How the peculiar power of Ta-Nehisi Coates feeds on white guilt and despair

Brendan O'Neill, in Spiked:

His insights are bleak; they are for the most part an intellectualised version of the 21st-century politics of identity and victimhood, so that, in the words of one of his growing number of black critics, in Coates’ moral universe ‘whiteness and wrongness… become interchangeable’. Indeed, Coates’ obsession with whiteness ends up displacing black agency and autonomy — as the victim-oriented new politics of identity is wont to do — because in his ‘whiteness-as-talisman’ worldview, ‘those deemed white remain [America’s] primary actors’. So ironically — but logically, too, given that the politics of identity in its current incarnation is devoted largely to the diminution of the individual and the folding of him and her into victimised groups to which things happen, rather than the treatment of him or her as an individual who can make things happen — Coates’ anti-whiteness centres white people, makes them the adults of the story, gives them all the potential action — to observe themselves, correct themselves, better themselves — while blacks are mere ‘bodies’ for whom history is a violent act upon themselves rather than something they act upon. (Coates continually uses the term ‘black bodies’ to refer to black people.)

No, it isn’t his style and certainly not his optimism — there is none — that endears Coates to the liberal establishment, and most passionately to the white sections of it. Rather, this increasingly spiritual and needy celebration of Coates speaks to one of the darker, more socially destructive elements of the latest manifestation of the politics of identity: the use of historic black suffering to justify the self-loathing and fear of the future of the late, decadent bourgeoisie; the privileging, indeed, of the painful black experience as a means not of ensuring historic clarity about past events but as a key prop, the starring role, in fact, in the contemporary political establishment’s turning against its founding values and loss of faith in its project.

Coates plays a very important role for today’s American elites: he provides them with an intellectual justification for their growing dearth of belief in their republic and its values; he is an external expression of their internal crisis of historic legitimacy and purpose. He is less an independent thinker, in the mould of WEB Du Bois or James Baldwin, than a literary manifestation of the American establishment’s own turn against itself and its search for a proof that makes sense as to why it is right to do that.

The birth of 'black privilege':

In recent years, particularly from the 1960s, many thinkers have observed the shift of the left’s focus away from class to identity, from social relations and questions of economic power towards narrower, though of course legitimate concerns about inequality among people of different backgrounds. In more recent years, there has been a further shift in the post-1960s rehabilitation of the politics of identity by those who profess to be left — a move away even from the tangible if limited question of inequality towards more therapeutic notions of pain and recognition; of the right of identity groups not merely to have equal access to public life but to feel validated in their self-professed suffering and to be accorded resources or respect on that basis. As Christopher Lasch argued in his 1985 book, The Minimal Self, ‘the victim has come to enjoy a certain moral superiority in our society’; we have witnessed the ‘moral elevation of the victim’. Competing groups now ‘vie for the privileged status of victims’, as Lasch said.

And this creates a situation where they increasingly ‘appeal not to to the universal rights of citizenship but to a special experience of persecution’, Lasch argued. In short, where a society organised around democratic ideals, around the idea of the self-willed individual and his freedom to shape his life and even political life as he saw fit, naturally encouraged people to appeal to the ideal of citizenship — to demonstrate their capacity for citizenship — a society organised around the victim, around the sanctification of having experienced suffering, naturally invites people to disavow their capacity for citizenship and instead to accentuate their frailty, their insufficiency, their helplessness. This ‘moral elevation of the victim’ has intensified, enormously, since 1985, so that the demand and the living of the universal rights of citizenship have now almost entirely given way to the project of cultivating self-weakness and dismantling one’s citizenship. And these shifts in the modern politics of identity have had a particularly profound impact on black politics, and on the cultural privileging of the black experience. [...]

Coates represents, in many ways, the pinnacle of these developments, the embodiment of the privileging of the black experience by those who have experienced a profound and existential ‘loss of faith in the future’, in Lasch’s words. This is why white liberals venerate him and need him like they need air and water: he provides the story for their crisis of belief; his biographical experience gives coherence to their jettisoning of faith in universal values and the project of the American republic; his often pornographic focus on America’s alleged disgust with and ongoing torture of ‘black bodies’ titillates their own sense of self-loathing, and complicity, and guilt. The guilt of the republics, the shame of the Enlightenment — key themes of our misanthropic era.

