Corey Robin's Blog, page 58

The Petty Pilfering of Minutes: Wage Theft in Contemporary America

Northwestern University political scientist Daniel Galvin has an eye-opening post in The Washington Post about wage theft, a topic I’ve written about before. Based on extensive research, he’s made the following findings (my summary here is abbreviated; for the fuller findings, read Galvin’s excellent piece):

1. Percentage of low-wage workers who have suffered wage theft: 16%. (Other studies report higher percentages.)

2. Average percentage of a worker’s wages lost to wage theft: 26%.

3. Where wage theft tends to happen: private homes, nail salons, food service industries.

4. Whom it tends to happen to: women, people of color, people under 30, non-citizens, non-union members, people who didn’t finish high school or who live in the South.

5. How it happens: “employers often commit wage theft by mandating off-the-clock work, paying their employees a flat rate irrespective of hours worked, making illegal deductions, withholding tips, misclassifying their employees as exempt, or simply refusing to pay for work performed.”

6. How it can be stopped: treble damages for violators.

Not exactly what Marx had in mind when he cited the petty pilfering of minutes, but getting close.

 

Prometheus Bound: A Labor Day Story for the Left?

I wonder how Prometheus came to be championed by the left. At least in Aeschylus’s hands (there are other versions of the story, but I think Aeschylus’s was the most well known), he’s a more ambivalent figure, politically speaking, than the one we’ve come to know on the left. Yes, he sides with the insurgent Zeus against the the old order of the Titans, even though he is a Titan himself, but he comes to regret that. And not just because Zeus turns on him but also because, as the Chorus keeps repeating, insurgent power is always crueler than its predecessor, ancient power has more majesty. Part of the backdrop to the story is that Prometheus made a mistake: not in giving fire (and much else) to humanity, but in hitching his wagon to such an unpromising star as Zeus. Prometheus’s growing contempt for Zeus and his followers is not that of a revolutionary against a tyrant; it reflects instead his old-regime hauteur, his contempt for the artless and the arriviste (not unlike Burke’s contempt for the lawyer revolutionaries in the National Assembly). And while he’s eager to share knowledge of the arts (technology) with humanity, he’s not so keen to share political knowledge. He knows that one day Zeus will be undone by a usurper, and he knows who that usurper will be, but he tries to keep that knowledge—the fact that Zeus will be overthrown—a secret: “You may not know this,” he tells the Chorus. “Ask no more.” That is, as the Chorus says, “sacred knowledge.” (Eventually Prometheus does reveal that Zeus will be overthrown, but he refuses to say who this usurper will be; that is his final act of defiance against Zeus, who wants to know whence the danger will come. Which is itself interesting: Prometheus’s true majesty is revealed by his withholding of a much sought after truth from a tyrant.) So, Prometheus seems to suggest, you can share technological knowledge but not political knowledge; technological knowledge need not emancipate, politically. Which is in fact a lesson for the left, though not the one we usually look to Prometheus for.

A Story for Labor Day

It’s Labor Day weekend. I should have something new to say about labor, but I’m feeling lazy. Which is itself one of the rights of labor: “The genuine wealth of man is leisure,” as Godwin put it. So I’ll post an excerpt from a piece I did for Dissent about 15 years ago. Which opens with one of my favorite stories about work.

TOURING WEST VIRGINIA during the 1960 presidential campaign, John Kennedy was accosted by a miner demanding to know whether he was indeed “the son of one of our wealthiest men.” Kennedy admitted that he was. “Is it true that you’ve never wanted for anything and had everything you wanted?” the miner pressed. “I guess so.” “Is it true you’ve never done a day’s work with your hands all your life?” Kennedy nodded. “Well,” the miner drawled, “let me tell you this. You haven’t missed a thing.”

Mindless drudgery or moral elevation? In the Western tradition, work has been both, and for good reason. On the one hand, work, whether physical or intellectual, can be fulfilling. Reversing the usual stereotype, Karl Marx criticized Adam Smith for lamenting the burdens of work and failing to grasp that “the overcoming of . . . obstacles” was a basic component of human freedom. Work pressed men and women to develop their full capacities, a prerequisite for the realization of self. Less romantic types have celebrated work for the relief it provides from the misery of the human condition. Without work, Sherlock Holmes confesses to Watson, there is only tedium— and cocaine. “My mind,” he says, “rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants.”

