This tweet is just one of many. It’s just an example, and not a particularly egregious one, and one with the right intentions at heart.

I like Ta-Nehisi Coates’s writing. A lot. And I loved his case for reparations, for a lot of reasons, but mostly because of what it brings to the public consciousness, or at least the media consciousness. It reminds us that racism is a structural facet of American society and that this structural inequality against black people has been with us literally since Europeans made land on the continent. It proposes a material solution to these problems– not an emotional solution, or a social solution, or a linguistic solution, but a structural, economic solution. And it’s as prominent an endorsement of the straightforward wisdom of direct cash transfers to solve social problems that I can imagine. So I’m thrilled it’s been discussed and shared as much as it is.

But the prominence of the piece, and the volume of the praise for it, reminds me again of the plain fact that many media types praise Coates in a way that they don’t praise other writers they like. To put it as simply as I can: when professional writers praise Coates, they adopt a kind of extreme piety that is out of character for themselves and their culture. They reach, in their writing, and they reach in a way that is indicative of a certain homiletic tendency– smarm, if you must– when white people think about race, when they talk about black people. And it’s unfortunate, in my opinion. I felt this way in the initial wave of enthusiasm for the piece, but that enthusiasm was so well-earned, and the point of the essay so necessary, I wanted to wait awhile to express these thoughts.

I am not arguing about degree of praise. The piece deserves great praise. Praise it, a lot. Share it. Print it out and give it to your mom. What I’m arguing about is diction, about register. When Coates publishes a major piece, suddenly, every white writer you read suddenly becomes Ken Burns. It’s like they turn their Twitter feeds over to James Lipton. It always reminds me of Steven Spielberg at his worst, where he thinks that he has to meet the moral stakes of the stories he’s telling, and that meeting them means covering everything with a rosy halo of sunlight and every word has to be a Morgan Freeman voiceover. It’s good intentions gone very wrong. It’s a failure to be real. And it’s all over the place right now. 

In my piece last year about my favorite prose stylists, I said this about the way Coates is written about by other writers, by white writers:

I have complained, in the past, about the way that some of Coates’s fans have treated him as the Wise Black Sage. This is a political complaint, of course, one about white guilt and white condescension and the role they still play in defining the reputations of black writers. But it’s also a statement about the shame of reducing writing of this quality to empty piety. Nothing drains writing of its life more surely than treating it like church. Coates is a far more playful, more unpredictable writer than that, and a far more radical one.

I thought that was true then, and I think it’s true now. Because the problem with treating reading a writer like going to church is that you’re sucking out so much of what makes that writer unique, unpredictable, human, alive. Coates is a serious writer, but he is not a pious writer, and the difference matters. Don’t drain his work of its vitality by treating it like eating your vegetables. If you love his writing, stop covering it in amber.

At its most benign, the tendency to treat praising Coates as a kind of secular sacrament simply makes that praise more awkward than it should be, robs people of the language of simple sincere gratitude that we use to give thanks. He and his essay deserve that sincerity. At its worst, though, it’s an example of a really ugly tendency of white readers to treat black writers as a blank canvas on which to work out their own personal shit about race. Years ago, a commenter on Coates’s blog took this to a certain extreme: “I wish that I could articulate how this article reverberated in my soul. Better, I wish that you, TNC could feel that reverberation, and I could read how you described it.” I don’t know what that is. But it’s not real praise and it’s not real respect. The first respect to pay a writer is the first to pay to any human being, and that’s to treat them as their own particular human self. And my impression is that Coates feels some of this too. Recently, he wrote, “I have no desire to be anybody’s Head Negro—that goes for reparations and beyond.”

I have a transgendered friend who frequently complains that her liberal friends end up treating her as a kind of vessel through which they work out their attitude towards trans issues. I just think that’s a terrible kind of emotional violence to commit against someone. She is quick to say that this is better than an uglier alternative, and that’s true, of course, it is better. But that’s a false choice: we can respect and love people or their work without treating them  as symbols first and people, or writers, second.

I like museums as much as anyone. But they’re filled with dead things. And Coates is alive, and his writing in alive. I recognize, as anyone who has written about other people’s writing must, that it’s far more difficult to find good words of praise than good words of blame. A work of this quality and this significance does indeed deserve deep praise. But the beauty of it is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. “This is great. Thank you for it.” The simplicity of that kind of praise comes with power, and it makes it very difficult to fall into the trap of making praise about you and not its recipient.

I know how this will play, especially given my reputation, which is my own fault and no one else’s. I swear to you that I am not attempting to dull any of the shine on this wonderful essay. Nor am I trying to overly criticize anyone for the very understandable desire to praise. I’m just asking for people to reflect on the way in which some kinds of praise can, with all the best intentions, dilute the cause of the argument being praised. When I read Coates’s essay, I feel that racism is keenly alive. When I read some of the praise for it, I’m back in elementary school, watching some solemn documentary. I fear that solemnity because solemnity can be a kind of dishonesty: we don’t live that way, most of the time. We can’t. And precisely what the reparations essay challenges us to do is to recognize racism as an everyday, banal experience. We have got to live with this, all of it, and that means we have to be real about it, in its boring, mundane evil.

Finally: if you liked that essay, and you really want to honor it, then the work is just beginning. Don’t let it fade into the limbo where popular essays go to die. Continue to advocate for reparations. Make the case for solving racial inequalities through direct economic intervention. Commit to arguing in favor of the practicality and justice of cash payments to black Americans, as reparations not just for slavery but for the century and a half of structural racism. Coates asks his readers to do the work. So do the work, the long-term, quiet work of reading and arguing and discussing. He made the case for reparations. We should, too.