Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 53

Against the 'Conversation on Race'

LL Cool J makes it:

"Martin Luther King says that darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can," LL Cool J said. "Hate can't drive out hate, only love can. So what we're talking about is compassion...."
"I'm not advising anyone to truly forget slavery, but what I'm saying is forget the slavery mentality," LL Cool J said. "Forget the bitterness. Don't get bitter, get better."

Brad Paisley backs him up:

"Let's not be victims of things that happened so long ago," Paisley said.

One of the problems with the idea that America needs a "Conversation On Race" is that it presumes that "America" has something intelligent to say about race. All you need do is look at how American history is taught in this country to realize that that is basically impossible. 

I have had conversations with very well-educated people who, with a straight face, have told me that there are Black Confederates. If you ask a very well educated person how the GI Bill exacerbated the wealth gap, or how New Deal housing policy helped create the ghetto they very likely will not know. And they do not know, not because they are ignorant, stupid, or immoral, they do not know because they are part of country that has decided that "not knowing" is in its interest. There's no room for any sort of serious conversation when the basic facts of history are not accessible. It would be like me demanding a conversation on Vichy France--en Français.

So we retreat to mushy, moist talk about who "feelings," "intentions," "good people" and "loving fathers." The great Jay Smooth once said that we need to move from a "what you are" conversation ("you are a racist") to a "what you are doing" conversation. Unfortunately this presumes a groundwork of honesty and good faith. No such good faith exists because we are ignorant, and deep down inside, we know it and are ashamed of it.

Even within those confines, it did not have to be this way. Paisley could have reached out and had a conversation with an artist who might actually challenge his worldview. He could have engaged Mos Def and walked through Brooklyn. He might have engaged Common, walked the South Side and read about the forces that made it so. He might have talked to Kendrick Lamar and walked through Compton. He could have visited the jails and thought about why they are heaving with black men, and wondered what connections that heaving has with the past.
But acts would require a mind interested in something more than being told what it already knows. It would require an artist doing his job and exploring. It would require truly engaging a community, instead of haughtily lecturing it on how, precisely, it should react to great pain. It would require something more than mere reification. It would require something more than absolution. It would require talking to people who may not like you. It would require the rarest of things in this space where everyone wants to write, but no one wants to read--a truly curious mind.        

Why 'Accidental Racist' Is Actually Just Racist

This new duet between Brad Paisley and LL Cool J, "Accidental Racist," is getting beaten up pretty badly on the intertubes. I confess to doing some of the beating, mostly because of laughable lyrics and the fact that there is actually a Rap Genius entry dedicated to the song. With that said, I think it's worth taking a second to analyze why the lyrics are in fact laughable.

I think we can get to the root of this by seriously and directly engaging Brad Paisley and his stated motives for the song. Here is Paisley in his own words:

"At this point, after all these albums and all these hits, I have no interest in phoning it in, and I think that [the song] comes from an honest place in both cases, and that's why it's on there and why I'm so proud of it. This isn't a stunt. This isn't something that I just came up with just to be sort of shocking or anything like that. I knew it would be, but I'm sort of doing it in spite of that, really. 

"I'm doing it because it just feels more relevant than it even did a few years ago. I think that we're going through an adolescence in America when it comes to race. You know, it's like we're almost grown up. You have these little moments as a country where it's like, 'Wow things are getting better.' And then you have one where it's like, 'Wow, no they're not.' 

"It really came to a boil last year with Lincoln and Django, and there's just a lot of talk about it. It was really obvious to me that we still have issues as a nation with this. There are two little channels in each chorus that really steal the pie. One of them is, 'We're still picking up the pieces, walking on eggshells, fighting over yesterday,' and the other is, 'Paying for the mistakes that a lot of folks made long before we came.' We're all left holding the bag here, left with the burden of these generations. And I think the younger generations are really kind of looking for ways out of this. 

"I just think art has a responsibility to lead the way, and I don't know the answers, but I feel like asking the question is the first step, and we're asking the question in a big way. How do I show my Southern pride? What is offensive to you? And he kind of replies, and his summation is really that whole let bygones be bygones and 'If you don't judge my do rag, I won't judge your red flag.' We don't solve anything, but it's two guys that believe in who they are and where they're from very honestly having a conversation and trying to reconcile."

