kind of weakness.

And as always, my colleague Jim Fallows is on it. I'd add in this interview with National Review's Robert Costa on what motivates John Boehner. Otherwise, it's yours. Leave the magic. Bring us science.
       

Osama Bin Laden Is Dead; Long Live Osama

I encourage everyone to check out Sarah Abdurrahman's utterly horrifying tale of being detained, along with the family, at the border. Adburrahman's family was held for six hours. The detention included being held in the cold, being handcuffed, and subjected--repeatedly--to a full body-search. To this day they have no idea why.     We are six years into the Obama administration and with each report of profiling, with each report of unaccountability, with the scuttling of the Democrats 2008 national security platform, the horrific success and mad genius of 9/11 becomes clearer. Our defeat is bipartisan and broad:   The NSA inspector general, in the letter dated September 11, detailed 12 investigations that found the NSA's civilian and military employees used the agency's spying tools to search for email addresses or try to snoop on phone calls of current or former lovers, spouses and relatives, both foreign and American.    In one instance, a military member queried six email addresses of a former girlfriend, an American, on the first day of having access to the data collection system in 2005.     In another instance, a U.S. government-employed foreign woman suspected an NSA civilian employee, who was her lover, of listening to her phone calls. An investigation found the man abused NSA databases from 1998 to 2003 to snoop on nine phone numbers of foreign women and twice collected communications of an American. Its true that in times of war civil liberties take a hit. But this war has the potential to last as long as someone, somewhere is claiming the mantle of Al Qaeda. It looks like our next mayor is going to be the progressive Bill De Blasio. But for all the noise made about Stop and Frisk, I've heard very little about shutting down the infamous Demographics Unit, which basically spies on Muslims for the hell of it.

       

Osama Bin Laden Is Dead. Long Live Osama.

I encourage everyone to check out Sarah Abdurrahman's utterly horrifying tale of being detained, along with the family, at the border. Adburrahman's family was held for six hours. The detention included being held in the cold, being handcuffed, and subjected--repeatedly--to a full body-search. To this day they have no idea why.  We are six years into the Obama administration and with each report of profiling, with each report of unaccountability, with the scuttling of the Democrats 2008 national security platform, the horrific success and mad genius of 9/11 becomes clearer. Our defeat is bipartisan and broad:The NSA inspector general, in the letter dated September 11, detailed 12 investigations that found the NSA's civilian and military employees used the agency's spying tools to search for email addresses or try to snoop on phone calls of current or former lovers, spouses and relatives, both foreign and American. In one instance, a military member queried six email addresses of a former girlfriend, an American, on the first day of having access to the data collection system in 2005.  In another instance, a U.S. government-employed foreign woman suspected an NSA civilian employee, who was her lover, of listening to her phone calls. An investigation found the man abused NSA databases from 1998 to 2003 to snoop on nine phone numbers of foreign women and twice collected communications of an American.Its true that in times of war civil liberties take a hit. But this war has the potential to last as long as someone, somewhere is claiming the mantle of Al Qaeda. It looks like our next mayor is going to be the progressive Bill De Blasio. But for all the noise made about Stop and Frisk, I've heard very little about shutting down the infamous Demographics Unit, which basically spies on Muslims for the hell of it.

       

Is James Baldwin America's Greatest Essayist?

