Ta-Nehisi Coates calls for reparations from our Midwestern campus – can we hear him?

Ta-Nehisi Coates 

James Cone came to talk to our University community onWednesday of last week, and Ta-Nehisi Coates came on Sunday.  Cone used a boxing metaphor to describe his writing career, and having these two on campus this week felt like a one-two punch.  Though the first is a black liberation theologian and the second is an atheist, their talks fit hand in glove.  Coming on the heels of the Donald Trump election, their reactions to this disorienting outcome were also complimentary.  I went to the second talk with the reluctant step-daughter’s boyfriend, an avowed liberal theologian who is just starting his professional life at a local church that is on the edge of insolvency.  As we walked away from Coates’ talk, we were both dumbfounded by what Coates had said – he provided an African American economics lesson that we didn’t dispute, but that was so much at variance with our received (and unquestioned) wisdom that we didn’t quite know what to do with the information.

Belvedere Elementary First Grade Class 1953

I grew up in a segregated America.  When I was six, we moved to Florida.  We lived first in Orlando and then moved to West Palm Beach, and I went to school in fourth, fifth and sixth grade at Belvedere elementary school.  It was a neighborhood school.  I walked to it – and was a crossing guard in sixth grade.  There were no blacks that I remember in the school.  The only black person that I remember was the woman who cleaned our house once a week and I remember driving her home and being surprised that she lived in a neighborhood where there were many blacks.  It was a curiosity.  I curious, but also hopelessly uninformed – I was as naïve as the Bridges of Kansas City.

Coates informed us that the histories of white and black America are inextricably intertwined; including through the shared economies of the two worlds.  He noted that America’s revolutionary war debt was largely repaid through slave labor – 60% of our export income was derived from cotton (in his article on reparation in the Atlantic, which I found much less compelling than his talk, he cited this as an 1840 figure – I think our Revolutionary war debt was largely repaid by then – but Hamilton the Musical, and Hamilton by Ron Chernow – which is the source for the musical, make the point that the Southern States paid more than their fair share of the Revolutionary war debt, and did so because they had wealth that was generated by slave labor).  He went on to note that in 1860, America’s single greatest asset based on monetary value – and one that was so large that it was greater in value than all of the other assets we had put together – railroads and banks and properties – was our slaves.

Directly as a result of Brown vs. Board of Education, I was going to be bused in the seventh grade.  In the south, school districts are county wide.  So there was a Palm Beach County board of education.  In the north, school districts are determined by city, so white flight was possible (and the inevitable result is that schools are more segregated now than they were when Brown vs. Board of Education was decided).  People could move out to the suburbs from the city core and find a new school district and students couldn’t be bused across district lines.  In Palm Beach County, there was no place nearby to fly to.  I was going to be bused to an inner city school or, perhaps, to the center of Florida to go school with migrant workers near the everglades (counties in the south of Florida intersect in the middle of the state).

Coates pointed out that segregation, which in our gauzy imagination is just separate drinking fountains and restrooms, was actually a way to enrich the whites who were in power.  Blacks, who were kept from the voting box by intimidation and poll taxes, paid regular taxes, but were not allowed to use the facilities that taxes paid for.  They were not allowed in the libraries, swimming pools, zoos and museums their taxes supported and, perhaps most damagingly, they were not allowed to go to the State Universities.   This was, in Coates’ mind and mine, taxation without representation – the very thing that fueled the American Revolution.  In Virginia, South Carolina, and Mississippi, blacks outnumbered whites – and across the south they made up about 1/3 of the population.  Afraid that blacks would revolt, whites used terror to control them, with the Lynching tree being the foremost means of doing that (lynching did not take place before the civil war because that would have required repaying a slave owner for damaged property).