The du-rag/red-flag line Paisley cites at the end belongs to LL Cool J, one of the two guys "that believe in who they are." LL Cool J has enjoyed a kind of longevity with which very few rappers can compete. In the mid-'80s and early '90s, particularly, he was a dynamic MC. (I am still partial to the "I'm Bad"/"Radio"/"Go Cut Creator Go" era.)  His career has blossomed beyond the record industry to include music and film. 

I can understand why an artist like Paisley would be attracted to an artist like LL Cool J. I can't for the life of me understand why he'd choose LL Cool J to begin "a conversation" to reconcile. Rap is overrun with artists who've spent some portion of their career attempting to have "a conversation." There's Chuck D. There's Big Daddy Kane. There's KRS-ONE. There's Talib. There's Mos Def. There's Kendrick Lamar. There's Black Thought. There's Dead Prez. And so on. 

In an artform distinguished by a critical mass concerned with racism, LL's work is distinguished by its lack of concern. Which is fine. "Pink Cookies" is dope. "Booming System" is dope. "I Shot Ya" is dope. I even rock that "Who Do You Love" joint. But I wouldn't call up Talib Kweli to record a song about gang violence in L.A., and I wouldn't call up KRS-ONE to drop a verse on a love ballad. The only real reason to call up LL is that he is black and thus must have something insightful to say about the Confederate Flag. 

The assumption that there is no real difference among black people is exactly what racism is. Our differences, our right to our individuality, is what makes us human. The point of racism is to rob black people of that right. It would be no different than me assuming that Rachel Weisz must necessarily have something to say about black-Jewish relations, or me assuming that Paisley must know something about barbecue because he's Southern. 

It is no different than the only black kid in class being asked to explain "race" to white people, or asking the same question of the sole black dude in your office. The entire fight is to get white people to respect the fact that Mos Def holding a microphone is not LL Cool J holding a microphone, that Trayvon Martin is not De'Marquise Elkins, that wearing a hoodie and being black does not make you the same as every other person wearing a hoodie and being black. 

Paisley wants to know how he can express his Southern Pride. Here are some ways. He could hold a huge party on Martin Luther King's birthday, to celebrate a Southerner's contribution to the world of democracy. He could rock a T-shirt emblazoned with Faulkner's Light In August, and celebrate the South's immense contribution to American literature. He could preach about the contributions of unknown Southern soldiers like Andrew Jackson Smith. He could tell the world about the original Cassius Clay. He could insist that Tennessee raise a statue to Ida B. Wells.

Every one of these people are Southerners. And every one of them contributed to this great country. But to do that Paisley would have to be more interested in a challenging conversation and less interested in a comforting lecture.

       

The Conservative Black Hope, Cont.

The other day I tried to tease out the difference between African Americans with conservative politics, and African Americans who promote themselves at the expense of the community from which they hail. To understand what it once meant to be an African-American conservative, it's worth checking out this old Washington Post piece on former Rep. J.C. Watts, who represented his beliefs but wanted to be something more than the guy who assured Jesse Helms that he was not racist.
You can see the other side of this dynamic in the recent panel of "black conservatives" convened by Sean Hannity. Among the participants was Jesse Lee Peterson. If you have a moment I urge you to listen to Peterson's analysis of slavery. Again, it is one thing to believe that deficit reduction is the most important issue of the day. It is another to imply that the Middle Passage was like "riding on a crowded airplane when you're not in first class." It is one thing to believe that America must always have the world's strongest military. It is another to say, "Thank God for slavery." It is one thing oppose gun regulation. It is another to say, to "the white man for going there and getting us here, I want to say 'Thanks.'"
Martin Luther King Jr. wrote:

Negroes are human, not superhuman. Like all people, they have differing personalities, diverse financial interests and varied aspirations. There are Negroes who will never fight for freedom. There are Negroes who will seek to profit for themselves alone from the struggle. There are even Negroes who will cooperate with there oppressors. These facts should depress no one. Every minority and every people has its share of opportunists, profiteers, free-loaders, and escapists."

There's nothing about being "conservative" that necessarily puts an African American among that group. I would gladly put, say, Kwame Kilpatrick -- who fleeced his city, then hid behind the specter of racism -- in that category. But the category does exist. When you are thanking "the white man" for slavery, you might be well a contestant for the summer-jam screen.
UPDATE: Included the full King quote. Quote is from King's book Why We Can't Wait.        