I finished The Fire Next Time on a plane to Greenville, South Carolina. I am here to give a talk tonight about the legacy of the Civil War. I probably should not have read Baldwin before coming into the backyard of John Calhoun and Pitchfork Ben Tillman. I'm all on fire and resolved to bring some of that fire forth tonight.  I have come to places like this before. I have never shrunk from speaking my piece, but I dislike making people directly uncomfortable and have a tendency to complicate things in person, which I know are not complicated at all. I am resolving to move away from that. Manners have their place. I should not conflate them with cowardice.I want to thank everyone who pointed me toward how much Baldwin really does embrace love. I am remembering what I, myself, loved about him as a young man. I came to college a total Malcolmite. I kind of still am. But Baldwin was among a set of influences that talked me out of my younger self. He is tough to pin down, because he understands the anger in black people, he feels it himself, and fears it. There is something of the atheist about him, though he does not directly say it. His encounters with racism leave him on the edge of violence and hatred, but The Fire Next Time is all about why one should walk back, all about why you should never judge yourself by the standards of the owner of the boot presently on your neck. That is how Baldwin got me. He revealed to me that black nationalism is, itself, a kind of philosophical integration. If you listen to any of Malcolm's speeches they sound like they are straight out of the Enlightenment, and Malcolm himself uses the American revolution and the nationalism of whites around the globe as a model. Baldwin's reply is not to interrogate black nationalism in isolation, but to interrogate nationalism--and the nation--itself. He hates the hypocrisy and self-congratulation of white liberals and though he loves hard, though he deeply understands that race is a creation, he is never blinded by love:The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes -- I am not speaking now of its racial value, another matter altogether -- is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened. One wishes they would say so more often.More:Now, there is simply no possibility of a real change in the Negro's situation without the most radical and far-reaching changes in the American political and social structure. And it is clear that white Americans are not simply unwilling to effect these changes; they are, in the main, so slothful have they become, unable even to envision them. It must be added that the Negro himself no longer believes in the good faith of white Americans -- if, indeed, he ever could have.More:Most of the Negroes I know do not believe that this immense concession [Brown vs the Board] would ever have been made if it had not been for the competition of the Cold War, and the fact that Africa was clearly liberating herself and therefore had, for political reasons, to be wooed by the descendants of her former masters. Had it been a matter of love or justice, the 1954 decision would surely have occurred sooner; were it not for the realities of power in this difficult era, it might very well not have occurred yet. This seems an extremely harsh way of stating the case -- ungrateful, as it were -- but the evidence that supports this way of stating it is not easily refuted. I myself do not think that it can be refuted at all. In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems. More: I cannot accept the proposition that the four-hundred-year travail of the American Negro should result merely in his attainment of the present level of the American civilization. I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now -- in order to support the moral contradictions and the spiritual aridity of my life -- expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse. The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power -- and no one holds power forever.White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being. And I repeat: The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks -- the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind. Why, for example -- especially knowing the family as I do -- I should want to marry your sister is a great mystery to me. But your sister and I have every right to marry if we wish to, and no one has the right to stop us. If she cannot raise me to her level, perhaps I can raise her to mine.These are some of the coldest American sentences ever written. When I was a young nationalist, this was the one that really shook me. "I don't what your sister--but if we wanted each other, no one has the right to stop us." It was something I'd never seen before--the black pride of nationalism fused to the undeniable morality of integration.I don't want to cherry-pick here, on the contrary, my point is that after all of this--after all his hard talk--Baldwin is still talking about love. These essays are amazing acts of intellectual and emotional courage. I got off the plane here in Greenville and called my agent (who knew "Jimmy" as she called him) and asked, "Does anyone still write like this?" The question was rhetorical. No one does. No one had. No one will.

       

A Festivus for the Rest of Them

I want to do something I've never done--wish Happy Birthday to someone I do not know. Mijin Cha is somewhere out there among the Horde. I am told that on this day, some years ago (never mind how many) Mijin joined the living. And we are most happy that Mijin joined the living and not some other random zygote who might favor cat videos over watching me glummy doom-say everything, fail at French, and otherwise discover at age 37, that which normal people discover 16. I don't much know why people come here to read, but I am happy they do. It's easy to forget that the vast majority of these readers do not comment but sit in their own private spaces quietly taken my measure. The most vocal members of the Horde owe this sprawling silent majority quite the debt. Without out them, I'd be back on typepad counting my hits for the day. (Two--me and my Dad.)And so in honor of these lurkers, of who Mijin Cha is clearly Queen, I declare today September 26, the Day Of The Lurker. Let there be song. Let there be dance. Let there be drink. Let there be merriment, for this the day for all those who don't talk, but understand. But mostly this is a day for Mijin. Happy birthday. I hope you have a great one. Happy birthday Mjin. Keep fighting the good fight. We love you much, but Susan loves you even more. 

       

A Festivus For The Rest Of Them

I want to do something I've never done--wish Happy Birthday to someone I do not know. Mijin Cha is somewhere out there among the Horde. I am told that on this day, some years ago (never mind how many) Mijin joined the living. And we are most happy that Mijin joined the living and not some other random zygote who might favor cat videos over watching me glummy doom-say everything, fail at French, and otherwise discover at age 37, that which normal people discover 16. I don't much know why people come here to read, but I am happy they do. It's easy to forget that the vast majority of these readers do not comment but sit in their own private spaces quietly taken my measure. The most vocal members of the Horde owe this sprawling silent majority quite the debt. Without out them, I'd be back on typepad counting my hits for the day. (Two--me and my Dad.)And so in honor of these lurkers, of who Mijin Cha is clearly Queen, I declare today September 26, the Day Of The Lurker. Let their be song. Let their be dance. Let their be drink. Let their be merriment, for this the day for all those who don't talk, but understand. But mostly this is a day for Mijin. Happy birthday. I hope you have a great one. Happy birthday Mjin. Keep fighting the good fight. We love you much, but Susan loves you even more. 

