Ta-Nehisi Coates: Black Pathology and the Closing of the Progressive Mind

[Blue_Tires]

Quite a long commentary, but well worth the read:

Among opinion writers, Jonathan Chait is outranked in my esteem only by Hendrik Hertzberg. This lovely takedown of Robert Johnson is a classic of the genre, one I studied incessantly when I was sharpening my own sword. The sharpening never ends. With that in mind, it is a pleasure to engage Chait in the discussion over President Obama, racism, culture, and personal responsibility. It's good to debate a writer of such clarity—even when that clarity has failed him.

On y va.

Chait argues that I've conflated Paul Ryan's view of black poverty with Barack Obama's. He is correct. I should have spent more time disentangling these two notions, and illuminating their common roots—the notion that black culture is part of the problem. I have tried to do this disentangling in the past. I am sorry I did not do it in this instance and will attempt to do so now.

​Arguing that poor black people are not "holding up their end of the bargain," or that they are in need of moral instruction is an old and dubious tradition in America. There is a conservative and a liberal rendition of this tradition. The conservative version eliminates white supremacy as a factor and leaves the question of the culture's origin ominously unanswered. This version can never be regarded seriously. Life is short. Black life is shorter.

On y va.

The liberal version of the cultural argument points to "a tangle of pathologies" haunting black America born of oppression. This argument—which Barack Obama embraces—is more sincere, honest, and seductive. Chait helpfully summarizes:

The argument is that structural conditions shape culture, and culture, in turn, can take on a life of its own independent of the forces that created it. It would be bizarre to imagine that centuries of slavery, followed by systematic terrorism, segregation, discrimination, a legacy wealth gap, and so on did not leave a cultural residue that itself became an impediment to success.

The "structural conditions" Chait outlines above can be summed up under the phrase "white supremacy." I have spent the past two days searching for an era when black culture could be said to be "independent" of white supremacy. I have not found one. Certainly the antebellum period, when one third of all enslaved black people found themselves on the auction block, is not such an era. And surely we would not consider postbellum America, when freedpeople were regularly subjected to terrorism, to be such an era.

We certainly do not find such a period during the Roosevelt-Truman era, when this country erected a racist social safety, leaving the NAACP to quip that the New Deal was "like a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through." Nor do we find it during the 1940s, '50s and '60s, when African-Americans—as a matter of federal policy—were largely excluded from the legitimate housing market. Nor during the 1980s when we began the erection of a prison-industrial complex so vast that black males now comprise 8 percent of the world's entire incarcerated population.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/black-pathology-and-the-closing-of-the-progressive-mind/284523/

[Anansi1171]

1. It's like even the most progressive of America are largely in denial even now. Nt

[kwassa]

2. Strong stuff

Here are the concluding paragraphs.

Obama-era progressives view white supremacy as something awful that happened in the past and the historical vestiges of which still afflict black people today. They believe we need policies—though not race-specific policies—that address the affliction. I view white supremacy as one of the central organizing forces in American life, whose vestiges and practices afflicted black people in the past, continue to afflict black people today, and will likely afflict black people until this country passes into the dust.

There is no evidence that black people are less responsible, less moral, or less upstanding in their dealings with America nor with themselves. But there is overwhelming evidence that America is irresponsible, immoral, and unconscionable in its dealings with black people and with itself. Urging African-Americans to become superhuman is great advice if you are concerned with creating extraordinary individuals. It is terrible advice if you are concerned with creating an equitable society. The black freedom struggle is not about raising a race of hyper-moral super-humans. It is about all people garnering the right to live like the normal humans they are.

[Blue_Tires]

7. Yeah, I'm mildly surprised how big the "Ryan didn't mean anything racial"

backlash has been from even some mainstream Democratic bloggers and pundits...

[1StrongBlackMan]

3. Strong piece that cogently articulates the fight that progressives do not wish to acknowledge ...

because doing so would force them to do something about themselves rather than for us. And further, it would require them to stop trying to tell us what we must do in order to insulate ourselves from racism.

[bravenak]

4. So true.

" it would require them to stop trying to tell us what we must do in order to insulate ourselves from racism."
Sums it up perfectly.

[1StrongBlackMan]

5. I wrote and re-wrote that part 3 times ...

I kept flipping between using the words "racism" and "them" ... You see, I went with the lesser inflammatory term.

BTW ... Did I say how much I loves me some "Coatesisms'?

[JustAnotherGen]

6. Love that

[M0rpheus]

8. Chait has posted his response.

Barack Obama vs. the Culture of Poverty

Four years ago, Ta Nehisi-Coates wrote one of the most important and memorable essays I’ve ever read. In it, Coates described a horrifying episode from an early, ascendant moment in his career, when, in the course of a heated argument with another journalist, he threatened to assault him and very nearly carried through. Coates used the episode as a synecdoche for the broader way in which the cultural mores he learned growing up in a heavily poor, heavily black neighborhood can become utterly destructive to career advancement:

I think one can safely call that an element of a kind of street culture. It's also an element which — once one leaves the streets — is a great impediment. "I ain't no punk" may shield you from neighborhood violence. But it can not shield you from algebra, when your teacher tries to correct you. It can not shield you from losing hours, when your supervisor corrects your work. And it would not have shielded me from unemployment, after I cold-cocked a guy over a blog post.

When the imprint of this culture was nearly strong enough to derail the career of a writer as brilliant as Coates, we are talking about a powerful force, indeed. He headlined his essay, “A Culture of Poverty.”

More recently, Coates has been engaging in a back-and-forth with me on this same subject. (I’d encourage those who haven’t to read his first column, my response, and then his rebuttal.) We have several points of disagreement, the most important of which is that Coates now maintains that there is no such thing as a culture of poverty.

I'm enjoying the back and forth so far.

[sheshe2]

9. The past is still the present.

"Obama-era progressives view white supremacy as something awful that happened in the past. I view it as one of the central organizing forces in American life"

Thank you Blue_Tires, such a powerful article.

[1StrongBlackMan]

10. Melissa Harris-Perry must be reading DU ...

because she featured this "debate", and touched on two other topics that are being discussed here.