Fine Old Cannibals

This morning in the thread on the Holocaust and humanism, I wrote this:

It is often said that racism is the result of a lack of education, that it must be defeated by civilization and progress. Nothing points to the silliness of that idea like the Holocaust. "Civilization" is irrelevant to racism. I don't even know what "civilization" means. When all your great theory, and awesome literature, and philosophy amounts to state bent on genocide, what is it worth? There were groups of hunter-gatherers wandering the Kalahari who were more civilized than Germany in 1943.

I probably should not have. 
I was trying to do two things: 1.) Question the idea of "civilization," a word which I have a hard time disentangling from intellectual bigotry. 2.) Point out that even by the standards of those who use words like "civilization, " actual "civilizations" fail. 
But sometimes when we try to question a bigoted claim, we end up simply restating the bigoted claim. I should have been clearer. I don't want anyone leaving with the impression that I think it is helpful, useful, or even accurate to attempt laud entire ethnic groups as "civilized" and others as "uncivilized." Not because it's "mean," but because I don't think such talk has any meaning or content.
Some of the deepest revelations of my life have come from sitting with Herman Melville. Even deeper ones have come from sitting with my father. I would expect that exact same thing to be try on the Kalahari.        

Humanism and Holocaust History

I'm getting toward the end of Antony Beevor's The Second World War. If you only know the outlines of World War II, I would very heartily recommend it. Speaking for myself, this is the first book I've read that devotes considerable attention to the Holocaust. It's one thing to know the numbers. It is another to be faced with the methodology.

When studying a great evil, my general approach is to try to preserve my judgement but suspend my judgementalism. In other words, I want to be able to tell you very forthrightly about the evils of, say slavery, while at the same time telling you about the psychology of the slave-holder. And I want to do this with the full knowledge that I could have been on either side of the whip.

No historian whom I've read better handles this than Drew Gilpin-Faust. Her work on the women planters during the Civil War does not excuse anyone. When she speaks of patriarchy or white supremacy, she does it with seriousness and specificity. She manages to avoid the temptation to lump women, blacks, poor whites into some vague activist melange called "The People." And at the same time, Faust is able to sketch the very real societal bonds that kept these women in a cage. That humanist approach to history, as opposed to marshaling history for condemnation or the improvement of collective self-esteem, is one I have tried to emulate.

In the case of the Holocaust, it is failing me. For all the talk of supremacy, Nazism in Beovor's telling is savagery and cannibalism. I don't mean that for rhetorical effect. The Nazis are using human body hair, human skin, human fat to make products. When practiced by the darker peoples of the world, we call this savagery. Here is Beovor quoting a Nazi paymaster in the Ukraine:

In Bereza-Kartuska where I took my midday break, 1,300 Jews had been shot the day before. They were taken to a hollow outside the town. Men, women and children were forced to undress completely and were dealt with by a shot through the back of the head. Their clothes were disinfected for reuse. I am convinced that if the war lasts much longer Jews will be processed into sausage and be served up to Russian prisoners of war or to qualified Jewish workers.

Vasily Grossman looking at Treblinka noted that 800,000 Jews and 'Gypsies'--a population of "a small European capital city" -- were killed by a staff numbering just over a hundred. "Never before in human history," writes Beevor, "had so many people been killed by so few executioners."

So I find humanism failing me here. Perhaps it is because I am American and not German, and thus there's greater distance. Or perhaps it's because I just haven't read enough. (When I first began studying slavery, I was not a humanist.) Certainly the scale of death, and its industrialization, presents a challenge. The irony of slavery (in the United States) is that planters have an incentive to keep enslaved people alive. You see the embers of the kind of hate that could lead to genocide, but never the fire. There's just to much money involved.

Anyway, I am not saying this as though its a fresh insight, I strongly suspect that the entire field of Holocaust Studies is grappling with this challenge. Or maybe the field has gotten past it. I just don't know.

One final point. It is often said that racism is the result of a lack of education, that it must be defeated by civilization and progress. Nothing points to the silliness of that idea like the Holocaust. "Civilization" is irrelevant to racism. I don't even know what "civilization" means. When all your great theory, and awesome literature, and philosophy amounts to state bent on genocide, what is it worth? There were groups of hunter-gatherers wandering the Kalahari who were more civilized than Germany in 1943.