But work can also be the misery of the human condition. It often requires demanding physical effort. It takes men and women away from more satisfying activity. It can be mindnumbing and oppressive. There is a reason, after all, that work is a biblical curse. And not only hard labor can seem onerous: whatever the charms of the life of the mind, Anthony Trollope noted, they alone could not compel a writer to put pen to paper; only the rewards of money and fame compensated for the painful effort writing required. “Take away from English authors their copyrights,” he archly observed, “and you would very soon take away also from England her authors.”

In recent years, this historic ambivalence about work has given way to a more flattened consciousness. In our post-welfare era, work is an unqualified good; the only bad thing is not having it. It gets people out of poverty— and out of bed. Going to work “constitutes a framework for daily behavior,” writes William Julius Wilson, without which “life . . . becomes less coherent.” Work instills discipline and responsibility. It converts the self’s drifting energies into vital currents of industry and design. These claims are not new; centuries ago, John Calvin praised work as “a sort of sentry post” preventing us from “heedlessly wander[ing] about through life.” What is new is the failure to acknowledge that work does not always fulfill its appointed mission. So complete is our faith in its virtues that George W. Bush, whose own life is not exactly an advertisement for steady work, can nevertheless luxuriate, without a hint of embarrassment or criticism, in its moral grandeur.

You can read more here.

Duke, Berkeley, Columbia, Oh My: What are our students are trying to tell us

My Sunday column in Salon uses the latest campus controversy—the Duke student who refuses to read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home—as an opportunity to take a second look at what these students with their trigger warnings and sensitivities are trying to tell us. I’d really like to get this aspect of the controversy into the conversation, so even if you disagree, it’d be great if you could share this column as widely as possible:

No one knows the power of literature better than the censor. That’s why he burns books: to fight fire with fire, to stop them from setting the world aflame. Or becomes an editor: Stalin, we now know, excised words from texts with about as much energy and attention as he excised men and women from the world. As Bertolt Brecht archly noted of the East German regime’s efforts to control what he wrote: “Where else in the world can you find a government that shows such interest and pays such attention to artists?”

This week, as I head back to the classroom amid controversy — from Columbia toBerkeley to Duke — over what college students will or will not read, I’m mindful of Brecht’s observation. Could it be that the men and women who most appreciate what we, professors of the humanities and social sciences, have to offer are the students who’ve been vilified as coddled and cosseted, demanding trigger warnings on syllabi or simply refusing to read the books we’ve assigned them because those books make them uncomfortable? Could it be that they, like the censor, are the ones who truly understand the power of the books we teach?

…

That’s why I’m less bothered than some of my colleagues are by today’s students. I see in their fear a premonition of what a book — and an education — can do. We live in an age, we’re often told, where reading has become rote or has simply disappeared. Half our students don’t do the reading; the other half submit dutiful book reports, barely registering the effect of what they’ve read.

Yet here are students who seem to understand, however faintly and problematically, what the literary critic Alfred Kazin called “the raw hurting power that a book could have over me.” They seem like throwbacks, these students: not to the Midwestern evangelism of Elmer Gantry but to the urban hothouse of the New York Intellectuals, those anxious and oversexed minds of mid-century for whom a Henry James novel or Walt Whitman poem was a holy fire. “Writing Was Everything“: that’s how Kazin titled one of his memoirs. In their refusal to read a book, in their insistence that professors warn them of the trauma it may contain, that is what students are running away from: writing that consumes them, writing that’s everything.

…

Even so, there’s a greater threat to reading and readers, to education itself, than trigger warnings or students objecting to a text. And that is the downsizing administrator, the economizing politician, who refuses to believe there’s any value in reading a difficult text at all. While the media debates Mr. Grasso’s refusal, I, as chair of my department, anxiously scrutinize our daily enrollment reports, knowing I have to defend courses with 12 students from administrative economizers — simply because the intimacy, attention and focus of a senior seminar doesn’t register as a value to men who can only see value when it is expressed as a number on a spreadsheet. Given the choice of defending a book to an aggrieved student or a course to a phlegmatic accountant, I’ll take the student any day: at least she and I agree that the book in question has power, and the experience of reading it, reality.

