Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 51

Post-Card From Chicago

I'm not going to be able to get in my run for today, but I did manage to squeeze a couple in during my days here in Chicago. The picture above is about halfway through my Saturday run. This is silly and self-evident but one of the best things about running is how it acclimates you to the native powers of your body.
I'm the kind of runner who makes for his astonishing lack of speed, with an astounding lack of endurance. No matter. Even a herb like me can start off in the midst of sky-scrapers, move my legs, and with the aid of Cherelle and Alexander O'Neal (Sugar, shu, shu, sugar...) turn, and see it all behind me. I'm used to this sort of transformation in cars, trains, and now bikes. But to do it solely by the locomoting that which your Momma gave you is a kind of magic.
       

Fear the 'Fro

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While doing some internet-sleuthing for my Mad Men post, I came across this cool piece by Teyonah Parris over at Essence (props to Dawnie Walton) on going natural. Parris plays Don Draper's secretary. Here she voices an old feeling, the likes of which many black woman (and perhaps women period) will find familiar:

I was walking down the street with one of my girlfriends and I saw this young lady who had the most amazing, bomb twist-out. I said to my friend, "Oh my gosh, her hair is so beautiful. I wish my hair could do that." My friend looked at me like I was crazy and said, "Uh, it would if you stop relaxing it." I stopped and thought to myself, wow, duh. I kind of felt dumb because of course I knew my hair was naturally curly, but it had been so long since I had been relaxing. I realized that I had no real relationship with my natural hair. At that very moment, I decided to change that. 
I wanted to see what my own hair felt like because I really didn't know. I had no clue. In the back of my mind, I always figured I could go back to a relaxer if I didn't like it. I started transitioning for a year and a half using sew-in weaves so my transition was fairly easy. My stylist would trim off the relaxer as time went on and eventually, she cut off the last little bit of straight ends and I was relaxer-free. I finally saw my own hair in its natural state. 
And then... I cried. 
 I did not know how to deal with this little afro on my head. I called my best friend crying because I did not want to leave the house. She came over and literally sat me down and said, "Teyonah you are beautiful. Your hair is amazing." She is really the main reason why I am natural to this day. Later on, we went out in Harlem and I was trying not to feel so self-conscious. The whole day, people would come up to me and say, "Wow, I love your hair. It's gorgeous." I was totally shocked. The reaction I got from other people was really comforting. I know we shouldn't look for approval from other people, but in all honestly, it really helped me see that it was really my own perception of my hair that was holding me back. That was really eye-opening for sure.

I should preface this by saying that I'm a sucker for the natural, and thus wholly biased. In any event,  I think that hair presents us of one of the more mind-boggling aspects of the intersection of racism and American beauty. It's no so mind-boggling that black women relax their hair, so much as it is that so few no what to do with it sans relaxer. Of course that's not really mind-boggling either--how would anyone really know? 
The natural tradition is all about neoclassicism and rediscovery, about going back to a home that most of us have never really known. So much of our experience is about getting back to something that may, or may not, have ever really existed. But in that journeying we create a kind of "new" past.        

The Disappointing Sixth Season of Mad Men

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I am fairly sure that this will be my least favorite season of Mad Men. Much of what made the show great is still there: The acting is top notch, and the writing, on a line-by-line level, is still thrilling. Witness Vincent Kartheiser's Pete Campbell angrily berating a colleague who wanted to do business the day after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination—"This cannot be made good." Simple writing and simple delivery  and what you get is a line that fractures the fourth wall, without the all the cheap House of Lies/House of Cards camera mugging.

Whatever Mad Men has been, it has never been cheap. A lot of us will be stuck on the scene where Don attempts to explain his bad fathering. I think I would be too, had I seen it five years ago—back when Don Draper was new. The problem with Mad Men right now is that whatever its individual parts, the show isn't adding up to much. It is almost as if someone has designed us a beautiful car with a bad engine. And so we're sputtering down the road... to where, exactly? I don't need to know where. What I need is to be in hands of an artist whose confidence and steadiness forces me to forget to ask.

