A View From The Left- Telling Some Truth, but Pushing a Myth-Notes on Ta-Nehisi Coates

Workers Vanguard No. 1083	12 February 2016

Telling Some Truth, but Pushing a Myth-Notes on Ta-Nehisi Coates

 

Since last summer, when his book Between the World and Me was released, black commentator and ideologue Ta-Nehisi Coates has been fawned over by the bourgeois liberal and not-so-liberal press. The book, which is written in the form of a letter to his son, is nominally a memoir on being black in racist America. Coates has since won a MacArthur “genius grant” and the 2015 National Book Award for nonfiction. A.O. Scott of the New York Times called the book “essential, like water or air,” and Bijan Stephen of The New Republic called it “precisely the document this country needs right now.” The book has been a New York Times best seller since it came out, and it made every major newspaper’s list of the top ten books of the year.

The popularity of Coates’s book intersects the end of the presidency of Barack Obama. Liberal commentators will make much ado about the first black president’s “legacy.” For the racist rulers of America, Obama’s election gave a much-needed facelift for U.S. imperialism. The image of a black man in the highest office of the land briefly provided a thin gloss on murderous capitalist class rule. Under Obama’s reign, there have been countless more victims of U.S. imperialist plunder and torture abroad. Meanwhile, conditions of life for black people—from joblessness and mass incarceration to segregated education and housing—have only deteriorated in this so-called democracy, a democracy for the rich. The last two years have also witnessed Black Lives Matter protests and other expressions of justified outrage in the streets over unrelenting racist cop terror. Yet, occurring in a long period without significant social and class struggle, such anger is coupled with little hope that anything fundamentally different from the situation in racist capitalist America today can ever exist.

Cue Coates’s book, which is perceived by many black and white petty-bourgeois liberal youth as “radical” simply because it acknowledges that racial oppression in America is real and structural, and that it victimizes even the economically better-off black elite (of which Coates is now a part). He also counters the pernicious “blame the victim” and “personal responsibility” rhetoric, which is preached by Obama (and Democrat Bill Clinton before him) to blame black people for their own oppression—all in the service of gutting social services and attacking the poor.

But Coates is an apologist for the racist capitalist system. In early 2008, he began writing for the moderate, centrist Atlantic. At that time, Coates was a defender, occasional tepid critic and general champion of the newly elected Obama, who was pushing the myth of a “post-racial” America. In May 2011, Coates wrote an article comparing Wall Street Democrat Obama to intransigent fighter for black freedom Malcolm X, titled “The Legacy of Malcolm X.” Its punchline was: “Why his vision lives on in Barack Obama.” That’s quite a distortion, but it’s hardly the first time Malcolm X’s name has been misused in the service of Democratic Party liberalism. Although not a Marxist, the real Malcolm X denounced the Democratic Party and exposed the con game of American “democracy.” He said, “A Dixiecrat is nothing but a Democrat in disguise.” He understood that the U.S. government and its representatives, Democrats as well as Republicans, were deadly enemies of black freedom. Malcolm was hated and feared by the capitalist rulers for telling the truth about racist America. Coates, on the other hand, is loved by the liberal elements of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie because he pushes illusions in the same system of “democracy” that Malcolm X detested.

Coates’s book tells some truths about American history in order to push a myth. Referring to racist cop killings, he writes, “The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said it was imposed by a repressive minority.” Coates promotes the falsehood that the capitalist exploiters and white workers and poor are united in a “syndicate” called “white America” that is “arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control” black bodies. He further argues that, from the time of slavery to the present, the white population as a whole has materially benefited. He cynically writes that white people reside in “perfect houses with nice lawns,” living a dream that “smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake,” and that these “dreamers” maintain this suburban dream on the basis of denying that it comes from black oppression.

Class divisions in society do not figure in Coates’s book, and he has nothing to offer black workers. Coates quotes the infamous 19th-century apostle of slavery and white supremacy John C. Calhoun: “‘The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black.’... ‘And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals’.” Coates continues, in his own words, “And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality.” But the lie that white workers and white capitalists are “equals” and have more in common than black and white workers do is the historic lie the American capitalist rulers have used to keep the working class and oppressed divided. Promoting this lie is what puts Coates in the ideological good graces of the bourgeoisie, the tiny repressive minority class that clearly benefits and is raking in the profits.