In this age of the neoliberal university, these students may be our best allies, for they seem to be among the few who understand that what we do matters. The administrator and the politician, the trustee and the pundit, think that we professors are worse than subversive; we’re useless. These students, by contrast, think we’re dangerous. Rather than dismissing them, maybe we should say: Thank you, we thought no one was listening, we thought no one cared. And then turn around and figure out how to use this as, ahem, a teachable moment — about the radioactivity of books and the fact that radiation has its uses.

Read more here.

Security Politics, Anti-Capitalism, Student Activists, and the Left

I gave a lengthy interview to Margins, a progressive student magazine at Yale. We talked a lot about a lot of things.

We talked about the increasing securitization—terrible word, I know—of politics. But, as I said, what I think is most significant about that trend is the growing opposition to it. Compared to what was going on in the 90s, or the aughts, the movements on the ground against the security state are tremendous. The only question is: can they build and last? We’ve seen lots of blips of movements in the last 15 years: against the WTO, the Iraq War, Wall Street, debt, and now the police. Their half-lives seem to be getting shorter and shorter. In part because we’ve yet to devise an organizational form that can withstand the forces that are arrayed against the left. But, I conclude:

I also think social movements go through a learning process, and it may very well just take a while for people on the Left to begin to work through some of these issues. And you have to have some patience for that process, and not just think you can recreate a party structure or a this or a that, whatever may have worked 50 to 100 years ago, but you have to also have a certain amount of confidence or faith that people will figure out some kind of an organizational model or apparatus that can do that and can survive. This way, I hope some of what we see the national security state doing becomes a salutary lesson to people that really are serious about transforming this culture, and this economy, and this politics. If you really are serious about that, and if you really believe that there is a ruling class that is determined to stop you or at least to hold on to its power, well, you’re going to have to come up with forms of counterpower that can resist and ultimately overturn that. This came up, I remember, during the discussions after Occupy, people brought up, ‘Well, look, the state smashed it, and that’s what happened.’ And that’s true, but the state has always tried to do that, and it has oftentimes done it far more viciously and violently than it did, so you kind of have to accept that that’s part of the political reality that you need to figure out a way of overcoming.

We also talked about anti-capitalism and the left, and the impact that the collapse of communism had on the left:

Even though the Left has been many different things, the 20th century left was overwhelmingly dominated by this idea of the transformation of social relations under capitalism. That idea was a very much in bad odor in the 1990s, and it affected lots of different kinds of Lefts, because the whole idea of political transformation, the whole idea of political agency, and being able to intervene in social relations, became suspect, so you had much much more quietistic models of politics, and anybody who identified as an activist, or thought of themselves as on the Left, was automatically suspect.

We talked about solidarity, about taking local grievances and making them universal:

A whole philosophy of the Left—and I don’t mean just unions or people who are socialists, I mean, just generally, the whole philosophy of solidarity and what the Left stands for—is that you take a particular grievance and ultimately, through a process of political action, you come to see in that grievance a whole world of systemic injustice and inequality that needs to be taken on and overthrown. And then, when the Left is really doing its job, it’s enabling local citizens and local activists and actors to see the world in that grain of sand, to use a little Blake metaphor, and that’s when the Left is doing what it’s supposed to be doing: it’s getting people to act on their particular grievance or sense of injustice or whatever it may be, and to begin to see a wider pattern in it that needs to be taken on—and slowly but surely people start looking at a broader systemic problem in society and begin to understand their own situation in those terms. That’s what political transformation is all about.

And we talked about student activism:

Well, I was never big on the whole idea of student activists. In fact, I think that’s what kept me away from being involved in campus politics for a long time, but I think because the situation of students has actually changed so dramatically—I just think this debt issue is so foundational—if we use it as an opportunity and see it as an opening, I think students are very well-positioned, both because of the debt that they have accrued and because of the kind of economic opportunities or lack thereof that they’re facing, to start mounting mass movements around this issue. Trotsky was 25, and he led the St. Petersburg Soviet in the 1905 revolution. Martin Luther King was maybe 27 when he led the Montgomery Bus boycott. All these people, were extraordinarily young, so when you have that history on the one hand, and then the fact that students are really in the crux of all the economic transformations that we’re talking about in terms of the increasing assumption of debt, the privatization of public education, and then the disaster of an economy that they are facing, well, that’s an opportunity. I talked to somebody the other day, who was applying to graduate school, and he works as a freelancer, but he temps, doing word-processing at that age. So I said, “What do you get paid?” And he said, “You know, 15 to 16 dollars an hour,” and this is in New York City. I thought, when I graduated college in 1989, I moved out to the Bay Area for a year, and I was temping, I made 15 dollars an hour. So that tells me there’s been such an economic constriction that I do think students are very well placed to take a leadership role on some of these foundational issues of our time.