Choosing to do an episode on the day of Martin Luther King's assassination is a major undertaking. I've generally never had much regard for the idea that there should be more black people on Mad Men. But after last night's episode, I'm very interested in what the show's writing team looks like. I just didn't really believe the non-hug between Dawn and Joan. It felt like didactic signaling. I also didn't believe the widespread sympathy for King and his aims among virtually every white face. It was almost as if King was Elvis Presley, not a man who died fighting for the rights of poor black people and opposing the Vietnam War.

I'm struggling to understand how the narrative actually advanced last night. I've always thought Weiner to be an especially efficient employer of narrative. Sometimes I'll watch the show and find myself believing that an episode must be at its end when, in fact, there are still 15 minutes left. Mad Men has always packed so much heart into every minute. But this season it's packing nothing.

"Matthew Weiner always starts slow" is not a reasonable defense—it confuses subtlety with sloth, and nuance with torpor. The fact that you are unsensational does not make you slow. From the moment you see Don Draper scribbling on a napkin, grappling with Lucky Strike, and conversing with a black waiter, you are in the story.

The problem with making great art is you are expected to make more great art. I don't think this season is great, and I thought last night's episode was weak.        

The Party of Morning Joe

I don't generally endorse theories of pathological Democratic weakness, but there really is no other way to see Senate Democrats voting to exclude FAA furloughs from sequestration. As my label-mate Derek Thompson points out, when you have a Congress that "reacts to flight delays but not to low-income families losing housing vouchers"  you have a basic problem of democracy.

Everyone agrees that sequestration is horrible policy. That was the point. Democrats now agree that poor and working people should bear the full brunt of that policy, while Delta Gold members should bear less of it. This is cruelty, or at least the willingness to abide cruelty. From Ezra Klein:

Recall the Democrats' original theory of the case: Sequestration was supposed to be so threatening that Republicans would agree to a budget deal that included tax increases rather than permit it to happen. That theory was wrong. The follow-up theory was that the actual pain caused by sequestration would be so great that it would, in a matter of months, push the two sides to agree to a deal. Democrats just proved that theory wrong, too.
In effect, what Democrats said Friday was that in any case where the political pain caused by sequestration becomes unbearable, they will agree to cancel that particular piece of the bill while leaving the rest of the law untouched. The result is that sequestration is no longer particularly politically threatening, but it's even more unbalanced: Cuts to programs used by the politically powerful will be addressed, but cuts to programs that affects the politically powerless will persist. It's worth saying this clearly: The pain of sequestration will be concentrated on those who lack political power.

Sequestration was premised on the abiding belief among Democratic power-brokers -- including the president -- that Republicans and Democrats were working with equal pain thresholds. They are not. Obama underestimated his enemies, and now we are going to pay for it.
If I were a Republican moderate (assuming there even are any left) what argument would I have for pulling my my more wayward allies to the table? On sequestration, at least, we all know the Party of Morning Joe is going to eventually fold anyway. 
Eric Cantor knows:

As a CQ / Roll Call reporter tweeted last night, "Make no mistake, this FAA fix is a complete, utter cave by Senate Democrats and, if signed, by the White House." This is a sentiment expressed in other press reports over the last 12 hours, including, Politico: "Democrats blink first on aviation" and Chicago Tribune: "White House Scrambles For Damage Control."
Consider that the Democrats opening position was they would only replace the sequester with tax increases. By the first of this week Senator Reid proposed replacing the whole sequester with phony war savings. And by last night, Senate Democrats were adopting our targeted "cut this, not that" approach.