In his writings over the past year, Coates claims he has been “radicalized,” i.e., that he no longer believes in the great progress for black people that he once attributed to Obama’s election. His book argues that nothing will change until the white “majoritarians” who collectively run American democracy wake up and realize the real truth of history. He tells his son at the conclusion of the book: “But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. 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.” Such a despairing and cynical worldview can only lead guilty white liberal youth to inspect their navels while any potential for integrated struggle against racist oppression goes to its deathbed.

Coates got broad recognition for an article with the same theme in the June 2014 Atlantic titled “The Case for Reparations.” In that piece, he argues for “a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt,” and continues, “Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.” Echoing religious claptrap about original sin, Coates views white supremacy as an inherent flaw of humanity.

Coates is not historically unique in laying the responsibility for black oppression on the white population as a whole, whether desperately poor or in penthouse offices at JPMorgan Chase, nor in ascribing the source of the problem to ideas and “flaws” of human nature. As veteran American Trotskyist Richard Fraser laid out in 1953:

“Karl Marx proved conclusively, however, that it was not greed but property relations which make it possible for exploitation to exist. When applied to the Negro question, the theory of morality means that the root of the problem of discrimination and white supremacy is prejudice. This is the reigning theory of American liberalism and is the means by which the capitalists throw the responsibility for the Jim Crow system upon the population as a whole. If people weren’t prejudiced there would be no Negro problem. This contention is fundamentally false.”

— Richard S. Fraser, “The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution” (November 1953), printed in “In Memoriam—Richard S. Fraser,” Prometheus Research Series No. 3, 1990

Coates’s pushing of white collective guilt conceals the fact that the oppression of black people as a race-color caste has a material basis. Black oppression is integral to the system of American capitalism, which was built on chattel slavery. It persists because it is a key prop for capitalist rule and profits. Full social, economic and political equality for black people cannot be achieved short of getting rid of capitalism through socialist revolution. The forcible segregation of the vast majority of black people at the bottom serves to divide the working class and to suppress wages for black, white and immigrant workers alike. The joining of the fight for black freedom to the struggle against all exploitation is the Achilles’ heel of the American capitalist behemoth.

We do not advocate begging the bourgeois state for reparations, a ridiculous proposition in a society where so many black people are denied jobs, not to mention welfare. And what of the millions of other victims of American capitalism: Native Americans, immigrants and, for that matter, poor and working-class whites? As black reformist left academic Adolph Reed argued against Coates in a January 21 interview with Doug Henwood on KPFA radio: “I can imagine going to talk to a long displaced steel worker in Western Pennsylvania who’s fretting now about further increase in economic insecurity.... And you’re going to explain to him or her that because of slavery they’ve got to be on the giving end of some transfer payments that will go to recompense blacks for harms done in the past.” What is necessary is hard class and social struggle to link the fight for black rights with the struggle for decent jobs, quality integrated housing, education and health care for all.

The only road to “reparations” for the huge injustices of slavery and exploitation is to end the capitalist system that maintains black oppression today and put the resources of U.S. society in the hands of the working class and in the service of the oppressed. Those genuinely seeking a strategy to end racial oppression must look to the working class, which stands as the one racially integrated and powerful force that can transform this society. We seek to win white, Latino and other minority workers to the understanding that fighting for black freedom is the key to winning their own liberation from the common enemy, the capitalist exploiters. As Karl Marx stated shortly after the Civil War, “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.”

Contrary to Coates, who argues that black people have no power to change society, black workers form a strategic part of the proletariat and are the most unionized section of the working class. They form an organic link to the downtrodden ghetto masses, who are valuable potential allies in the class struggle against the capitalist rulers. Our outlook is one of building a 70 percent black, Hispanic and other minority Bolshevik party. Class-conscious black workers, armed with a revolutionary Marxist program, can play a central role in building such a party, leading white workers, even backward ones, in battles against the capitalist class with the aim of workers rule. This is the only way to overcome centuries of racial oppression and open the road to the assimilation of black people into an egalitarian socialist society.