       

'None of Us Is Simple'

Yesterday I wrote about Michael Kelly. I started off by saying "I didn't know Michael Kelly." I actually don't know a lot of people, and I generally like it that way. One of the perils of this job is you begin to "know people" and this compromises your willingness to strongly and loudly disagree with them. The compromise isn't total, and one of the things I know that we've tried to do here (especially Conor, Jim, Jeff and myself) is fight publicly. Maybe we don't always do it as much as we should. But it is a value we hold.
I don't want to speak for anyone else, but the danger of becoming a "Serious Person" lingers in the back of mind. And so I keep my distance from certain scenes.  But sometimes knowing someone actually allow you to say something deeper, and more insightful, something you coud not know without proximity. 
In that spirit, I would encourage you to read Jim Fallows' response to my piece (and some other pieces) on Michael Kelly. Here's Jim assessing a truly egregious column Kelly wrote on Al Gore:

Michael's judgment was not merely wrong. It was "dishonest, cheap, low." And it had impact. It is hard now to convey the drumbeat of arguments for the war and also of ridicule and impatience for anyone who lacked war fever. That is what you see in Michael's contemptuous dismissal of Gore. The buildup to the war was probably Christopher Hitchens's worst moment, too, when he was dead-set on the moral rightness of the invasion and intent on demolishing people who disagreed. The two of them, Michael and Christopher, were not the only ones striking this tone, but they were very influential. 
Now, the complication. At just the time Michael was writing those words about Al Gore, he was supporting and trying to improve my cover story, in his own magazine, arguing that we would regret the consequences of invasion for many years to come. None of us is simple.

At first I was thinking that it must be easier to write this sort of thing when the person has passed away. And then I remembered that Jim is, in no way, new to to this challenge. So maybe it's not easier. In fact, it's probably never easy to publicly assess people whom you've known, and liked, privately. But it's part of the work.         

'None Of Us Is Simple'

Yesterday I wrote about Michael Kelly. I started off by saying "I didn't know Michael Kelly." I actually don't know a lot of people, and I generally like it that way. One of the perils of this job is you begin to "know people" and this compromises your willingness to strongly and loudly disagree with them. The compromise isn't total, and one of the things I know that we've tried to do here (especially Jim, Jeff and myself) is fight publicly. Maybe we don't always do it as much as we should. But it is a value we hold.
I don't want to speak for anyone else, but the danger of becoming a "Serious Person" lingers in the back of mind. And so I keep my distance from certain scenes.  But sometimes knowing someone actually allow you to say something deeper, and more insightful, something you coud not know without proximity. 
In that spirit, I would encourage you to read Jim Fallows' response to my piece (and some other pieces) on Michael Kelly. Here's Jim assessing a truly egregious column Kelly wrote on Al Gore:

Michael's judgment was not merely wrong. It was "dishonest, cheap, low." And it had impact. It is hard now to convey the drumbeat of arguments for the war and also of ridicule and impatience for anyone who lacked war fever. That is what you see in Michael's contemptuous dismissal of Gore. The buildup to the war was probably Christopher Hitchens's worst moment, too, when he was dead-set on the moral rightness of the invasion and intent on demolishing people who disagreed. The two of them, Michael and Christopher, were not the only ones striking this tone, but they were very influential. 
Now, the complication. At just the time Michael was writing those words about Al Gore, he was supporting and trying to improve my cover story, in his own magazine, arguing that we would regret the consequences of invasion for many years to come. None of us is simple.

At first I was thinking that it must be easier to write this sort of thing when the person has passed away. And then I remembered that Jim is, in no way, new to to this challenge. So maybe it's not easier. In fact, it's probably never easy to publicly assess people whom you've known, and liked, privately. But it's part of the work.         