After Three Weeks of Terrible Publicity, 41 UIUC Leaders Call on Administration to Resolve Crisis (Updated)

In what may be the most significant and largest statement by campus leaders at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to date, 41 department chairs and program heads have issued a powerful call for the university to reinstate Steven Salaita. Addressing the new acting chancellor, Barbara Wilson, who recently replaced Chancellor Phyllis Wise, and UI President Timothy Killeen, the writers not only register just how severe the Salaita crisis has been but they also make plain a way out of the mess: reinstate Salaita. In a statement accompanying the letter’s release, English Department head Michael Rothberg said:

The Salaita case has become an international symbol for the precariousness of academic freedom and shared governance in the contemporary university. Until the university reinstates Dr. Salaita to his rightful position, our campus will continue to exist under a cloud of censure and boycott. The university needs to do the right thing: to reinstate Salaita and to take steps to ensure that future hiring is based purely on scholarly review by faculty members and not on political considerations or the influence of interests beyond the university.

In addition to many of the chairs and directors of departments in the humanities and social sciences, the signatories include the heads of the chemical sciences, math, statistics, and animal biology.

The letter suggests that we may be in a new moment of the Salaita fight. After last year’s initial burst of activism—which included multiple department votes of no confidence in Chancellor Wise, a boycott by more than 5000 scholars of UIUC, and censure by the AAUP—we’ve seen, in the last three weeks, the following developments:

The stunning and comprehensive rejection by a federal judge of UIUC’s claim that it had never hired Steven Salaita and thus owed him none of the obligations of academic freedom that it is bound to honor among its faculty.
The sudden resignation of Chancellor Wise.
The revelation that Chancellor Wise and other campus administrators had been using personal email accounts to discuss the Salaita case—and that those emails had not been released in response to multiple FOIA requests and that Wise had admitted to destroying some of them.
The embarrassing pas de deux between Wise and the Board of Trustees over the $400,000 bonus she had been promised, resulting in a frenzy of steps and counter-steps—rejection of resignation; initiation of dismissal proceedings; threats of lawsuit; acceptance of resignation—that would challenge even the most seasoned dancer at Martha Graham.

A story that seemed to be settling into the cozy chambers of a federal judge was now back on the front pages, showing the university once again in a most terrible light. Between the lines of this latest letter from the department chairs and unit heads one can hear a reminder to the trustees and administration: we can’t take another year of this. Perhaps the university’s new leadership will listen.

Here are excerpts from the letter:

We the forty-one undersigned Executive Officers and campus leaders from departments and academic units across the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign urge you to help end the crisis that has plagued our university for more than a year….The decision has also inflicted harm upon the reputation and standing of our university.

The AAUP has censured the Urbana-Champaign campus for the violation of academic freedom. An ongoing academic boycott against our campus continues to adversely affect an important dimension of our intellectual livelihood. More than 5,000 scholars around the world, many of them prominent intellectuals, refuse to participate in talks or conferences at the University of Illinois. Such events are part of the exchange of ideas for which our campus has always been known, and their cancellation impoverishes the conversation on campus to the detriment of students and faculty alike. Over the long term, it threatens our competitiveness in bringing in external funding and recruiting distinguished scholars.

We are therefore asking you to use the authority of your offices to recommend to the Board of Trustees that they reverse their previous decision and reinstate Dr. Salaita at the next board meeting in September. We firmly believe that this step will help put the university on track toward ending AAUP censure and regaining its place among the most respected public institutions of higher education in the country. The decision to reinstate Dr. Salaita will also make it easier to resolve pending litigation and save the university community and state taxpayers from the high costs of defending a wrong decision in the court of law.

We ask for a meeting to discuss our request to restore the rightful stature of the University of Illinois.