And so white liberals actively welcome Coates’ chastising of them and their culture and history. Writing in Elle, the white liberal broadcaster Sally Kohn said all white people, especially white women, should read Coates because his ‘sharp edges’ and ‘hard truths’ will force whites to face ‘brutal reality’. It is ‘impossible to read [him] without wincing’, she says, ‘and it should be’. Because ‘discomfort is progress’. ‘Get even more uncomfortable’, she tells her fellow wealthy, well-connected white liberals, and then ‘spend the rest of your life’ thinking about what Coates says. This is not reading for intellectual expansion or pleasure — it is reading as self-punishment, the use of black pain to justify white self-loathing and liberal self-doubt. A perversely symbiotic relationship has developed between Coates and his largely white liberal readership, the former dutifully providing horror stories about ‘black bodies’, the latter dutifully lapping them up and feeling disgusted with themselves for their part in it all. This isn’t intellectualism — it’s a public performance of identitarian S&M.

H/t Glenn Loury.

The hermeneutics of Ta-Nehisi Coates

Peter Dorman at Naked Capitalism, (originally EconoSpeak):

The thing is, he seldom makes arguments in the sense I understand that term. There isn’t extended reasoning through assumptions and implications or careful sifting through evidence to see which hypotheses are supported or disconfirmed. No, he offers an articulate, finely honed expression of his worldview, and that’s it. He is obviously a man of vast talents, but he uses them the same way much less refined thinkers simply bloviate.

But that raises the question, why is he so influential? Why does he reach so many people? What’s his secret?

No doubt there are multiple aspects to this, but here’s one that just dawned on me. Those who respond to Coates are not looking for argumentation—they’re looking for interpretation.

The demand for someone like Coates reflects the broad influence that what might be called interpretivism has had on American political culture. This current emerged a few decades ago from literature, cultural studies and related academic home ports. Its method was an application of the interpretive act of criticism. A critic “reads”, which is to say interprets, a work of art or some other cultural product, and readers gravitate toward critics whose interpretations provide a sense of heightened awareness or insight into the object of criticism. There’s nothing wrong with this. I read criticism all the time to deepen my engagement with music, art, film and fiction.

But criticism jumped channel and entered the political realm. Now events like elections, wars, ecological crises and economic disruptions are interpreted according to the same standards developed for portraits and poetry. And maybe there is good in that too, except that theories about why social, economic or political events occur are subject to analytical support or disconfirmation in a way that works of art are not.

RESET on Coates, Reparations, Wisdom

Over at Crooked Timber thehersch suggests a reading of Coates on reparations that hadn’t quite occurred to me. The reading is of this line:

More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.

As you may recall, I was taken up short by that line because the founders in question accepted slavery in the union and many of them were slave holders. What kind wisdom is that?

Thehersch suggests that wisdom there is to be interpreted as “a current-day wisdom worthy, retrospectively, of the founders”. It’s not the founders wisdom, it’s our wisdom, about them, about the nation they founded, about us.

I hadn't thought of that. But if that's what Coates is up to, well, it feels like something he discovered in the course of writing that essay and hasn't fully assimilated. I note further that it's not so far from the reading I give his essay in, Felix Culpa: The Judeo-Christian Underpinnings of Coates’ Reparations Argument.

If I'd been Coates’ editor, I'd have asked for changes. Given all the criticism he has laid at the founders’ feet in that essay his statement as published isn't as clear as you think it is. Clarification would be helpful. I might have been satisfied with something like this:

More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of a childlike myth of its innocence into a hardwon wisdom worthy of the struggles of the founders.