       

The Party Of Morning Joe

I don't generally endorse theories of pathological Democratic weakness, but there really is no other way to see Senate Democrats voting to exclude FAA furloughs from the sequestration. As my label-mate Derek Thompson points out, when you have a Congress that "reacts to flight delays but not to low-income families losing housing vouchers"  you have a basic problem of democracy. 
Everyone agrees that sequestration is horrible policy. That was the point. Democrats now agree that poor and working people should bear the full brunt of that policy, while Delta Gold members should bear less of it. From Ezra Klein:

Recall the Democrats' original theory of the case: Sequestration was supposed to be so threatening that Republicans would agree to a budget deal that included tax increases rather than permit it to happen. That theory was wrong. The follow-up theory was that the actual pain caused by sequestration would be so great that it would, in a matter of months, push the two sides to agree to a deal. Democrats just proved that theory wrong, too.
In effect, what Democrats said Friday was that in any case where the political pain caused by sequestration becomes unbearable, they will agree to cancel that particular piece of the bill while leaving the rest of the law untouched. The result is that sequestration is no longer particularly politically threatening, but it's even more unbalanced: Cuts to programs used by the politically powerful will be addressed, but cuts to programs that affects the politically powerless will persist. It's worth saying this clearly: The pain of sequestration will be concentrated on those who lack political power.

Sequestration was premised on the abiding belief among Democratic power-brokers--including the president--that Republicans and Democrats were working with equal pain thresholds. They are not. Obama underestimated his enemies, and now we are going to pay for it.
If I were a Republican moderate (assuming there even are any left) what argument would I have for pulling my my more wayward allies to the table? On sequestration, at least, we all know The Party of Morning Joe is going to eventually fold anyway. 
Eric Cantor knows:

As a CQ / Roll Call reporter tweeted last night, "Make no mistake, this FAA fix is a complete, utter cave by Senate Democrats and, if signed, by the White House." This is a sentiment expressed in other press reports over the last 12 hours, including, Politico: "Democrats blink first on aviation" and Chicago Tribune: "White House Scrambles For Damage Control."
Consider that the Democrats opening position was they would only replace the sequester with tax increases. By the first of this week Senator Reid proposed replacing the whole sequester with phony war savings. And by last night, Senate Democrats were adopting our targeted "cut this, not that" approach.

       

The Ghetto Is Public Policy

I'm away this week, reporting. For the past few months I've been exploring the wealth gap through New Deal-era policy with a particular focus on housing. I'm in Chicago this week talking to victims of that policy, and attempting to grapple with its broader implications. I'll be out for a few days.

For those keeping count, the current exploration involves the following books:

1.) Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns

2.) Tom Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty

3.) Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto

4.) Beryl Satter, Family Properties

5.) Antony Beevor, The Second World War (I didn't feel like I could really understand New Deal policy without understanding World War II)

6.) Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself

7.) Douglass Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid (just started on the plane out here)

For those new to this I would start with Wilkerson's book. And I'd add two more that I read a few years back: Thomas Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis, and Ira Katznelson's When Affirmative Action Was White. 

I think what amazes me about all of this is the degree to which we blind ourselves to policy. I remember coming to Chicago in the mid-90s, riding down the Dan Ryan and assuming that the wall of projects (there's no other way to describe them) was somehow "natural." It never occurred to me that segregation -- without "Whites Only" signs -- was actual policy. We are living with the effects of that policy today. And we likely will be for many years.

       

Don Draper's Dead End

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After last season ended with a woman hitting on Don Draper, and Don Draper giving her--and us--that "I'm up for it" look, I feared we'd get a season just like the one we now have. I know the shot was meant to be ambiguous, but it never really struck me that way. I've written quite a bit about my annoyance with pop culture's current obsession with cynicism, darkness, and anti-heroes. It's not so much that I pine for naiveté, as I pine for something different and new--especially in the same series. Watching Don Draper in his sixth season, I can't escape the feeling that I'm watching Don Draper in his third season.

Except he's lost something. Don is a beautiful philandering stud. That was always there but it was wrapped in so much more--his role as father to a young daughter (gone thus far), his role as a kind of father to Peggy (gone by necessity of plot), his relationship with Roger as some future image of himself (also gone), his previously mentioned fear of discovery (seemingly also gone.) What's left is a dude who makes adultery look beautiful. My impulse is to say that this Don Draper is lot less interesting. But I wonder if this Don Draper is all of what we actually came for. Did most of always think of the literature as gift-wrapping for the style?

Who knows. But I'd rather see the camera shift, and Don Draper give some scenes away to those characters who really are changing, not just relapsing. It's true that in real life, real people relapse all the time.  But stories are not real life. They have beginnings and ends chosen by their creators.