Update (August 24)

Ilesanmi Adesida, who is the provost of UIUC, just announced that he too is resigning from his position. That means that four of the leaders involved in the original Salaita decision—Chancellor Phyllis Wise, Board of Trustees Chris Kennedy, UI President Robert Easter, and Provost Adesida—have stepped down from their positions. If ever there were a time for the new leadership to announce that they had truly cleaned house, it’s now. REINSTATE SALAITA!

Update (August 25)

In his continuing effort to become this year’s poster child for Irony Watch, UIUC Professor Nicholas Burbules has this to say about the unfairness of Adesida’s resignation:

I didn’t and I don’t know of any specific issues of misconduct, or accusations of misconduct, that would justify this decision. Whatever mistakes have been made, it’s hard to see people lose their reputations and careers in ways like this. I don’t think it’s deserved.

And he had this to say of the effect of the resignations of Wise and Adesida on the campus community:

We can’t and we’re not going to stand still as a campus. But it’s hard to set goals when the goals you’re setting aren’t necessarily the goals of the people who might be implementing them down the road.

Absolutely no sense that the first statement could be applied to Steven Salaita’s situation, and the second to that of the American Indian Studies program at UIUC (which has lost so much of its core faculty that it’s now down to two full-time professors), a thousand times more.

After Three Weeks of Terrible Publicity, 41 UIUC Leaders Call on Administration to Resolve Crisis

In what may be the most significant and largest statement by campus leaders at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to date, 41 department chairs and program heads have issued a powerful call for the university to reinstate Steven Salaita. Addressing the new acting chancellor, Barbara Wilson, who recently replaced Chancellor Phyllis Wise, and UI President Timothy Killeen, the writers not only register just how severe the Salaita crisis has been but they also make plain a way out of the mess: reinstate Salaita. In a statement accompanying the letter’s release, English Department head Michael Rothberg said:

The Salaita case has become an international symbol for the precariousness of academic freedom and shared governance in the contemporary university. Until the university reinstates Dr. Salaita to his rightful position, our campus will continue to exist under a cloud of censure and boycott. The university needs to do the right thing: to reinstate Salaita and to take steps to ensure that future hiring is based purely on scholarly review by faculty members and not on political considerations or the influence of interests beyond the university.

In addition to many of the chairs and directors of departments in the humanities and social sciences, the signatories include the heads of the chemical sciences, math, statistics, and animal biology.

The letter suggests that we may be in a new moment of the Salaita fight. After last year’s initial burst of activism—which included multiple department votes of no confidence in Chancellor Wise, a boycott by more than 5000 scholars of UIUC, and censure by the AAUP—we’ve seen, in the last three weeks, the following developments:

The stunning and comprehensive rejection by a federal judge of UIUC’s claim that it had never hired Steven Salaita and thus owed him none of the obligations of academic freedom that it is bound to honor among its faculty.
The sudden resignation of Chancellor Wise.
The revelation that Chancellor Wise and other campus administrators had been using personal email accounts to discuss the Salaita case—and that those emails had not been released in response to multiple FOIA requests and that Wise had admitted to destroying some of them.
The embarrassing pas de deux between Wise and the Board of Trustees over the $400,000 bonus she had been promised, resulting in a frenzy of steps and counter-steps—rejection of resignation; initiation of dismissal proceedings; threats of lawsuit; acceptance of resignation—that would challenge even the most seasoned dancer at Martha Graham.

A story that seemed to be settling into the cozy chambers of a federal judge was now back on the front pages, showing the university once again in a most terrible light. Between the lines of this latest letter from the department chairs and unit heads one can hear a reminder to the trustees and administration: we can’t take another year of this. Perhaps the university’s new leadership will listen.

Here are excerpts from the letter:

We the forty-one undersigned Executive Officers and campus leaders from departments and academic units across the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign urge you to help end the crisis that has plagued our university for more than a year….The decision has also inflicted harm upon the reputation and standing of our university.

The AAUP has censured the Urbana-Champaign campus for the violation of academic freedom. An ongoing academic boycott against our campus continues to adversely affect an important dimension of our intellectual livelihood. More than 5,000 scholars around the world, many of them prominent intellectuals, refuse to participate in talks or conferences at the University of Illinois. Such events are part of the exchange of ideas for which our campus has always been known, and their cancellation impoverishes the conversation on campus to the detriment of students and faculty alike. Over the long term, it threatens our competitiveness in bringing in external funding and recruiting distinguished scholars.