Some Thoughts on Michael Kelly

I didn't really know Michael Kelly. We had one friend in common, and as the years have gone by I've come to be fairly close with people who respected and loved him. Kelly died ten years ago while covering Iraq. In reading about him, it's clear that what many respected about Kelly was his willingness to put himself in great danger in order to answer the great questions. He does not come off as the sort of guy to opine on TV comforted by the safety of reports from Brookings.  But nor does he come off as the sort of guy who subject to the calm and rational consideration of dissent.
Over at Gawker, Tom Scocca published a very hard--and very fair--assessment of Kelly's role in the Iraq War. I hadn't read much of the work Scocca referenced, so I did myself a favor and looked up some of Kelly's columns in the days leading up to Iraq. What you find in these columns is the pit of all that, to this day, angers those who were against the war from the start. Kelly's columns are not pro-war, they are ferociously pro-Bush, and gleefully contemptuous of liberals who thought otherwise. 
It's the glee that burns. There's a kind of writer who gets his kicks writing bad reviews of music and books. You see that same spirit in Kelly's mocking of Paul Krugman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Janeane Garofalo, or in his attacks on the French by evoking the ghost of Pétain. 
That glee turned Kelly  into a thin writer who spurned nuance in favor of hyperbole. In the fall of 2002,  for instance, Kelly wrote that Bush...

...presides over an administration that is unusually intelligent -- and also cunning -- unusually experienced, unusually disciplined and unusually bold.

He continued:

Democrats will howl...that the president is not competent, that his administration is not to be trusted, that Republican presidents and Republican policies are radical and dangerous and frightening and bad...
I suppose they will continue to believe this, and continue to say it, in voices growing ever more shrill and ever more loud, yet, oddly, ever more distant and faint.

The president wasn't competent. Iraq and then Katrina proved that. And the voices did not grow more "distant and faint." They led to the election of Barack Obama. But again, it is not the simply the wrong-ness, it's the gleeful and casual dismissal. Here is Kelly writing after witnessing an antiwar march in early 2003:

The debate is over. The left has hardened itself around the core value of a furious, permanent, reactionary opposition to the devil-state America, which stands as the paramount evil of the world and the paramount threat to the world, and whose aims must be thwarted even at the cost of supporting fascists and tyrants...

After embedding with the military in Iraq, Kelly said of the war:

It is remarkable enough that the United States is setting out to undertake the invasion of a nation, the destruction of a regime and the liberation of a people. But to do this with only one real military ally, with much of the world against it, with a war plan that is still, by necessity, in flux days before the advent, with an invasion force that contains only one fully deployed heavy armored division -- and to have, under these circumstances, the division's commander sleeping pretty good at night: Well, that is extraordinary.
A victory on these terms will change the power dynamics of the world. And there will be a victory on these terms.

A few weeks ago, my colleague Jim Fallows argued that "People in the media who were for the war have, with rare and admirable exceptions, avoided looking back."
Reading through Kelly's file, you begin to understand why. Michael Kelly wasn't an outlier. He was one of the most important journalists of his generation. He was a National Magazine Award winner and the one-time editor of The Atlantic, The New Republic (he helped birth Stephen Glass) and The National Journal. Kelly was at the center of media power, and he was beloved by many around him
It is often tough to reconcile what people do professionally with what they do personally. I don't mean to attack a man who was--by every account--a great father and husband, and a great friend. But great fathers and great husbands die with some regularity and do not merit remembrances in national publications. Michael Kelly is not publicly notable because of his personal fidelity but because of his professional work. Faced with a historic conflict, Kelly's professional work amounted to a gleeful embrace of what was wrong, and a gleeful assault on what was right.
That too must be remembered.        

Some Thoughts On Michael Kelly

I didn't really know Michael Kelly. We had one friend in common, and as the years have gone by I've come to be fairly close with people who respected and loved him. Kelly died ten years ago while covering Iraq. In reading about him its clear that what many respected about Kelly was his willingness to put himself in great danger in order to answer the great questions. He does not come off as the sort of guy to opine on TV comforted by the safety of reports from Brookings.  But nor does he come off as the sort of guy who subject to the calm and rational consideration of dissent.
Over at Gawker, Tom Scocca published a very hard--and very fair--assessment of Kelly's role in the Iraq War. I hadn't read much of the work Scocca referenced, so I did myself a favor and looked up some of Kelly's columns in the days leading up to Iraq. What you find in these columns is the pit of all that, to this day, angers those who were against the War from the start. Kelly's columns are not pro-war, they are ferociously pro-Bush, and gleefully contemptuous of liberals who thought otherwise. 
It's the glee that burns. There's a kind of writer who gets their kicks writing bad reviews of music and books. You see that same spirit in Kelly's mocking of Paul Krugman, Kurt Vonnegut and Janeane Garofalo, or in his attacks  on his attack on the French by evoking the ghost of Pétain. 
That glee turned Kelly, in the days leading up to the War, into a thin writer who spurned nuance in favor of hyperbole. In the Fall of 2002,  for instance, Kelly wrote that Bush, 

...presides over an administration that is unusually intelligent -- and also cunning -- unusually experienced, unusually disciplined and unusually bold.