To avoid going to a predominantly black high school where my mother was told by the black principal that I likely would have been a target of bullying (something I had already experienced at the hands of whites) and would have had a below standard education or riding a bus two hours out and two hours back to go to a school that would have been primitive at best, my parents intended to enroll me in an all-boys all-white boarding school.  I took the tests and was enrolled.  I looked forward to it in an odd sort of what-does-this-mean way, and I was relieved that I was not going to be beaten.  From Coates’ and Cone’s perspectives, I was being taught to fear those whom my tribe was responsible for suppressing – and this would prepare me to suppress them later, violently if need be.  While I don’t doubt that, the lived experience was much more one of curiosity.  Who were these people that were to be feared?  Would that I were a person far enough advanced to wonder what it would have been like for them to go to a school in which the teaching was inferior and there was (what was for me a real) threat of violence – but I was curious about others and saw them as static and people to be feared – and therefore I was not in an empathic mindset – they seemed not akin to  me but somehow essentially different.

Coates noted that when the first African Americans arrived – one year before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock – the differences between the slaves and the white indentured laborers brought by the colonists to work the extensive land holdings they had were nominal.  The primary difference was that after seven years, the indentured laborers would earn a plot of land and start to compete with their landholding bosses.  But the Africans and the laborers lived together and worked together – they intermarried and found themselves to be in a largely common predicament.  By 1848, the nominal differences were exaggerated until the primary distinction was not between rich and poor but between black and white, and the poorest white, John Calhoun – the Senator from South Carolina is quoted by Coates as saying, belonged along with the rich whites to the upper classes.  No matter how ne’er do well I might be, I am, like Huck Finn’s dad, better than almost half of the population.

I was rescued from whatever horrors living at an all-white Episcopal boarding school would have visited upon me – different and I have no idea whether better or worse than my fate in the public system – by a move north.  My father, for reasons entirely unrelated to my predicament, was transferred to a northern state and we went house-hunting in suburbs that boasted top flight public education – in a system that was almost completely white – there was a small African American community in the suburb that contributed perhaps 2-3% of the students to the public high school.  I never became close to any of them, though was aware of them and interested – though I must again admit sadly – largely as objects rather than as subjects.

Both Cone and Coates emphasize that for the United States to become whole, we must recognize the ways in which white and black America are intimately – across a vast divide – entangled.  They are both viewing that divide from the African American side, necessarily.  And from that side, Cone is seeing the ability of the blacks to survive the terrors that they have – to experience religious freedom and a tremendous sense of community despite the malicious intent of European Americans while Coates is seeing all that African Americans have contributed to the wealth that this country has amassed – and the poverty that has been their reward.  Cone spoke on behalf of the black blood shed – and Coates spoke on behalf of the labor that has not been recognized.  They were both accounting for their ethnic heritage and they were finding tremendous value in it.  I think this is a necessary step for the African American Community – but equally necessary – and potentially more difficult for the European Community to take.

In our conversation when leaving the Coates lecture, two white, reasonably liberal guys said to each other, in essence, “Huh, the narrative Coates just presented is different than the one we have lived with.  Our experience is that blacks are seen as a drag on the economy – they are on welfare or in prison and white America has to support them.”  In the wake of the talk, this seemed like a hopelessly naïve position, but I believe it to be the dominant culture’s position and I bet many blacks would agree with it.  While I don’t think I can reconcile the positions in this piece any more than Coates can figure out a reparation figure in a lengthy Atlantic article – he recommends that the legislature takethat up and think it through – I think part of the reparation process he proposes would, then, be an accounting.  How do we take our vastly different narratives and weave them together into a cogent understanding of something as big and complex and nuanced as our shared history necessarily is?

We live within the city limits of a large northern city.  Our kids have all gone to an integrated public magnet high school.  (My son, much to the dismay of the much more progressive reluctant wife, went to an (integrated) private Montessori elementary school while her daughters went to a nearby public Montessori elementary school that, at the time they attended it, was intentionally 50% white and 50% other).  The kids have all experienced having friends who are bright and highly motivated who are unable to keep up with the rigors of the selective high school not through lack of discipline, but because of poverty and/or chaos at home.  They have seen, up close and personal, what Lyndon Johnson meant by poverty for blacks is different than it is for whites.  The safety net just isn’t as strong.