But I'd have been happier with a bit more:

More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of a childlike myth of its innocence into a hardwon wisdom worthy of the compromises the founders had to make. Their understanding of humankind was inadequate and their need for agreement was urgent. They did the best they could. We have seen and suffered with the results of their decisions and our knowledge of humankind is deeper. To redeem their mistakes and validate the efforts they took to found the first modern democracy we must...

And there's the rub. We must what, exactly? Make reparations? But that's what the whole essay's been about. And all Coates has to say about that is that we should pass Conyer's bill, have this Congressional conversation, and maybe we'll write some checks, and maybe we won't. But we'll have aired the issue in an official way.

Corey Robins (at Crooked Timer) has said that Coates' current book, Between the World and Me, has no politics in it, that it makes no demands on the reader. Well, his case for reparations is pretty much like that. To the extent that it makes a demand of the reader it is (only implied) that you call your congressman and urge the passing of HR 40. That's not much of a demand, and it's not explicit. All that's really there is that we search our souls and have this national conversation on race in which we face up to the nation's flaws and contradictions.

Coates, Baldwin, Obama and Expressive Culture 2

My previous post in this series didn’t go quite where I wanted it to go. Scratch that, as I didn’t really know where I was going – which happens a lot and is a feature of the process, not a bug. But, though I like what I wrote and stand by it, there’s something more I was looking for. Time to try again.

First I want to drop in a passage from an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates where he tells us why he decided to write his book. Then I want to present passages from the three pieces by Baldwin, Obama, and Coates:

James Baldwin, “Letter from a Region of My Mind” (New Yorker Nov 17, 1962)

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations, The Atlantic, June 2014.

Barack Hussein Obama, Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney, Delivered June 26, 2015.

Finally, I offer some remarks on the rhetorical machinery behind the scenes.

Coates on Why He Wrote the Book

"Between the World and Me": Ta-Nehisi Coates' Extended Interview on Being Black in the US, Wednesday, 22 July 2015 00:00.

AMY GOODMAN: You write it as a letter to your son, Samori. Tell us why.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Well, I hate to disappoint you guys, but mostly as a literary technique, I began Between the World and Me after I finished the draft of "The Case for Reparations," and I was actually somewhat frustrated with that piece, because it’s a very, very empirical piece, very, very much based in the tools of journalism, reportage, very, very evidence-based. But I thought, at the same time, it made what it meant to live under a system that made reparations essential in the first place abstract. There was a distancing effect about talking about people as numbers, you know, about talking about people across history.

And what I wanted to do with this book is to give the reader some sense of what it meant to live under a system of plunder as an individual, to express that, to take it out of the realm of numbers and to take it directly into, you know, individual people. How does it feel every day in your life to live under such a system? How do you cope with that? How is it warping? What is it perverse? What sort of effects does it ultimately have on you? And how do you, you know, as much as possible, make your peace with it?

In the context of this post, what Coates is saying, in effect, is that he wanted to write like James Baldwin. He wanted to write personal observations about being black in America in the 21st Century, CE.

Coates, Baldwin, Obama and Expressive Culture

A couple of weeks ago I had a post in which I used game theory and the story of the emperor’s new clothes to talk about Ta-Nehisi Coates, Malcolm X, Game Theory, and Expressive Culture. In that post I suggested that Coates is like the boy who pointed out that the emperor is in fact naked, a comparison I’d also used in an open letter to Steven Pinker in which I suggested that, in general, imaginative literature plays that role in social groups.

The function we are talking about is that of providing common or mutual knowledge, knowledge that everyone has and moreover everyone knows that everyone else knows it. In the case of the story of the emperor’s new clothes the mutual knowledge is a simple fact, the emperor is naked (despite his pretense to the contrary). Coate’s The Case for Reparations is not so simple.

In this post I want to compare Coates on reparations with James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region of My Mind” (New Yorker Nov 17, 1962) and Obama’s eulogy for Clementa Pinckney. None of them are works of fiction, but they are quite different documents.