Or perhaps chosen by their fans. My love for Mad Men has long been on display here. But I like to think the show ended after Season Two. Or Season Four. The fact that I can even say that is a testament to Matthew Weiner and his efforts to actually create something incredible. But I'm just not feeling it right now. I'm not feeling anything.        

Western Thought for Footmen and Aspiring Legionnaires

The Leviathan (Chapter V: Of Reason And Science) 
I've long wanted to put in place hard standards for commenters on my blog. I think reading Chapter V and then writing an essay would be a good start. Of course this would be a standard that I would struggle to fulfill. So much for that idea.
At any rate, I thought this was so crucial:

By this it appears that reason is not, as sense and memory, born with us; nor gotten by experience only, as prudence is; but attained by industry: first in apt imposing of names; and secondly by getting a good and orderly method in proceeding from the elements, which are names, to assertions made by connexion of one of them to another; and so to syllogisms, which are the connexions of one assertion to another, till we come to a knowledge of all the consequences of names appertaining to the subject in hand; and that is it, men call science. And whereas sense and memory are but knowledge of fact, which is a thing past and irrevocable, science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another; by which, out of that we can presently do, we know how to do something else when we will, or the like, another time: because when we see how anything comes about, upon what causes, and by what manner; when the like causes come into our power, we see how to make it produce the like effects.

For Hobbes, sense and memory are things that we all come equipped with. But reason is worked at. Reason comes from naming--as precisely as possible--that which we sense, and then using a valid method to connect the names. I was joking at the top about comments because I think half the disagreement on this board--and  beyond this board--comes from an imprecision of names. We went through this yesterday. What do we mean by "liberal?" By "progressive?" By "conservative?" 
And you could take this principle and really go to town on American punditry. I think Hobbes would have a great deal of fun with Bill Keller's case against naming torture. There's probably some great line to be drawn from this problem of naming to Orwell:

Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.

Misnaming is not simply how we misreason, it's how we deceive and evade. Perhaps Hobbes knew this:

To conclude, the light of humane minds is perspicuous words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; reason is the pace; increase of science, the way; and the benefit of mankind, the end. And, on the contrary, metaphors, and senseless and ambiguous words are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities; and their end, contention and sedition, or contempt.

I know this is the wrong thing to say about a guy like Hobbes but there is something deeply moral, for me, in this part-reason is the pace; increase of science the way; and the benefit of mankind, the end. I just love that. And I love the idea that to muddy our words is a quiet contempt and sedition against ideas and mankind.         

Western Thought For Footmen And Aspiring Legionnaires

The Leviathan (Chapter V: Of Reason And Sense) 
I've long wanted to put in place hard standards for commenters on my blog. I think reading Chapter V and then writing an essay would be a good start. Of course this would be a standard that I would struggle to fulfill. So much for that idea.
At any rate, I thought this was so crucial:

By this it appears that reason is not, as sense and memory, born with us; nor gotten by experience only, as prudence is; but attained by industry: first in apt imposing of names; and secondly by getting a good and orderly method in proceeding from the elements, which are names, to assertions made by connexion of one of them to another; and so to syllogisms, which are the connexions of one assertion to another, till we come to a knowledge of all the consequences of names appertaining to the subject in hand; and that is it, men call science. And whereas sense and memory are but knowledge of fact, which is a thing past and irrevocable, science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another; by which, out of that we can presently do, we know how to do something else when we will, or the like, another time: because when we see how anything comes about, upon what causes, and by what manner; when the like causes come into our power, we see how to make it produce the like effects.

For Hobbes, sense and memory are things that we all come equipped with. But reason is worked at. Reason comes from naming--as precisely as possible--that which we sense, and then using a valid method to connect the names. I was joking at the top about comments because I think half the disagreement on this board--and  beyond this board--comes from an imprecision of names. We went through this yesterday. What do we mean by "liberal?" By "progressive?" By "conservative?" 
And you could take this principle and really go to town on American punditry. I think Hobbes would have a great deal of fun with Bill Keller's case against naming torture. There's probably some great line to be drawn from this problem of naming to Orwell:

Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.