 

Both Cone and Coates were nonplussed about the election.  Both essentially agreed with Dave Chappelle’s position in his SNL monologue when he stated, in effect, we have seen you guys do this before and we never expected that you weren’t going to do something like this.  Both Cone and Coates suggested that the African American community may be better prepared to weather this than the liberal European American Community; our side is used to getting our way.  I think that Trump’s election forces us to face some truths that we have not wanted to face – but that Cone and Coates, between them, can help us address.  We have wanted to believe that, by educating American, in our classrooms and through mass media, about the virtues of diversity, we have created a sea change in the hearts and souls of the dominant culture.  This has not happened.  We still live in a world of us and them – whether the them is blacks, whites, Mexicans, Muslims or whomever.

Where are we headed?  What might our goal look like?  Cone suggests that European Americans need to own our oppression to become whole.  I agree with that.  To me, it sounds like a psychoanalytic goal – to own the parts of ourselves that we would disavow.  And that is a really difficult goal to attain.  It is one thing – and a difficult thing – for Cone and Coates to gain a sense of the value of their culture.  Dave Chappelle said he would cast off being black in a heart beat if he just could do that (and he is speaking here to a long history of internalized racism that Mamie and Kenneth Clark scientifically observed 75 years ago using dolls that they presented as evidence in the Brown vs. Board of Education case).  But it is another thing for the dominant culture to value the contributions of a denigrated subculture.  In the process of a productive psychoanalysis, we come to value rather than run from our unconscious selves.  We see that those aspects of who we are that we would deny can be useful to us.  But first we have to come to realize that we have an unconscious – and we have to own it as part of ourselves.  While Cone and Coates cry out for us to own the African Americans as an integral part of our American selves, Trump has become the mouthpiece for millions who would disown that.

In a New York Times editorial this week, Mark Lilla maintains that one of the errors that Hillary made was to pander to the various subgroups of the culture.  He points out that if you fail to mention the subgroup of anyone in the audience they feel excluded and don’t feel you are on their side.   Cone and Coates are working towards a more inclusive message.  That message, in 1960s lingo, is something like, “We are all Bozos on this bus,” meaning that, like it or not, we are one country and ultimately one world, and we are a complicated country and world – one that is full of contradictions – some of them so deep and powerful that we cringe when we think of looking at them.  But, if we are going to get out of this mess, we need to do that.  And the first place to do that is to look at the parts of ourselves that we would rather not see.  We need to see things that apparently serve us well – “I am a member of the upper class” – as things that actually hinder us - “We are all on this boat together and the only way that it will continue to rise is if we recognize the value of every part of that boat.”

So, it is not surprising that Cone, Coates and Chappelle are all pretty jaundiced about our ability to do this.  We live in an age where we would rather turn away than sit with something that is uncomfortable – and we have always been thus.  Many of us who are motivated to do the necessary work are, like me, naïve.  We believe that there will be solutions that involve a Rodney King-like ability for us to just get along and we don’t realize that we ourselves are as much of an impediment to that as the redneck out in the sticks – because it is just as uncomfortable for us to confront what we would rather not see as it is for him – and we should be much better prepared to do so.  I think it was Chappelle who said, “I am with Colin Kaepernick.  I will just take a knee and watch these white guys duke it out.”  Well, if we are going to duke it out, we need to work on better arming ourselves, including by recognizing how necessary we are, light and dark, to each other, including because we can serve as mirrors to each other that will afford a better understanding of ourselves – one that we would not be able to honestly achieve on our own.

Of course, underlying all of this, is a conversation about the value of labor.  How do we determine what work has what value?  I don't know the answer to this.  Especially as we approach a post industrial economy, this opens up even bigger questions - what do we do that is of value?  The liberal redneck pointed out recently that both parties in this country are run by elites - and rely on people who work with their hands to support them. His position is that neither party actually cares for the vast majority of those who vote for them.  In truth, of course, most of us care about those who are closest to us.  It is truly hard to have a sense of the common good.  Cone and Coates call on us to think about that, in spite of ourselves.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here.

For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter,  John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, Americanah, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

 

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