Double-Consciousness

Before that discussion, however, I want to look at a paragraph from W. E. B Du Bois. This is from his essay “Strivings of the Negro People” and it was published in the magazine where Coates is now a senior editor, The Atlantic Magazine, but it was published over a century ago, in August 1897. This is the paragraph where Du Bois introduced his concept of double-consciousness:

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa; he does not with to bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he believes—foolishly, perhaps, but fervently—that Negro blood has yet a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without losing the opportunity of self-development.

How does this double-consciousness inform and frame the three pieces we’re examining?

James Baldwin

Let’s start with Baldwin’s piece. It’s an autobiographical essay in which he opens with his adolescence in Harlem and moves to a visit he had with Elijah Muhammad as a mature adult. That is to say, this is one man speaking about his personal experience. To be sure, this one man is brilliant, perceptive, and a wonderful writer, but it is one man’s view of the world. That’s what we’re participating in when we read this essay.

Another take on Coates: As Writer, as Celebrity

“Between the World and Me ... and Twitter”, Stephan A. Crockett, Jr. writing in The Root:

The book is lyrical and rhythmic. There are lines in the book that are worthy of tattoos; there are lines in the book that could be early writings of a constitution for black folks. There are lines in the book that will make you cry.

So it isn’t the book as much as it’s the duality of Coates the writer and Coates as celebrity, as voice of blackness-turned-entity, Coates as phenomenon.

Coates as writer still believes—even earnestly, I would imagine—that he is just Coates the writer. Coates as phenomenon is a powerhouse sentient being who has the ear of the actual god, Toni Morrison, and has been anointed a Christ-like literary Jesus.

And so forth and so on:

In short, Coates as writer is a recognizer and nonsubscriber to the dream. Coates as phenomenon achieved it.

And isn’t that the premise for it all? The book as a private conversation between a father and his son for public consumption, a literal migration from Baltimore to Baldwin. Even the fact that Coates as writer is shocked when whites are interested in his work underlies the truth that Coates as phenomenon writes. For. The. Atlantic.

Coates as celebrity seems rather different from Coates as priest, but I think that Crockett is looking at the same phenomenon as McWhorter is.

I like the term that Loury used in one of his dialogs with McWhorter, expressive. This is expressive culture we’re looking at. It may take the form of an argument for reparations in one case, or a letter to one’s son, but the fundamental impulse is expressive. It’s a mechanism through which groups share values and norms.

For some deep intellectual background, see David G. Hays, The Evolution of Expressive Culture, 1993.

Felix Culpa: The Judeo-Christian Underpinnings of Coates’ Reparations Argument

Yes, I understand that Coates is an avowed atheist. But he was born and raised in a culture that has been formed by Christian thought and ritual practice. It is easy enough to disavow both Christian scripture and ritual practice. But there is no way to escape patterns of mind that have seeped into the culture through centuries of practice.

The particular pattern that Coates is enacting in The Case for Reparations is the Fortunate Fall, felix culpa in Latin. The idea is (not so) simple: When Adam and Eve exercised their free will and ate of the tree of knowledge, they fell into sin. By taking physical form as Jesus Christ, God gave humankind the opportunity to transcend original sin and thereby to reach a higher level of existence than that enjoyed by prelapsarian Adam and Eve.

What’s Going On?

Coates’ article is a long one and unfolds in ten chapters. Near the end of the third chapter, “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”, he mentions a bill, HR 40, that has been repeatedly introduced into Congress over the last quarter century. It calls for a study of the reparations issue:

That HR 40 has never—under either Democrats or Republicans—made it to the House floor suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential. If we conclude that the conditions in North Lawndale and black America are not inexplicable but are instead precisely what you’d expect of a community that for centuries has lived in America’s crosshairs, then what are we to make of the world’s oldest democracy?

One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one’s ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte. A nation outlives its generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delaware, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, but we are still paying out the pensions. If Thomas Jefferson’s genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally Hemings’s body. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.

Observe two things about this passage: 1) it begins in Congress with HR 40 and 2) it ends with the founding fathers, in this case, two of them who are explicitly implicated as slave-holders.

Near the end of very last chapter, “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany” there is another passage that is framed the same way:

A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.

John Conyers’s HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.

