Do you want to know how material, structural solutions to our racial inequalities become part of the vague, useless “conversation about race” that we have been having and talking about having for years and years? When a piece advocating those material, structural solutions is misrepresented as just another salvo in that conversation about race– by those praising it.
Here’s Errin Hayes Whack discussing Ta-Nehisi Coates’s reparations essay:
It does no good to have only black Americans in conversation with each other about topics of race….
“The Case for Reparations” is a bold beginning to the greater conversation we must have on the damages wrought by racism that still need repair in our nation. That anyone in 2014 would be pleading, as Coates is, to simply talk honestly about the implications behind centuries of proven history of one group oppressing another, is astonishing.
It does no good to only be having conversations at this point. And Coates is most certainly not simply talking honestly about the implications of structural racism. He is advocating a structural solution to that racism. It is so, so retrograde, so counterproductive, to respond to that by saying “let’s get a conversation about race going.”
I don’t agree with John McWhorter’s take on the essay in general. But he’s right about this:
Despite frequent claims that America “doesn’t want to talk about race,” we talk about it 24/7 amidst ringing declamations against racism on all forms. Over the past year’s time, I need only mention Trayvon Martin, Paula Deen, Cliven Bundy, and Donald Sterling. Over the past few years, three of the best-selling and most-discussed nonfiction books have been Isabel Wilkerson’s chronicle of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns, Rebecca Skloot’s book about the harvesting of a black woman’s cancer cells (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks), and Michelle Alexander’s invaluable The New Jim Crow. And let’s not forget recent major release films such as The Help, 12 Years a Slave, and The Butler.
Can we really say that these are signs of a nation in denial about race, racism, and its history?
It’s not true that we don’t have a conversation about race. You cannot seriously engage with the liberalish side of elite media and think they don’t talk about race. What’s true is that we don’t have a useful conversation about race. Because conversation that does not lead to structural, material efforts is just hot air. The publication of Coates’s piece came along with a lot of the performative emoting that the white, elite media always brings to these moments. (Every time Coates publishes an essay, his admirers among white media types suddenly start channeling Ken Burns.) That’s OK: an argument of this importance and necessity is well worth it. But what really turns my stomach is the possibility that the soulful emoting of white people in the media is as far as the essay goes, that once the business of people publicly feeling feels about the essay is past, the specific goal of reparations will fade away. God, what a loss, if so.
I mean I just find this so completely frustrating and so, so indicative of why nothing ever changes. We can never, ever know if psychological, social, and emotional healing has taken place. It is non-verifiable, and the pursuit of non-verifiable racial progress has been an enormous failure. What we can know is if we’ve closed the black-white wealth gap. That’s progress. That’s victory. Nothing will render the argument for reparations more useless more quickly than to drain it of its specific policy character. Reparations means direct, redistributive cash transfers to black Americans. That’s what reparations are. Of course in a democracy you have to have a conversation to begin the long, hard slog towards political victory. But I beg you, make that conversation about that real, specific goal– using the power of the federal government to redress historical injustice and contemporary inequality by giving black people money.
Politics really shouldn’t be any different than the way you act in real life, which is to ask what you got for giving someone money, support, or whatever. It’s a transaction where you ought to be able to point to something you received from it. The cable guy better deliver cable and not an inspiring lecture about the advance of high-tech cable that makes you feel great about the march of progress but doesn’t give you cable. If we believe stuff and elect people who supposedly believe it too, maybe just maybe we can ask them why they don’t deliver us anything more tangible than symbolism, pretty speeches, and Not Being The Other Guy.
I’m not sure when I first noticed the conversation about the conversation about race. Might have been the 80s, when the Reaganites were accelerating the drug war and the response from liberals was to have the conversation about the conversation. It’s now a running joke, you could easily make a drinking game out of every time you hear “conversation about race” on television (double shot if it’s “national conversation about race”).
I’m not inclined to even read the Coates piece. It’s long, I know I’ll agree with everything in it in the abstract, and at the end I’ll still be left with the realization that this can’t possibly happen in my lifetime.
“What’s true is that we don’t have a useful conversation about race. Because conversation that does not lead to structural, material efforts is just hot air.”
That’s refreshing. I think you can imagine how the whole, “let’s have a conversation,” line sounds to the ears of someone who is opposed to the idea of involuntary reparations.
Whenever I hear a progressive say, “It’s time to have a national conversation about X,” I immediately grab my wallet and think, “Oh God, here they go again, paying lip service to the ideas of deliberative democracy, moral suasion, and the acceptance of input from opponents with whom they are willing to compromise, right before they pretend there’s a non-existent consensus and prepare to ram their preordained and unpalatable agenda down my throat.”
Bonus points for encouraging the baiting of those individuals who are insufficiently sophisticated to tread in the murky waters of racial discourse without making pariahs out of themselves. Who is going to introduce the argument into the ‘conversation’ that at least some of the disparities that are being attributed to structural racism have a biological origin? No one who saw Richwine get fired from Heritage, of all places.
In other words, it is my view that the call for dialogue is the genteel tea-ceremony that makes the progressives feel better about themselves before issuing their furtive directives. It doubles as a, “raise the flagpole and see who salutes,” poll of the potential political commitment or opposition to the policy.
I think that the progressives share your policy goals but are more cautious about admitting them in public, and want to put some lipstick on the pig first. You seem to think that it is all lipstick, no pig.
Yes, it’s going to be interesting seeing the cultural liberal media react to the Nicholas Wade book this year.
I’m not seeing much in the way of responses calling and preparing for organization for reparations and a Truth & Reconciliation Committee like Conyers was proposing, so unfortunately that’s likely to be the case. It’ll get its day in the sun, maybe get some Twitter hashtags going, and if it’s lucky end up being brought up occasionally down the line whenever the Reparations topic comes up in discussion.
I mean, even you and I are doing that. We’re just talking about people talking about Coates’ essay. I don’t really have any intention in the near future of bringing a group of people together to consider lobbying the Utah legislature for reparations and reconciliation (both nationally and for local cases like the attempts back in the 1920s to clear out black residents who lived near the City and County Building in Salt Lake City).
Freddie had a great, great quip about Coates one: ‘TNC needs to put down the French lessons and pick up a remedial math textbook.’
You can make a case for or against reparations, but why are we taking this fool seriously exactly?
I never, ever said anything like that in my life. Ever. So, for that, congratulations: banned.
Apologies, Freddie. maybe someone else did in a thread you commented on?
Either way, it was great.