We are therefore asking you to use the authority of your offices to recommend to the Board of Trustees that they reverse their previous decision and reinstate Dr. Salaita at the next board meeting in September. We firmly believe that this step will help put the university on track toward ending AAUP censure and regaining its place among the most respected public institutions of higher education in the country. The decision to reinstate Dr. Salaita will also make it easier to resolve pending litigation and save the university community and state taxpayers from the high costs of defending a wrong decision in the court of law.

We ask for a meeting to discuss our request to restore the rightful stature of the University of Illinois.

No more fire, the water next time: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Global Warming and White Supremacy

In the very last pages of Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates registers his full and final distance from the world of James Baldwin. Where Baldwin had said, “We, with love, shall force our [white] brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it,” and where that assault by African America on white supremacy was the promissory note to a more fundamental transformation of the United States (“we can make America what America must become”), Coates makes explicit what has been implicit throughout his text: he does not believe black America can transform white America.

I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle….But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves,…

And what will force the Dreamers—white people—to learn to struggle for themselves? Global warming. Climate change.

The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos.

This was, for me, perhaps the most poignant moment of the book. For Coates, global warming, the destruction of the earth’s delicate ecology and thereby the earth, is not merely an environmental fact; it is very much connected to the history of white supremacy in all its phases of modernity: from primitive accumulation through capitalist industrialization through suburbanization.

Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas. The two phenomena are known to each other. It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the methods of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves.

But lest black Americans think that they are exempt from this coming catastrophe, Coates is careful to insist that everyone, black and white, will be destroyed together.

I left The Mecca [Howard University]…knowing that should the Dreamers reap what they had sown, we would reap it right with them. Plunder has matured into habit and addiction.

Despite Coates’s atheism and the science and secularism that underlies this vision of destruction, it’s hard to escape its theological resonance.

For starters, there is the clear rejection that the punishment of white America will come from black hands. From black political hands exacting punishment for the white man’s four centuries of welter and waste:

I had heard such predictions [of the destruction of white America by African America] all my life from Malcolm and all his posthumous followers who hollered that the Dreamers must reap what they sow. I saw the same prediction in the words of Marcus Garvey who promised to return in a whirlwind of vengeful ancestors, an army of Middle Passage undead. No. I left The Mecca knowing that this was all too pat…

More important is the inversion of Baldwin. Baldwin derived the title of The Fire Next Time from the couplet of a black spiritual:

God gave Noah the rainbow sign.

No more water, the fire next time.

The couplet is a more ominous rendition of the story of Noah and the flood that we find in Genesis 9. Where God in the original promises Noah after the flood that he will never again destroy the earth or humanity, and that the rainbow will be a sign of God’s covenant with humanity, the spiritual warns of a different ending: this time, it was just the flood; do it again, and next time, it will be a fire.

It’s hard not to read the line, in Baldwin’s hands, as a kind of premonition (he’s writing in 1963) of Watts, Newark, and all the urban fire that would eventually consume postwar America. For Baldwin, the problem is not merely white supremacy, the racism America must abandon. It is also Christianity, which he thinks has created part of the predicament. In this, he shares something with Coates, who also has abandoned Christianity and religion.

But here we come to the ultimate—well, the penultimate—irony: Coates writes out of the atheist disposition that Baldwin helped pave the way for, yet he imagines a catastrophe far more biblical than anything Baldwin, the man reared and steeped in the teachings of the black church, might have conjured. Baldwin asked us to imagine not a flood, but a fire, a fire set by men against men. Coates says that the flames of Malcolm and Garvey have gone out; the justice of ancestors wronged will never come. No more fire, the water next time.

Here’s the ultimate irony. As Mychal Denzel Smith recently wrote in The Nation, Hurricane Katrina—the flood last time—may have been the moment that black rage, and all the political promise it contains, exploded onto the public square of 21st-century America. That was the moment when Kanye West said simply, to a scandalized nation, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

The generation that heard Kanye West say “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” then pushed the vote for the first black president, then watched America continue to not care about black people, simply has had enough. As the deaths of young, unarmed black people continue to become headlines, and social media holds more hashtag funerals, the hope has turned to despair, and the despair into rage. That rage consumed the streets of Ferguson when Michael Brown was killed; it set fire to the streets of Baltimore when Freddie Gray was killed; and it sent Bree Newsome up the flagpole at the South Carolina state Capitol to bring down the Confederate flag in the wake of nine people being killed in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Black rage is back, cutting to the core of white supremacy and demanding that America change.