This time the founders are mentioned as a group and there is no recognition that they had permitted slavery in the new nation, had permitted the Three-Fifths Compromise in the Constitution, much less that some of them were slave owners. What happened? Why the inconsistency?

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Malcolm X, Game Theory, and Expressive Culture

As the title says, I’ve got more to say about the phenomenon of Ta-Nehisi Coates. In the first place, I’m wondering is his writing is affecting people now in the way that The Autobiography of Malcolm X affected me back in the late 1960s. So I start by talking about that. Then I suggest that the story of the emperor’s new clothes, as explicated by game theory, gives us a way of thinking about Coates’ impact. He’s the little boy who tells the crowd that the emperor is naked. Game theory gives us a way of generalizing from that story that side-steps the religious analogy.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Nation of Islam

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which he co-wrote with Alex Haley, was published in 1965, though I didn’t read it until a couple of years later, probably in the summer of 1966 between my freshman and sophomore years of college. It hit me like a ton of bricks, though beyond that I can’t say. I simply don’t remember anything beyond the fact of the book’s impact.

Why did it hit me so hard? Simple: I’d never read anything like it, at least framed as non-fiction. I was politically left, perhaps even radical – I belonged to Students for a Democratic Society rather than to the campus Democratic organization, whatever it was called – and supported the Civil Rights movement, which I’d watched on television. I believed in equality, and so forth, though the anti-war movement was more pressing.

There’s nothing surprising about this. After all, I’d lived a white middle-class life. I grew up in a white suburb of Johnstown in western Pennsylvania. The only ethnic-cultural issue that had any impact on my daily life was Catholics vs. Protestants, and that was mostly about who went to school where and what terms the high school sports terms competed against.

Going to college at Johns Hopkins changed that a bit. I was now living in a city of some size and, for the first time in my life, Jews became real to me. There’d only been one Jewish family in my neighborhood back home, but Jews constituted a large proportion of the student body at Hopkins and I found most of my friends among them.

Baltimore, of course, is, and was back then (I assume), a majority black city. But the Hopkins campus – the arts and sciences school – is in North Baltimore, which is mostly white, and it abuts the lower edge of the Roland Park neighborhood, which had houses of size and even grandeur. If there were no black students in the student body at Hopkins in 1965 – something that would change in a couple of years – the university had black employees. That’s when I first encountered a college graduate working a clerk’s job, in the campus bookstore.

So African Americans were no longer quite so exotic – perhaps not the best word, but it points in the right direction – they weren’t on the “inside” of the world I lived in either. I had no black friends, had no meals in black homes, nor did I build anything with black friends and colleagues.

And then there's reading Malcolm X about living as a black man in a white world, that was quite a shock. So THAT’s why the man is angry, thought I to myself. Until I read that book, Martin Luther King was just fine, but Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, not so good. Now the Nation of Islam made sense to me in a way it hadn’t before. That was a rational response to irrational injustice.

But beyond that, well, I marched against the war in Vietnam, got drafted and did alternative service in the Chaplain’s Office at Hopkins, attended Sunday afternoon jazz concerts at the Left Bank Jazz Society, where the audiences were majority black, but none of that had anything directly to do with improving the lives of black people.

What does it matter that I believed then, and still do, that the foundations of the modern world were laid on the corpses of enslaved laborers, that African Americans have suffered a grave injustice, and that injustice persists? I’m not saying or implying that such belief doesn’t matter, but only pointing out that belief is one thing, social action is another. Reading can have a direct effect on one’s beliefs. How one acts on those beliefs is a different matter.