He continued:

Democrats will howl...that the president is not competent, that his administration is not to be trusted, that Republican presidents and Republican policies are radical and dangerous and frightening and bad...
I suppose they will continue to believe this, and continue to say it, in voices growing ever more shrill and ever more loud, yet, oddly, ever more distant and faint.

The president wasn't competent. Iraq and then Katrina proved that. And the voices did not grow more "distant and faint," they led to the election of Barack Obama. But again, it is not the simply the wrong-ness, it's the gleeful and casual dismissal. Here is Kelly writing after witnessing an anti-war march in early 2003:

The debate is over. The left has hardened itself around the core value of a furious, permenant, reactionary opposition to the devil-state America, which stands as the paramount evil of the world and the paramount threat to the world, and whose aims must be thrwarted even at the cost of supporting fascists and tyrants...

After embedding with the military in Iraq, Kelly said of the War:

It is remarkable enough that the United States is setting out to undertake the invasion of a nation, the destruction of a regime and the liberation of a people. But to do this with only one real military ally, with much of the world against it, with a war plan that is still, by necessity, in flux days before the advent, with an invasion force that con- tains only one fully deployed heavy armored division -- and to have, under these circumstances, the division's commander sleeping pretty good at night: Well, that is extraordinary.
A victory on these terms will change the power dynamics of the world. And there will be a victory on these terms.

A few weeks ago, my colleague Jim Fallows argued that "People in the media who were for the war have, with rare and admirable exceptions, avoided looking back."
Reading through Kelly's file, you begin to understand why. Michael Kelly wasn't an outlier. He was one of the most important journalist of his generation. He was a National Magazine Award winner and the one-time editor of The Atlantic, The New Republic (he helped birth Stephen Glass) and The National Journal. Kelly was at the center of media power, and he was beloved by many around him
It is often tough to reconcile what people do professionally, with what they do personally. I don't mean to attack a man who was--by every account--a great father and husband, and a great friend. But great fathers and husbands die with some regularity and go undiscussed. Michael Kelly is not publicly notable because of his personal fidelity, but because of his professional work. Faced with a historic conflict, Kelly's professional work amounted to a gleeful embrace of what was wrong, and a gleeful assault on what was right.
That too must be remembered.        

The Conservative Black Hope

My Times column today looks at the phenomenon that is Dr. Benjamin Carson. For kids like me who came up in Baltimore during the 80s and 90s, Carson has special importance. Whenever the black folks at our summer camps or schools wanted to have a "Be A Credit To Your Race" moment they brought in Dr. Carson. I saw him speak so many times that I began to have that "This guy again?" feeling. As an adult, knowing how much it takes to speak in front of people, I can recognize that Carson's willingness to talk to black youth (and youth in general) came from a deeply sincere place. There were no cameras at those summer camps and school assemblies. No one had money to pay him. But he showed up. And that was what mattered.
There's nothing about "showing up" that is inconsistent with being conservative. Some of the most committed black people I know--in some other America--would be Republicans. But in this America, this conservative movement, has a fairly nasty romance with white racism. There are black conservatives (some Republican, some not) who manage to steer clear of this--Bill Cosby, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, and possibly Tim Scott. And there are others who, to put it bluntly, profit from it. 
It's perfectly respectable to think Obamacare is bad for the country. It's less respectable to claim that Obama The corollary of that last metaphor--the idea of liberalism as a plantation--is especially noxious and deeply racist. It holds that black people are not really like other adult humans in America--people capable of discerning their interest and voting accordingly--but mental slaves too stupid to know what's good for them. 
When Ben Carson uses this language he is promoting himself at the expense of the community from which he hails. More, he is promoting himself at the expense of the community in which I once saw him labor.  That is tragic.