…

An opportunity may have been missed in those post-Katrina days, when the words “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” still buzzed. But a decade later, the resurgence of black rage in the political sphere is finally ready to make America face its racist past and present. Or burn it down trying.

For all the sense we get of Coates as a man of his time (this is what I argued yesterday), perhaps he’s not. Perhaps we’re still with Baldwin: no more water, the fire next time.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Three Not-So-Easy Pieces

I’ve spent the past few days reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and posting about it on Facebook. Rather than rewriting those posts as a single piece here, I thought I’d take some screen shots, and share them with some additional commentary. A shout-out to my friend Lizzie Donahue, whose queries to me on our daily walk this morning prompted the last and lengthiest post.

Here’s the first post.

And here’s a short addendum to this post, where I comment further on the theme of education and Coates’s discussion of his time at Howard University.

I say here that breaking with the mytho-poetic view of a heroic African past was the second great trauma of Coates’s life. I should be more precise. I mean disillusionment. But it was a disillusionment that was immensely productive. More than the loss of a specific view of things, the break with black nationalism made Coates suspicious of all master narratives, all collective platforms of totality. As an alternative, he turned to the specificity and concreteness of poetry, “of small hard things,” as he says: “aunts and uncles, smoke breaks after sex, girls on stoops drinking from mason jars.” And in that specificity “I began to see discord, argument, chaos, perhaps even fear, as a kind of power.” The “gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was not an alarm. It was a beacon.” This is a writer for whom the struggle to see what is in front of his nose is a lifelong effort, a hard-won right to see things as they are, without mediation or adornment or chastising authority. So much so that it has made him, as we’ll see, suspicious of all collectivities, all platforms.

One other note on education. Coates has a wonderful passage on translation as living. He goes to Europe for the first time, lands in Geneva, heads for the train station, and here’s what he says:

I surveyed the railway schedule and became aware that I was one wrong ticket from Vienna, Milan, or some Alpine village that no one I knew had ever heard of. It happened right then. The realization of being far gone, the fear, the unknowable possibilities, all of it—the horror, the wonder, the joy—fused into an erotic thrill. The thrill was not wholly alien. It was close to the wave that came over me in Moorland. It was kin to the narcotic shot I’d gotten watching the people with their wineglasses spill out onto West Broadway. It was all that I’d felt looking at those Parisian doors. And at that moment I realized that those changes, with all their agony, awkwardness, and confusion, were the defining fact of my life, and for the first time I knew not only that I really was alive, that I really was studying and observing, but that I had long been alive—even back in Baltimore. I had always been alive. I was always translating.

That passage reminded me of this exchange between Peter Cole, the poet and translator, and Joshua Cohen, the author in The Paris Review:

Cole: People say such dumb things about translation.

Cohen: Such as?

Cole: Such as that, unlike so-called original composition, it’s always a matter of compromise, of negotiation—that translation is inevitably a failed approximation, or like a black-and-white photograph rather than color. But what in life that’s valuable over time doesn’t involve negotiation or intelligent compromise? Where does friendship come from? Or marriage? Education? Commerce? A culture? Would you colorize Stieglitz? And who says that original composition is fundamentally different from translation? “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Beckett isn’t talking about translation there, he’s talking about life, or writing, period. Poetry isn’t lost in translation, it is translation. It’s lost only in bad or gray translation—and in the mindless repetition of the thin figures of speech we use to talk about it.

…

Cole: You have to be desperate, at some level, to write anything, no? To move the magic of consciousness and language from one state or place to another. From an itch or an instinct to a line of poetry, and from that line of poetry to the next one, and from these two in combination to a third, and then to a reader. Translation as we normally think of it only raises all that to a higher exponential power. So, yes, there’s desperation, but even more so, at least for me, there’s desire—for nourishment and for pleasure. Translation isn’t some weakly technical craft. It’s a deeply human activity, an essential part of the art of our lives, whether we’re aware of it as such or not. Of course it exists in relation to something, not on its own, and so we think of it as secondary, but hey, so do we exist only in relation to something, as inheritors and animators or deadeners of traditions of all sorts. But that’s my stump speech—deep translation.