       

A Rising Tide Lifts All Yachts

So in our continuing run of posts, which The Horde has dubbed "The TNC Futility" series, we have a chart showing the relative poverty levels of the neighborhoods where blacks and whites in America have lived across two generations. One generation was born between 1955 and 1970. The other generation was born between 1985 and 2000. The data was compiled by Patrick Sharkey for his excellent book Stuck in Place. It is pulled from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a longitudinal study which began in the late 60s. I think I've used this chart before, but it bears another look.As you can see, the majority of black people live in conditions that very few white people ever experience, and a significant number of black people live in conditions which virtually no white people experience. This has not changed. For the first generation 62 percent of black people, but only 4 percent of white people, lived in neighborhoods where 20 percent or more of the people were poor. In the second generations 66 percent of black people, and 6 percent of white people, lived in such conditions. In both generations a third of all black people lived in neighborhoods where 30 percent of the population was below the poverty line. Only one percent of all white people lived in such situations.The vast majority of white people live in low poverty neighborhoods. The vast majority of black people live in moderate to high poverty neighborhoods, with the scale tipping toward the high end. Only 10 percent of all African-Americans experience the kind of neighborhood ecology that 61 percent of white people experience. It's interesting that the trend line--even for white neighborhoods--is pointing down. Canaries in the coal mine I guess.It's important to understand that a direct line from neighborhood poverty to individual poverty can not necessarily be drawn. On the contrary, individual affluent African-Americans tend to live in neighborhoods that are a step below individual affluent whites. [A]lmost half (49 percent) of black children with family income in the top three quintiles lived in neighborhoods with at least 20 percent poverty," writes Sharkey. "Compared to only one percent of white children in those quintiles." The sociologist John Logan found that, over the past two decades, affluent blacks tended to live around more poverty, than poor whites.So this is not simply a question of "the black poor" or even "the poor." Helping the poor is a noble goal on to itself. But it isn't the same as addressing the effects of a tradition of racist policy. The two are related--much like homophobia and misogyny are related. But just as same-sex marriage and abortion rights are not the same thing, neither is America's toleration of racism, and its toleration of inequality, color regardless.About those baguettes: I forgot to close out my last post with some sort of notation on the culinary adventures of this particular black family which--for the first time ever--finds itself living in that black ten percent. I tried to teach my son some knife skills in the kitchen this weekend--I started cutting when I was about his age. This ended in bandages. Just a flesh wound, I assure you. But afterward the boy looked at me like I was Jesus walking and said, "If you weren't here, I would have been freaking out." Do not think I have forgotten the importance, and particular magic, of black fatherhood. I think I wanted to be a father--not out of any sense of nobility--but for that moment, right there. To feel needed. To be singularly important to someone.After I bandaged him up he sat in the kitchen and watched me cut up a chicken, make a quick stock, and then some noodle soup. I then announced that we would, again, try our hand at a cake--but this time something basic and yellow. The boy went and watched a 20-minute video of Christopher Kimball baking a cake. He then returned and said, "I want to do it." And he did it. It was awesome--light and not overly sweet. The only help he got from me was getting the batter into the pan. It was then that I remembered that someday I would not be so needed, not so singularly important. Already he is coming home with notes from girls. One of them is going to sweep him away from me. And then it will just me and his mother again. And France. We'll be free and that will be nice. But we will never again be so terribly needed.

       

Is James Baldwin America's Greatest Essayist?

I picked up James Baldwin's new collected joint and haven't quite been the same since. I read a lot of Baldwin in college, and basically left with the sense that he was a badass. But I hadn't gone back to Baldwin in many years. Some people who are important to us as young people, wither under our gaze as older adults. And then other people who we know as genius somehow just increase in our estimation. 

Baldwin is among those people for me. This is not news. You can see him here giving Bill Buckley exactly what he deserves. And smarter people then me can tell you about his genius. What I can say is that this weekend I read his essay "Price of the Ticket" and felt like someone out there—long dead—understood how I felt.

Here is passage from "Price of the Ticket" in which Baldwin reflects on the mentoring he got from Marion Anderson and Beauford Delaney:

Because of her color, Miss Anderson was not allowed to sing at The Met, nor, as far as The Daughters of The American Revolution were concerned, anywhere in Washington where white people might risk hearing her. Eleanor Roosevelt was appalled by this species of patriotism and arranged for Marian Anderson to sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. This was a quite marvellous and passionate event in those years, triggered by the indignation of one woman who had, clearly, it seemed to me, married beneath her.