Misnaming is not simply how we misreason, it's how we deceive and evade. Perhaps Hobbes knew this:

To conclude, the light of humane minds is perspicuous words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; reason is the pace; increase of science, the way; and the benefit of mankind, the end. And, on the contrary, metaphors, and senseless and ambiguous words are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities; and their end, contention and sedition, or contempt.

I know this is the wrong thing to say about a guy like Hobbes but there is something deeply moral, for me, in the part of this--reason is the pace; increase of science the way; and the benefit of mankind, the end. I just love that. And I love the idea that to muddy our words is a quiet contempt and sedition against ideas and mankind.         

A History of Liberal White Racism, Cont.

There is some sense that when we talk about the period leading up to the New Deal and beyond, that we are talking about progressives in the North making a tragic, yet necessary, bargain with white racists conservatives in the South. In fact what Ira Katznelson shows in Fear Itself is something a little more complicated. The white supremacists in his book are, indeed, for the most part, Southern. But they also are very much married to to the prospect of progressive liberal reform. It may break our brains a bit to imagine, say, a Southern white supremacist backing railroad unions. But that's actual history.
And if you think about it, it makes sense. Ben "Pitchfork" Tillman and Tom Watson were populist and (ultimately in the case of Watson) white supremacists. The division goes back to the days of pre-slavery politics when the South was somewhat divided between planters and yeoman farmers. I say"somewhat" because on the issue of White Supremacy, there was no division. 
No character in Katznelson's book troubles the waters like Mississippi's governor, and then senator, Theodore Bilbo. Here is a man who, in one breath, can be hailed as "a liberal fire-eater" and then in another dubbed "a bulldog for protecting traditions of the South." Bilbo was a Klansmen who stumped for Al Smith. But black equality was a bridge too far.
If Roosevelt's agenda belongs to us, so does the man who said this:

...it is practically impossible, without great loss of life, especially at the present time, to prevent lynching of Negro rapists when the crime is committed against the white women of the South."

And then claimed that the United States was:

...strictly a white man's country, with a white man's civilization, and any dream on the part of the Negro Race to share social and political equality will be shattered in the end.

We can not part ourselves from the man who recounted a meeting with a delegation of back labor leaders like this:

You know folks, I run Washington. I'm mayor there...Some niggers came to see me one time in Washington to try to get the right to vote there. The leader was a smart nigger. Of course he was half white. I told him that the nigger would never vote in Washington. Hell, if we give 'em the right to vote up there, half the niggers in the South will move into Washington and we'll have a black Government. No Southerner would sit in Congress under those conditions.

Theodore Bilbo worked to block funding for Howard University, tried to initiate a "Back to Africa" campaign for colonizing black citizens, attempted to segregate the national parks, dismissed multiracial children as "a motley melee of misceginated mongrels," attempted to ban interracial marriage in Washington, D.C., and raged against antilynching legislation that would compel "Southern girls to use the stools and toilets of damn syphilitic women." And he did this as a progressive.
It is not enough to claim that "liberalism" has, somehow, changed meanings thus allowing us to disown the Mississippi Senator. On the contrary, the Roosevelt administration congratulated Bilbo on his win in 1940 pronouncing him "a real friend of liberal government." When Bilbo himself first ran for Senate  he promised to "raise the same kind of hell as President Roosevelt." When he was up for reelection Bilbo promoted himself to be "100 percent for Roosevelt ... and the New Deal." 
If the New Deal is ours, so is Theodore Bilbo. Acknowledging this part of our history wounds us. Class interests, in the liberal mind, has always been seen as the great uniter. And yet we see for whole stretches of our history race not simply race trumping class, but race effectively functioning as class. 
Does it mean that the New Deal was worthless? No. Is the point that Roosevelt was a covert anti-black bigot? Nope. But it is part of our history. And it is as important to acknowledge this--just as,  when the history of marriage equality is written, it will be important to acknowledge the Democratic Party's "evolution."