Here’s the second post I wrote, on the surprising atheism of Coates’ book.

In re-reading this, I’m reminded of something else I wanted to say. In the last several decades, intellectuals of a pragmatist bent have often affirmed a kind of politics of struggle amid the ruins of God, Marx, and other master narratives. Think Cornel West. What strikes me in reading Coates, though, is just how visceral and personal and punch-in-the-gut powerful the death of God is for him. There’s a moment near the end of the book where he looks at the photographs of civil rights protester, and he asks his son:

Have you ever looked at the faces? The faces are neither angry, nor sad, nor joyous. They betray almost no emotion. They look out past their tormentors, past us, and focus on something way beyond anything known to me. I think they are fastened to their god, a god whom I cannot know and in whom I do not believe. But, god or not, the armor is all over them, and it is real. Or perhaps it is not armor at all. Perhaps it is life extension, a kind of loan allowing you to take the assaults heaped upon you now and pay down the debts later.

There’s nothing easy or cheap or distant about this atheism. Coates is fully aware of its costs: not just personal—the existential agony of the unbeliever—but also political: “I thought of my own distance from an institution [the black church] that has, so often, been the only support for our people.” And he’s still willing to pay them. Because he has no other choice. One cannot compel belief, whether it’s in God or the revolution. This is why I’ve been slightly discomfited by the critiques of Coates that take him to task for his political fatalism. In part because I don’t think that’s quite accurate, as we’ll see below, but also because I don’t know that you can will someone to believe in something they don’t believe.

And here we come to the third post, broken up into two screenshots.

By way of qualification, as Joel Scott Rutstein pointed out to me on Facebook, I should acknowledge that throughout the book, Coates deploys an arresting phrase: the people who believe themselves to be white. Every time I read that, I was indeed brought up short.

Update, 3 pm

Dammit, I meant to include these in my post but forgot. Tressie McMillan Cottom has one of the very few posts that grapple with Coates’s atheism. It’s very smart, though I disagree with her, I think, on the question of the political fallout. Her post led me to this, by Robert Greene, which I also thought quite smart, on the dangers of asking or reading Coates to be a writer other than he is.

Family Values Fascism, from Vichy to Donald Trump

Fascists often soften their call for national purification and the deportation of alien elements with invocations of family values.

In 1942, as the Vichy regime began handing over the foreign-born Jews of France to the Nazis, it made the decision to deport their children (about six thousand) with them. In order to fulfill the Nazis’ quota—but also, Vichy proclaimed, to keep the families together.

At the time, Robert Brasillach wrote, “We must separate from the Jews en bloc and not keep any little ones.” Defending his position after the liberation of France, he explained: “I even wrote that women must not be separated from children and that we must arrive at a human solution to the problem.” A month later, he doubled-down on the notion that family values might somehow soften his fascism:

I am an anti-Semite, history has taught me the horrors of the Jewish dictatorship, but that families have so often been separated, children cast aside, deportations organized that could only have been legitimate if they hadn’t had as their goal—hidden from us—death, pure and simple, strikes me, and has always struck me, as unacceptable. This is not how we’ll solve the Jewish problem.

Deportations are acceptable, then, if they do not have as their goal the extermination of the Jews, and if they do not break up families. That is how we solve the Jewish problem.

(And long before Vichy, there was slaveholder Thomas Dew contemplating the pragmatics of emancipation in the South: “If our slaves are ever to be sent away in any systematic manner, humanity demands that they should be carried in families.”)

Now comes Donald Trump, speaking today on Meet the Press.

Donald Trump would reverse President Obama’s executive orders on immigration and deport all undocumented immigrants from the U.S. as president, he said in an exclusive interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd.

“We’re going to keep the families together, but they have to go,” he said in the interview, which will air in full on NBC’s “Meet the Press” this Sunday.

Pressed on what he’d do if the immigrants in question had nowhere to return to, Trump reiterated: “They have to go.”

“We will work with them. They have to go. Chuck, we either have a country, or we don’t have a country,” he said.

The genius of family values fascism is that it’s twofer: you get to don the mantle of humanitarianism by keeping families together, and by deporting the children along with their parents, you also get rid of more undesirables.