Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 64

In Defense of Political Anger

Peter Beinart has some interesting reporting on why Chuck Hagel performed so poorly. Hagel was told to be as non-confrontational as possible and sent to pacify the lions with carrots:

All nominees are warned not to allow their hearings to turn combative, but a source close to Hagel suggests that the staffers prepping Hagel were particularly adamant on this score. "They expected [Jim] Inhofe, [John] McCain and especially [Ted] Cruz to come after him, and they said, 'Be a tank--don't rise and attack back.'" An aide involved in the Hagel preparations says that's overblown, but acknowledges that it was made clear that as a nominee, Hagel could not allow himself to be drawn into the kind of feisty exchange that Hillary Clinton had with Wisconsin Republican Ron Johnson during last month's hearings on Benghazi. This was considered particularly important in winning over those relatively moderate Senate Republicans like Tennessee's Lamar Alexander and Alaska's Lisa Murkowski, who administration aides believe like Hagel personally, and can be convinced to vote for him, or at least to oppose a Republican filibuster.

I usually avoid the all-too-common tactic of describing every Obama flub as some foretold advance in the long game. But I think the point here was to avoid a fumble. As Beinart says, it may not have been the best exhibition of Obama's second-term foreign policy, but it probably got him confirmed. If Hagel has to suffer hectoring by John McCain, so be it.
On a sidenote I really wish we would drop this discomfort with politicians getting "angry." Anger is human and sometimes wholly appropriate. My problem with John McCain has never been that he's angry, but that he's vindictive. 

The Language of Segregation Under Social Sanction

Continuing from our conversation around housing segregation and the language employed by those with power I think it's worth thinking some about the text of this petition:

"As moral, religious and law-abiding citizens, we feel that we are unprejudiced and undiscriminating in our wish to keep our community a closed community ... to protect our own."

The petition was put out in 1957, as Levittown sought to stave off integration. What's important to note is that we are well into post-war America and there is some social sanction emerging against prejudice and discrimination. What the petition does is effectively endorse prejudice and discrimination while claiming not to. Another example:

"We favor racial integration, but only at such time the negro shows he is ready for it."

Anyone familiar with the popular notion that talking about racism makes one racist will recognize the tactic. It's important to understand that the form is old. As social sanction emerged against slavery after the Civil War, you found former slaveholders insisting that the War actually wasn't about slavery--even as they sought to erect Black Codes which effectively perpetrated slavery.
I need to read Orwell. Like yesterday.

The Language Of Segregation Under Social Sanction

Continuing from our conversation around housing segregation and the language employed by those with power I think it's worth thinking some about the text of this petition:

"As moral, religious and law-abiding citizens, we feel that we are unprejudiced and undiscriminating in our wish to keep our community a closed community...to protect our own."

The petition was put out in 1957, as Levittown sought to stave off integration. What's important to note is that we are well into post-war America and there is some social sanction emerging against prejudice and discrimination. What the petition does is effectively endorse prejudice and discrimination while claiming not to. Anyone familiar with the popular notion that talking about racism makes one racist will recognize the tactic. 
It's important to understand that the form is old. As social sanction emerged against slavery after the Civil War, you found former slaveholders insisting that the War actually wasn't about slavery--even as they sought to erect Black Codes which effectively perpetrated slavery.
I need to read Orwell. Like yesterday.

The Effects of Housing Segregation on Black Wealth

In his book Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North, Tom Sugrue makes a great point while discussing the erection of Levittowns. The premier suburban developments excluded blacks and became bastions of white supremacy. Here Sugrue looks at Levittown, Pennsylvania:

As was the case in every Levittown, by Levitt's orders, not a single resident was black. It was not for a shortage of potential black buyers. Black housing demand far exceeded supply. In metropolitan Philadelphia, between 1946 and 1953, only 347 of 120,000 new homes built were open to blacks. Racial exclusion had perverse economic effects: It created a vast gap between supply and demand. As a result, blacks paid more for housing on average than did whites. In nearly every northern city, black newcomers crammed into old and run-down housing, mainly in dense central neighborhoods left behind by upwardly mobile whites.

This is really sinister. In rhetoric, at the time, America claimed "separate but equal." In effect, what you see is something more like "separate and serfdom." The policy was to keep black people from moving out of ghettos, and to keep them from marketing their labor in competition with whites, unless absolutely necessary. It is not enough to merely understand segregation as a means to keep the "races" separate. Segregation is about rendering black people a permanent underclass. This is not about an amorphous diversity. This is about power.
Part of keeping power out of black hands is turning the community's aspirational class into a bevy of easy marks. You can only imagine what kind of money was made exploiting the dreams of middle class black people trapped in the ghettos of America. That money represents a transfer of wealth from black hands to white hands. It continued unabated from the early 20th century, through the New Deal (which actually aided this process), well into the 1960s.
We spend a great deal of time talking about the black poor, but less talked about is how America for most of its history has actively punished black ambition. The black middle class has been the field for demonstrations upon the subject of what happens to "niggers with ideas." Any history of race riots in America will note that the targets are invariably institutions of black improvement -- churches, "black wall streets," schools, homes, etc.  it's worth considering what message a country sends to a people when it persecutes ambition. 
And it's worth thinking about how this country thought about black citizenship. William Levitt pitched homeownership as act of patriotism:

No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do.

When a nation excludes a people from the process of patriotism, what is it saying to them?

The Lost Battalion

Early and open guys. It's all yours...