Obama’s Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney: Technics of Power and Grace

I've uploaded a new working paper. Links etc. below:

• Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/14487024/Obama_s_Eulogy_for_Clementa_Pinckney_Technics_of_Power_and_Grace
• Social Science Research network: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2637414

Abstract: President O'bama’s eulogy for Clementa Pinckney took the form of a sermon in the black vernacular tradition. This particular sermon exhibits ring-form composition; as such it is symmetrical about a structural midpoint. It opens with the recitation of a scriptural passage and closes with the hymn, “Amazing Grace”. Grace is introduced as a theme in the middle section, which is also where Obama mentions the killer. The sermon is placed in a traditional of black performance going back to 19th century camp-meetings. Finally it is suggested that the performance takes place in an emerging discursive space that is neither religious nor political, but partakes of both.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction: Confluence 2

Obama’s Pinckney Eulogy and the Place of Religious Discourse in Civic Life 4

The Circle of Grace 9

Performing Black, Three Discussions 12

The Technics of Grace 16

To Redeem a Nation 21

Appendix 1: Black Preaching, the Church and Civic Life 28

Appendix 2: Text of the Eulogy 31

Appendix 3: Loury and McWhorter on Ta-Nehisi Coates 36

Introduction: Confluence

The posts in this document lie at the confluence of three streams of inquiry. Two are obvious: 1) African-American culture and 2) literary form and mechanism. And one is not so obvious: 3) the future. Let us consider them in turn.

My interest in African-American culture centers on music and, within music, predominantly jazz. Just how I became interested in jazz is not entirely clear. While there was music in the house when I was growing up, my father liked classical music, Beethoven in particular; there was no jazz. I found that by myself but the mystery is where and how.

The only thing I’m sure is that Disney had something to do with. He had two shows on TV, the Mickey Mouse Club, which aired on weekday afternoons, and his omnibus show which aired on Sunday evenings. Both would occasionally feature a Dixieland band called The Firehouse Five Plus Two. I heard them and loved them. And somehow I found my way to jazz records at the local discount department store: Louis Armstrong, Maynard Ferguson, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and others – I favored trumpet players because I was myself learning trumpet at the time.

From the music itself I became interested in the musicians and began reading jazz biographies. Somewhere along the line I learned that this music had roots in the black church. And that, as they say, blew my mind. There was no music remotely like that in the church I’d attended as a child. And so my interest in the music and the musicians became an interest in the culture and its interaction with and influence on American culture in general.

I suppose my interest in literature is grounded ultimately in the fact that I loved to read. But I didn’t go to college to study literature. I went to study philosophy;I figured that was where you got to put everything together. Wbat I discovered is that while academic philosophy had its points of interest, it was not a discipline where one worked on broad intellectual synthesis.

But literature, that turned out to be more a promising arena for synthesis, particularly as it was taught by Richard Macksey at Johns Hopkins, where I did my undergraduate work. The story of how I went from an interest in literature to a specific interest in form and mechanism is more complex than we need entertain here. Suffice it to say that it happened.

And then three decades or so after that, early in this millennium, I entered into correspondence with Mary Douglas, the great anthropologist. She got me interested in ring-composition, in which the sections of the text are symmetrically arrayed about a mid-point (I explain this more fully later). It’s a form mostly studied by Biblical scholars and classicists, but Douglas was attempting to broaden attention to the form and, to that end she gave a series of lectures at Yale which became her last academic book, Thinking in Circles.

Once Douglas had gotten me interested in the form I found examples in modern texts – Tezuka’s Metropolis, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – and films – three episodes in Disney’s Fantasia, the original Japanese Gojira, (as opposed to the American re-edit and re-shoot as Godzilla, King of the Monsters) and Apocalypse Now. I wasn’t looking for another example when I starred working on Obama’s Pinckney eulogy, but indicators quickly appeared (e.g. the distribution of the word “grace” in the text) and, with a bit of work, the pattern became clear.

That’s all well and good, you say, but what has any of that to do with the future? Consider this paragraph near the end of the eulogy:

Reverend Pinckney once said, “Across the South, we have a deep appreciation of history – we haven't always had a deep appreciation of each other's history.” What is true in the South is true for America. Clem understood that justice grows out of recognition of ourselves in each other. That my liberty depends on you being free, too. That history can't be a sword to justify injustice, or a shield against progress, but must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past – how to break the cycle. A roadway toward a better world. He knew that the path of grace involves an open mind – but, more importantly, an open heart.

“A roadway toward a better world.” A better world, in the future.