By this time, I was working for the Army—or the Yankee dollar!—in New Jersey. I hitchhiked, in sub-zero weather, out of what I will always remember as one of the lowest and most obscene circles of Hell, into Manhattan: where both Beauford and Miss Anderson where on hand to inform me that I had no right to permit myself to be defined by so pitiful a people. Not only was I not born to be a slave: I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave-master. They had, the masters, incontestably, the rope—in time, with enough, they would hang themselves with it. They were not to hang me: I was to see to that. If Beauford and Miss Anderson were a part of my inheritance, I was a part of their hope.

Much of Baldwin's writing is roughly contemporaneous with the Civil Rights movement, but he seems to share none of its hope, none of its belief in the power of love to conquer all. There is something so real about him. He is not a nationalist, but a humanist—and yet he is the most clear-headed humanist I've ever read. He is not here to flatter you. He is not here to make white people better. He is not here to change the world. He doesn't even seem like he's trying to "inspire." He is here to write—because it's what he wants to do. I love that, and I feel it on so many levels.

I'm often asked what "impact" I hope my writing has. To which I can only respond, "Fuck if I know." I write because I want to, because I can do nothing else. Because I believe they will hang themselves, and this is my attempt to prevent them from hanging me.

       

The Killing of Jonathan Ferrell in Context

If I sounded a bit glum and fatalistic in my post on the killing of Jonathan Ferrell, and if I sounded glum and fatalistic in my postings on Trayvon Martin, and if I generally have sounded glum and fatalistic period, you can blame charts like this one. Again, this is from Patrick Sharkey's research in his book Stuck In Place. I would go so far as to call it essential in understanding the profound lack of progress we've seen, over the last forty years, in our efforts to forge an integrated society. Much of Sharkey's data is pulled from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The PSID is remarkable in that it allows you to look at people across generations. Or for now, just one generation because the PSID started in the late 60s. Above you see a chart look at blacks and whites born in poor and affluent neighborhoods, and what happened to them across a generation. The chart then shows what percentage of each group's families remained in poor neighborhoods, and which group' did not. It also shows what percent of each group's families born into affluent neighborhoods were able to remain there, and what percent of each group's families were not. As you can see the results are glum. Put simply if you are black and grew up around poverty, your children probably grew up the same way. If you are white and grew up around poverty, your children probably did better. If you are black and grew up around affluence, your children probably didn't. If you are white and grew up around affluence, your child probably did. When I talk about terms like "poor" and "middle class" and "elite" not translating when we compare blacks and whites, this is what I mean. Black people living around affluence are not white people living around affluence with a tan. Their lives are different. The prospects of their children are worse, and their presence on the East Side tends to be transient. The fact of a dual-society has implications beyond the dollar signs. Toleration of black disadvantage, in a world where that disadvantage is rarely forthrightly explained, leads to the toleration of magic. This is true many times over when you consider that America was founded on the magical thinking of white supremacy. Put differently, if a society has a history of believing that black people are less than human, and yet repeatedly sees black people living in conditions unlike other humans in that society, the original belief is reified. And we know this. Beryl Satter documents in her book, Family Properties, how the racist practice of redlining black people did not just rob black people of wealth, it reinforced racist beliefs already present. Because I am black, my interest rates and my payments are higher than yours. Because my payments are higher I can not keep up my property as well as you. Because my payments are higher, I work a second job and I am not around to supervise my kids. You don't ever see the absurd contract on my house. But you do see my gutters falling off. You see my kids out past the hour of streetlights. No one told you about redlining. But many people told you that I am lazy and prone to criminality. You have been told this since somewhere around the 18th century. And now you see that when I move next door, property values dip, and the neighborhood becomes a ghetto. Where science is concealed, magic reigns. And you will be forgiven for believing that the fact of the ghetto, is the fact of my lesser humanity. And with that lessened humanity, with all the requisite stereotypes, comes an entire belief system that tolerates the killing of Trayvon Martin by a man who then tours the factory where the weapon he used to slaughter a child was made. I can only yell so loud when a jury comes back with a verdict we do not like. I can only yell so loud when the police act on magic. The society believes in magic. The institutions reflect this belief. Whoso tolerates a dual-society, necessarily tolerates the killing of Jonathan Ferrell. I see no evidence that the dual-society, nor its toleration, are in decline. Trayvon Martin will happen again. George Zimmerman will be innocent again. Fools will blame hip-hop again. Racists will discover Chicago again. And we will be back in the streets demanding a change in some law which is but the thin branch of a problem, that extends down into our country's deepest roots. Again.