30 Rock's Rejection of White Guilt

Like half the people in my small world, I'm a little sad to see 30 Rock go, but also a little glad that they didn't overstay their welcome. (This has been a pretty good season actually.) One thing that I don't think 30 Rock gets enough credit for is how it handles race. I don't know how many black writers they've had on the show—Donald Glover and Hannibal Burris are the ones I know. But I'm really having a hard time thinking of a mainstream show (one that wasn't a "black show") that better handled race. 
I think they did that by not actually handling race or black characters so much as interrogating whiteness. Some of the best scenes on the show come from the portraits of whiteness and a kind of white maleness ("I like Tracy Jordan. Dude's a baller. I like that you've got a slut on the show, even if she is a little boned out.")
And they did this without apologizing for being white, without giving a diversity lecture, but by just being the thing. I'm going to miss that.

How Shall We Grapple With the Leviathan?

I want to use this thread to get together a schedule and process for getting through Hobbes. My highest aim is to have as many of those who start with us, finish with us. In that vein, how do we feel about doing 2-3 chapters a week? The chapters are really, really short--some shorter than others. 
Honestly, I would really like to go as slow as one chapter a week. That would take us through much of the year, but I think our discussions would be really thorough and I think more people might be inclined to join in. What say you assembled Horde?
UPDATE: So having taken a good round of opinion, we'll do one chapter a week. I want to encourage maximum participation and really deep reading. How about we start with the Introduction. Let's meet back here next Friday 2/8, and talk Leviathan. Looking forward to it guys.

How Shall We Grapple With The Leviathan?

I want to use this thread to get together a schedule and process for getting through Hobbes. My highest aim is to have as many of those who start with us, finish with us. In that vein, how do we feel about doing 2-3 chapters a week? The chapters are really, really short--some shorter than others. 
Honestly, I would really like to go as slow as one chapter a week. That would take us through much of the year, but I think our discussions would be really thorough and I think more people might be inclined to join in. What say you assembled Horde?

David Mamet and the Irrelevance of the Actual Meanings of Words

Andrew Sullivan goes in pretty well on David Mamet's deplorable article which finds him arguing for a world of maximum guns. But like Scott Lemeiux, I was absolutely stunned by this paragraph:

The Founding Fathers, far from being ideologues, were not even politicians. They were an assortment of businessmen, writers, teachers, planters; men, in short, who knew something of the world, which is to say, of Human Nature. Their struggle to draft a set of rules acceptable to each other was based on the assumption that we human beings, in the mass, are no damned good -- that we are biddable, easily confused, and that we may easily be motivated by a Politician, which is to say, a huckster, mounting a soapbox and inflaming our passions.

Which is also to say the Founding Fathers were also slaves, and by slaves I mean white guys who wore wigs. All jest aside, I find the process that produces this sort of work to be utterly amoral. I've said this before, but this is the kind of writing that would get you bounced out of any decent essay writing class at a credible university. Words have meanings. You cannot change the fact that Thomas Jefferson served in the Virginia House of Burgesses because it's unfortunate for your argument. Unless you have a name like David Mamet.
The message one derives from this is that power gives you the privilege of lying. If you are big enough, if your name rings out far enough, you may make words mean whatever you want them to mean. I experience this as a kind of violence against language. If we can't agree on the meaning of "is," then we have no ability to talk. And if we have no ability to talk, we really are that much closer to guns.
Perhaps I should not be surprised that Newsweek printed this piece. But I will not retreat into cynicism. I will not allow myself to be unsurprised by the amoral use of words. It must be said that this use is wrong. And if saying so requires me to be old (or young) and naive, I will take it. When those of us who write start expecting that other writers will lie, we are that much closer to lying ourselves.

Western Thought for Class Clowns and Erstwhile Nationalists

Just to explain a bit more about why we'll be grappling with Hobbes, I think some oft-repeated history is order. We had a small row over Augustine a few weeks back. One thing I wanted to emphasize, but did not is that don't think it's ever cool to be ignorant. I dropped out of college. Before that I didn't take college seriously. Before that I didn't take high school seriously. Before that I didn't take middle school seriously. The consequence of those decisions are mixed. The good part is I've cultivated an aesthetic of auto-didacticism. The bad is that there are many gaps in my formal education. Augustine and my relatively late arrival to a foreign language among them.
I was raised in what you might crudely term an Afrocentric intellectual environment. I say "crude" because that wasn't a term that was really used in my house. We didn't celebrate Kwanzaa. We didn't really wear daishikis or speak in Swahili. I knew people who did all of those things, and they certainly influenced me, but that wasn't where we were at. It might nw because my Dad came out of the Panthers, a group that always evinced a skepticism of black nationalism. But the works and history of black people were essential to my upbringing. My Dad was a bibliophile. There were books by black people literally spilling off the wall. What there was not was much Fitzgerald, Augustine, Nietzche, Gramsci, Melville or much of anything out of the "Western" canon.
I don't regret that. It's my particular rooting in the black struggle that has brought me here with you. But I suspect most writers and thinkers begin with a grounding in the general, and then go to the specific. For me, I started with the specificity of the black experience and in conversation, mainly, with people thinking about that experience. Now I find confronting the West and somewhat underprepared. I need more guns.
This occurred to me recently as I reviewed this post on African-Americans and the "social contract." The fact is that I haven't read any significant thinkers on the subject. After the show on Saturday, Chris Hayes was nice enough to set with me and talk social contract, a bit. We joked about how people so often throw the term "social contract" but often don't really know the ends and outs of it. And then Chris suggested the classics--Hobbes, Locke and Rosseau, with a little Scanlon sprinkled in.
So that's it. That's what we're going to do less we slip into "the canting of Schoole-men." Dissertations have been written on this subject so I doubt I'll get the full extent of it. I'm going to basically start with Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. I might make it to Rawls, I'm not sure. But I'm opening the journey up. I can't go alone.