At the same time I’ve been thinking about Pope’s recent encyclical, Laudo Si’, a religious document with tremendous political implications, that put it in the same place in my mind as Obama’s eulogy, and that looked to the future as well. As tenuous as it is, that’s really it, this look to the future.

But there’s one more thing. As I began thinking about the post for 3 Quarks Daily that became the first section of this document I listened to a discussion that Glenn Loury and John McWhorter had about the journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates as a quasi-religious figure. But their remarks struck me as being reasonable. And what their remarks did was lead me to postulate the emergence of a liminal space, an undefined region of discursive possibility, that is emerging in contemporary discussions. That’s where we also find Obama’s eulogy and Laudo Si’.

Is this where we begin to forge the outlines of new ways of being in the world, of 21st Century society and culture? I don’t know, but that’s what’s on my mind these days.

* * * * *

About the rest of this document:

Obama’s Pinckney Eulogy and the Place of Religious Discourse in Civic Life: This is the last post I wrote in this series. This is where I suggest, as I’ve already stated, that we’re seeing the emergence of a new future oriented-dialog.

The Circle of Grace: I lay out the possibility that the eulogy is a ring-form and concentrate on the mid-section, where Obama mentions the murders and where grace becomes a theme.

Performing Black, Three Discussions: Here I trascribe sections of three interviews: 1) Glenn Loury and John McWhorter discussing Obama, 2) Barack Obama and Marc Maron discussing comedians, and 3) Ike Turner and Sam phillips discussing Elvis Presley.

The Technics of Grace: Here I discuss the rest of the eulogy, how Obama moves two and then frum the middle section, and clinch the ring-form analysis. I also remark on audience interaction, which we can judge from the video tape.

To Redeem a Nation: Here I discuss Obama’s choice to deliver this address in a specifically black style and say a bit about the history of black expressive style.

Appendix 1: Black Preaching, the Church and Civic Life: This is an older post about the potential of black preaching to enrich our civic life in general.

Appendix 2: Text of the Eulogy: This is the entire text, to which I have added paragraph numbers for ease of reference during analysis and description.

Appendix 3: Loury and McWhorter on Ta-Nehisi Coates: This is a large part of the discussion of Coates as a quasi-religious figure and, in general, of the emergence of antiracism as a secular religion.

Finally, when working on the eulogy I created a set of analytic and descriptive tables, President Obama’s Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney, Analytic and Descriptive Tables. Here’s the link where you can download them: 

https://www.academia.edu/14123971/President_Obama_s_Eulogy_for_Clementa_Pinckney_an_Analytic_Table

McWhorter on Antiracism as Religion, and Beyond

Yesterday I published a post at 3 Quarks Daily in which I quoted a July 21 remarks between John McWhorter and Glenn Loury to the effect that antiracism has become something like a religion. In particular, they focused on the writing of Ta-Nehisi Coates. McWhorter has now published a piece in The Daily Beast, Antiracism, Our Flawed New Religion.

Religion vs. Practical Action

In view of that piece I’d like to continue the discussion. First, here’s a bit of the Loury/McWhorter discussion I didn’t quote. This is McWhorter at about 35 minutes in:

What we’re talking about as not worthy, what you see as condescending, David Brookes pretending to think that he has no right to question something that somebody wrote just because they’re black and they have a way with a pen, none of that has anything to do with being concerned with black uplift. And black uplift has to take place separately from that. It has nothing to do with Charles Blow and his artful prose. So all those people are going to be doing the Bible. That’s what they’re doing, I think of it these days. It’s religion and I can’t say it’s a terrible thing, but it will have nothing to do with changing poor black people’s lives.

So, the religion of antiracism is one thing while political and social action that will improve black lives is something different. One of McWhorter’s concerns, obviously enough, is that the religion will distract attention and action away from concrete action.

Here’s a passage from McWhorter’s new article:

Coates is “revered,” as New York magazine aptly puts it, as someone gifted at phrasing, repeating, and crafting artful variations upon points that are considered crucial—that is, scripture. Specifically, Coates is celebrated as the writer who most aptly expresses the scripture that America’s past was built on racism and that racism still permeates the national fabric.

The very fact that white America today cherishes this religion is evidence that Coates’s particular pessimism about America and race is excessive. This became especially clear last year with the rapturous reception of Coates’s essay, “The Case for Reparations.” It was beautifully written, of course, but the almost tearfully ardent praise the piece received was about more than composition. The idea was that the piece was important, weighty, big news. But let’s face it—no one, including Coates himself, I presume, has any hope that our current Congress is about to give reparations for slavery to black people in any significant way. Plus, reparations had been widely discussed, and ultimately put aside, as recently as 15 years ago in the wake of Randall Robinson’s The Debt. Yet Coates’s article was discussed almost as if he were bringing up reparations as a new topic.

Here is a passage from Coates’ piece that gives some idea of what he’s looking for:

A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.

John Conyers’s HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.

Coates had earlier noted that Conyers has been introducing his reparations bill, HR 40, annually for the last quarter century and had gotten nowhere with it, and all it called for was to study the issue. That is, all that Coates is calling for is a grand ‘conversation on race’ inscribed within the conditions of HR 40, whatever they may be. It is not a call to action. It is, to use a word that Loury had introduced into his conversation with McWhorter, an expressive act.

Moreover one wonders just who and what Coates meant by reference to "a wisdom worthy of [America's] founders". Does that include the founders who held slaves? While one can reasonably argue that having wisdom and holding slaves are not necessarily exclusive, an article on reparations is a strange place to let that conjunction pass without argument, and argument on the matter would surely sidetrack the discussion. Did no one at the magazine spot this problem? If so, i'd really like to know why it was allowed to pass without comment? If not, how could anyone have possibly missed it? For that matter, how could Coates have possibly written it, unless he needed desperately to believe in founders free of the taint of racism?

@3QD: Obama’s Pinckney Eulogy, Ta-Nehisi Coates as “Priest”, Laudato Si’

The topic: The place of religious discourse in civic life.

Initially prompted by some remarks by Glenn Loury and John McWhorter from June 29, I took a close look at Obama’s eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney and was stunned. The particular question that attracted my attention was the issue of Obama’s ‘authenticity’ as he enacted the role of a black preacher and transformed the eulogy into a sermon on race relations in the USA. So I transcribed part of their conversation and started thinking.

And I thought that I really ought to write a blog post addressing the authenticity issue. I ended up writing four posts. I devoted two posts to a close analysis of Obama’s eulogy, discovering – to my delight and surprise – that is exhibited ring-composition, one of my particular interests. Another post consists of transcribed conversation, the Loury-McWhorter conversation that got me started, a conversation between Pres. Obama and Marc Maron, and one between Ike Turner and Sam Phillips (the producer who discovered Elvis Presley). And my final post took up the authenticity issue, with a look into the past through Duke Ellington, Elvis Presley, and 19th Century camp meetings, and concluding with some remarks on the quasi-political quasi-religious nature of the President’s remarks.

As I was working into, through, and beyond that last post I began to think of the Pope’s recent encyclical, Laudo Si’, a religious document with tremendous political implications. That put it in the same place, in my mind, that I had just created for Obama’s eulogy. And these two statements came within a month of one another.

Is something afoot, I wondered, something between and around religion and politics?

As I was thinking about that, and thinking about what I’d write for my up-coming 3 Quarks Daily column, I listened to another Loury-McWhorter discussion, this one was about Ta-Nehisi Coates as a quasi-religious figure. I’ve read a few pieces by Coates, but nothing in the last year or so. But their remarks struck me as being reasonable. What’s more, it seems to me that they were defining this liminal space where we find Obama’s eulogy and Laudato Si’.

And that became my 3QD column, where I place those documents in evidence for a discussion of the role of religious discourse in public life. You can find that colunn HERE. Below the asterisks I've placed my transcription of Loury and McWhorter on Ta-Nehisi Coates.

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Here’s the Blogginheads.tv conversation: