Forget what your dad is telling you, kid: listen to Buddy.
Question: If Ta-Nehisi Coates’ racist and hateful, anti-white, anti-US essay for The Atlantic is respectable public discourse, why isn’t Dylan Roof’s manifesto?
I think it is fair to that we know what the standards, or rather double standards, are in Barack Obama’s America. We have repeatedly been told by progressive activists that “hate speech” either isn’t or shouldn’t be protected by the Constitution, but the essay “Letter to My Son” by a regular Atlantic contributor, published by the magazine as literature, shows that “hate speech” is a narrower category in the progressive universe than its catchy name would suggest. Pompous, pretentious, labored, and smug anti-white, anti-American speech isn’t hate, apparently, but rather wisdom.
I just want to know what the rules are now.
Blogger/law professor Ann Althouse threw a link to the long piece by Coates to her readers without comment, as is often her technique. Actually, she highlighted a comment to the essay by one of the readers of Metafilter, who gushed,
I sat in the parking lot of my gym for 30 minutes reading that amazing, amazing piece. I’m rendered inarticulate by its power, by its purpose, by how fucking important it is and how I wish every person in this country would read it and really hear what he’s saying. And, just, goddamn. It’s so good. It references MLK in the same breath as Wu-Tang, and it’s all woven together so fucking effortlessly, but the references aren’t winky nods to pop culture, they’re buttressing an argument that is already so strong and undeniable and.
Althouse left off the last line, which was…
God. I know this sounds hyperbolic, but fucking hell, I hope this letter is taught in civics classes and literature classes for decades to come.
The Professor is correct: the positive reactions to this monstrosity are at least as fascinating as the essay itself. Read it all the way through, if you can. I found the long article extremely hard to get through. The prose is the sort of over-worked, straining-to-be-poetic slog that black revolutionaries and poets of the Sixties used to excel at, often from prison; Eddie Murphy did some hilarious imitations of them. Style and pretentiousness aside, the essay is tragic, frustrating and deeply sad: if this or anything even close to this is a common state of mind among African Americans, then it is small wonder progress in U.S. race relations is regressing.
President Obama promised hope and change, and this is pessimistic, hopeless. Ta-Nehisi Coates tells his son ( he isn’t really writing to his 15-year-old son, who unless he’s a prodigy with the patience of a monk couldn’t possibly comprehend this bloated mess, and thank God for that) that there has been no change in white America’s–that is to say, America’s—attitude and treatment of blacks since Colonial days, and change isn’t coming. Here’s a typical section—well, not typical, exactly, for it is clearer than most:
“Democracy is a forgiving God and America’s heresies—torture, theft, enslavement—are specimens of sin, so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune. In fact, Americans, in a real sense, have never betrayed their God. When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” he was not merely being aspirational. At the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term “people” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. As for now, it must be said that the elevation of the belief in being white was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land.”
It should not surprise anyone who comes here with any frequency that the moment when my mind shut off any possible trust or respect for Coates and his views occurred when he wrote this:
“That was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free. The men who had left his body in the street would never be punished. It was not my expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you were young and still believed. You stayed up till 11 p.m. that night, waiting for the announcement of an indictment, and when instead it was announced that there was none you said, “I’ve got to go,” and you went into your room, and I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after, and I didn’t hug you, and I didn’t comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.”
That paragraph tells the reader, or at least readers who care to be objective, that..
1. Coates doesn’t care about facts, law or reality, just his ideological constructs, in the service of which he twists events and re-casts them like movie re-makes. Mike Brown was not murdered, and the lack of an indictment was just. Those who refuse to accept that are either ignorant, intentionally spreading lies, or so infected with racist hate that toxic confirmation bias cripples their minds.
2. Coates was raised to hate and fear whites.
3. He was raised to hate and fear the United States.
4. He is raising his son to hate and fear whites.
5. He is raising his son to hate and fear the United States.
If a writer poses as a truth-teller and blatantly misrepresents the truth, there is either an intention to deceive or a belief that one’s readers don’t care about the truth or only want to read what supports their pre-existing biases. The nest section of the essay—no, I’m not going to wade through this vile muck in detail, for that would be cruel to both of us—says this:
“I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, an 11-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.”
But Eric Garner was not “choked to death.” He was not intentionally killed by anyone, and his death was not “for selling cigarettes.” Renisha McBride was not shot “for seeking help,” and John Crawford, the black man shot by police when he didn’t hear their demands that he put down the gun replica that he was carrying in a Walmart, was not “shot down for browsing in a department store.” Tamir Rice, the Cleveland child shot by police who believed the pistol he was carrying in a park was real, was not “murdered,” and he was not 11-years-old. Even generously allowing literary license for a polemic, no responsible reader can accept the statements or opinions of any author, on any topic, who intentionally misrepresents facts like this. Moreover, no competent editor should permit it. Every news source reports that Rice was 12, and that he was large enough that he could have been mistaken for an adult. Why, do you think, Coates transformed him into an 11-year-old? You know why.
What Coates is doing to his son is conditioning him to resist the authority of police, because his father says they are out to kill him, just as the United States is determined to destroy him, because he is black. This programming can get his son killed. Coates is so consumed with racist paranoia that he doesn’t care.
If a rational reader can avoid being angry with Coates for his self-indulgence, his hate, his dishonesty and his negligent and incompetent parenting, the fair response to the rambling screed is pity. To Coates, slavery only ended in form, not substance. He tells his child—teaches his child!—this:
“The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.You and I, my son, are that “below.” That was true in 1776. It is true today. There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when the people who believe themselves to be white, renounce this demon religion, and began to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of such a day. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.”
If there is such a thing as hate speech, this is it. It is more eloquent and erudite that the typical anti-black rants on Chimpmania, but that makes it worse, and more dangerous. A bunch of diseased white racists telling each other how inferior blacks are will produce an occasional Dylan Roof, but the equally irrational hate of a published author and regular contributor to a self-styled “intellectual” cultural magazine with a storied past does far more harm to the culture. It is also reckless harm. I’ll concede that the essay has value: now I know more about the deterioration of race relations in the U.S. and the kinds of toxic thinking that are accelerating it. The same can be said of reading the virulent racism on Chimpmania, too. Would The Atlantic ever publish an equivalent, white supremacy, anti-black essay, even one as full of literary pretensions as “Letter to My Son”?
No. It wouldn’t dare.
Yet civicly and ethically,they are indistinguishable. Both are cultural poison, and Coates’ article is worse.
Despair is un-American; so is racism, hate, pessimism and hopelessness. I encountered The Atlantic’s essay late last night while vegging out to old “Dick Van Dyke Show” episodes on Netflix. By sheer coincidence, I was watching an episode I had forgotten (it had been 50 years, after all), and not one of Dick’s best, called “A Show of Hands.”
In the episode, Rob and Laura Petrie are supposed to attend an event to receive an award for Rob’s boss Alan Brady. Before they go, both accidentally put their hands in a pot of indelible black dye—and the event is sponsored by a civil rights organization. The couple wears white gloves to avoid insulting their African-American hosts, but when Rob learns that the inscription on the award extols honesty and trust between races, he decides that integrity demands that he tell the truth, expose his black hands, and hope that the assembled will understand. Naturally, they do.
The idea that color alone separates races in the U.S. is a simplistic and naive approach typical of the period, but I have no difficulty concluding that the nation was on a more promising trajectory in 1965 than it is today. In 1965 there were important voices in the black community that were breaching division and hate, but their followers were a minority of a minority, and they were not being endorsed by prestigious publications like The Atlantic, or public figures with the popularity of the First Lady, who periodically reveals sentiments about her nation that seem consistent with that of Mr. Coates.
The incongruous juxtaposition of the old sitcom’s optimism and the Coates rant made me recall, for some reason, an early post on Ethics Alarms in which I endorsed the ethical lyrics of the Dick Van Dyke Show’s theme music, which were never heard on the show. The words were written by “Buddy Sorrell” himself, the late Morey Amsterdam. They are deceptively wise and useful, and represent a far healthier approach to life than the defeatist, angry, paranoid and self-pitying world view Ta-Nehisi Coates is intent on passing on to his son. It also accurately expresses the philosophy my own father lived by, and taught his son.
There is no reason why Morey’s cheerful advice should not serve black and white Americans equally well, for there is more value and perception in his simplistic little ditty than in all the rhetorical gloom of “Letter to My Son.”
So you think that you’ve got troubles?
Well, trouble’s a bubble,
So tell old Mr. Trouble to “Get lost!”.
Why not hold your head up high and,
Stop cryin’, start tryin’,
And don’t forget to keep your fingers crossed.
When you find the joy of livin’
Is lovin’ and givin’
You’ll be there when the winning dice are tossed.
A smile is just a frown that’s turned upside down,
So smile, and that frown will defrost.
And don’t forget to keep your fingers crossed!
NOTE: The original post mistakenly credited the essay to Vanity Fair. I apologize to that publication, and also thank reader deery, who alerted me quickly to the error.
Ethics Alarms 
You can erase this comment once you make the correction, but I think the piece was published by The Atlantic, not Vanity Fair as you have stated.
No, I’m leaving it up: thanks a lot. I fixed it. I was apparently possessed by Caitlyn Jenner…
There’s still a Vanity Fair reference: right before the inset “No. It wouldn’t dare.”
Ugh. Thanks. Damn Caitlyn…
Actually I once subscribed to The Atlantic. Never Vanity Fair.
Sounds like Amiri Baraka the elder, minus the foul language.
Ta-Nihisi, or Morey?
Ta-Nihisi. Baraka’s idea of poetry was to say to the white man “up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up!”
I know. Remember, I’m AD for a 20th Century masterworks theater company. If we weren’t leaving the stage, I would have done The Toilet or Dutchman this season. Before he went nuts, Baraka was an important playwright.
I can practically guarantee at least one person on my facebook friends list will post a link to that article while gushing about how good Coates is on race.
Of all the recent instances, I think he may have a point on Rice and Garner, but lying about the age doesn’t help his case, nor does conflating the initial cause of interaction with the proximate cause of the violent interaction.
Other than that, I basically agree with everything you wrote. Coates is part of the problem, and is utterly incapable of recognizing that fact. That last quoted section is infuriating, because it recognizes NO individuality whatsoever among whites. Everything in his view is determined by race. I have not captured nor tortured anyone, nor am I a cannibal. Nothing in my existence is dependent on the subjugation of blacks. I am not responsible for the actions of other people, any more than he is. I may bring up statistics on differential crime rates as a form of evidence in various circumstances, but I never go to the extra step of asserting that it’s right to base my interactions with individuals based on the group they are involuntarily associated with.
I think the officers in Garner’s case should have been prosecuted for negligent homicide, but Coates has no point in stating that he was “killed for selling cigarettes.” If anything, his death resulted from him resisting arrest and an excessive police response, but the obviously weren’t trying to kill him. Rice’s case is arguably manslaughter as well, but again, it was not entirely the cop’s fault. If someone is just going to ignore relevant facts that don’t fit the narrative, it’s easy to win an argument.
Hmm… I should have said that those two cases have legitimate issues, rather than that he had a point.
That’s right.
Not just that. I know which friends it will be.
The toxic race relations isn’t as surprising as I would have thought a decade ago, but refusing to comfort his kid? That’s just cruel. How is his son’s life supposed to be better if he abandons him? This is just lazy. Why stay if it’s as terrible as he says?
I hate hate hate the “love it or leave it” trope and always have, but Ta-Nehisi makes it rise in my throat like vomit.
Then there’s the guy who wrote this piece: http://www.vox.com/2015/7/2/8884885/american-revolution-mistake
Love it or leave it kind of popped into my head reading that one. What is it with these kids under forty? All they do is complain.
Well, if the American Revolution did not happen, the author would not have been born.
If America can survive this latest wave of virulent leftist hate it will be a miracle.
Agreed. It’s relentless. Frankly, I’m not sure it is survivable.
May I suggest that persons brought up to venerate that episode are unlikely to be detached enough to assess the arguments linked there properly? I find the first two arguments strong, and only the third one flawed in parts (and I happen to know other arguments that were not presented there – try James Chalmers’s contemporary work Plain Truth, which has largely been borne out by events, except in supposing that the French would recognise their true interests and act accordingly).
Before anyone is tempted to rejoin that I myself am biassed, I would like to remind readers that my family on my mother’s side were Irish politicals, with my great-uncle Leopold even making it into the history books, so if there were any bias it would be the other way if anything.
Wait wait wait wait. This is just a veiled consequentialist argument and ultimately it relies on a “hypothetical alternate history” strawman to pretend like “how things worked out was worse”.
You have absolutely no idea that the first two items would have played out faster had the revolution been a failure. England retaining its colonies could very well change entire attitudes about things. Arguments could be made that slavery would have lasted just as long.
Grasping for straws this time to cry some more about loss of the colonies…
“You can always leave and live someplace you think is better, if you wish” (a variation on “love it or leave it”) was also my first reaction to Ta-Nehisi. But somehow, I suspect that what Ta-Nehisi really wants is for his son to hang around long enough, and get motivated enough, to “destroy the village in order to save it,” a la Vietnam carpet-bombing style. The demolition is a necessary prerequisite to avenging history as he reads it. As things are, Ta-Nehisi has persuaded me to live thoroughly convinced that I am, indeed, superior to him, and that my ideas are superior to his. If only the system was corrupt enough in my favor to take his son away and place him in my adoptive home, the young man’s life might progress.
Jack: thanks; I never knew before that the Dick Van Dyke Show theme song had lyrics, let alone what they said and who wrote them. Wonderful, heartening info. Thanks again.
Thanks for the kudos. Dick has gone out of his way in recent years to let everyone know about Morey and his contribution; I vowed to help any way I could.
I don’t think you have to love it, but I think the only fair ways to deal with this kind of anger is to let it go, leave for somewhere better, or try to improve it. Destruction and this kind of virulent hatred doesn’t even begin to build a better society for everyone, it just changes the targets.
It never talks about ‘after.’ If you could wave a magic wand and all the bad cops and judges and whatever group they hate are gone, we’re still going to need cops and judges to arrest violent people. They are all ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water,’ to use an old phrase. MLK was talking about after and making a future, this guy sounds more like Armageddon, instead of his son getting a better future than now. By not comforting him and at least giving him sympathy, it is a nasty form of abandonment, to not help him above the lowest level of Mslow’s hierarchy. It’s a self-perpetuating negative feedback loop.
His father, the kid’s grandfather, was a Black Panther.
Consider the fact that ethnic privilege was the norm, not the exception, throughout human history.
The fact that ethnic privilege in America was minimized in less than five decades is very remarkable. I mean, think about it. Ethnic privilege has a rich pedigree going back more than fifty centuries, and it took less than fifty years to diminish this privilege to levels never before seen in human history.
These race baiters refuse to acknowledge that,.
It’s even worse. This guy refuses to intellectually and emotionally acknowledge that slavery and Jim Crow aren’t alive and well.
After reading this and TNC’s book excerpt in The Atlantic, there were a few ideas I disagree with:
1. ” ‘ This was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free…..’ That paragraph tells the reader… 2. Coates was raised to hate and fear whites. 3. He was raised to hate and fear the United States 4. He is raising his son to hate and fear Whites. 5. He is raising his son to hate and fear the United States ”
There is nothing I can find in that paragraph alone or contextually with the neighboring paragraphs that states a hate for or fear of whites. In the previous paragraph he expresses sadness for those “believing themselves white.”
2. “But Eric Garner was not ‘choked to death’.” According to the NY Medical Examiner’s Office, the cause of death for Eric Garner was “compression of the neck (chokehold), compression of chest, and prone positioning.” What exactly is the difference between this and being choked to death? Considering he did not voluntarily compress his own chest and put himself in a prone position, I find this a distinction without a difference.
3. “Tamir Rice…was not ‘murdered’.” Tamir Rice, at 5’7″, 195lbs, might have looked like an adult and did have a toy gun. Until the trial occurs and all evidence is examined, one cannot say he was not murdered.
4. Considering the history of slavery and Jim Crow in the south, redlining in the North, and segregation and sundown towns across the United States, it would be inaccurate to say racism is “un-American”.
I think that TNC’s goal, if this is for his son, is to understand his position in the United States. Unlike other commenters, I find no call to arms to kill the white man or “destroy the village in order to save it”. He repeatedly refers to a struggle which, honestly, I cannot define but vaguely hints towards living without hope that things will be better.
1. ” ‘ This was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free…..’ That paragraph tells the reader… 2. Coates was raised to hate and fear whites. 3. He was raised to hate and fear the United States 4. He is raising his son to hate and fear Whites. 5. He is raising his son to hate and fear the United States ”
There is nothing I can find in that paragraph alone or contextually with the neighboring paragraphs that states a hate for or fear of whites. In the previous paragraph he expresses sadness for those “believing themselves white.”
What? the whole essay is about how whites and police officers are determined to harm him! “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” What does that mean to you? I know the piece is goobledygook, but that message is mighty clear.
2. “But Eric Garner was not ‘choked to death’.” According to the NY Medical Examiner’s Office, the cause of death for Eric Garner was “compression of the neck (chokehold), compression of chest, and prone positioning.” What exactly is the difference between this and being choked to death?
Uh, “compression of chest, and prone positioning.” It means that he was NOT choked to death. It means multiple facors, like his excessive weight, played a part.
Considering he did not voluntarily compress his own chest and put himself in a prone position, I find this a distinction without a difference.
Well, that’s not how the law works, nor should it. If he were choked to death, choking would have been the sole factor involved. Coates doesn’t mention other factors: that’s called misrepresentation.
3. “Tamir Rice…was not ‘murdered’.” Tamir Rice, at 5’7″, 195lbs, might have looked like an adult and did have a toy gun. Until the trial occurs and all evidence is examined, one cannot say he was not murdered.
That’s fine, except that Coates’ rhetoric says he WAS murdered. And sure I can say it: he wasn’t murdered. No facts support such a conclusion.
4. Considering the history of slavery and Jim Crow in the south, redlining in the North, and segregation and sundown towns across the United States, it would be inaccurate to say racism is “un-American”.
Nonsense. It’s un-American by definition: our defining documents say so. Is everything that takes place in America “American”? That’s not how we use the word. Serial killing is “American,” then. Child abuse. Rape. Cannibalism. Treason.
I do not see Ta-Nehisi Coates expressing any hatred of his own whatsoever in the excerpts you have quoted, as opposed to despair and other such things, though he should reasonably foresee that he might be inciting hatred among the more intemperate of his readers; it is only “hate speech” in that sense.
His piece can be boiled down to this, in it’s essence: “White people enslaved us, they are still enslaving us, and they will go on enslaving us. All that has changed is the means and terms of that bondage.”
What black person can read that and not hate white people at least a little more than before they read it? Would you love those who enslaved you? He rejects all religion out of hand, and assures all and sundry that it is race, and only race that matters.
So if you’re a black reader of Coates’ article, can you come away loving whites, or understanding them in such a way that you’d want to do something besides violent rebellion? Consider:
So no, technically, he never says, or directly suggests that blacks should hate whites. Instead, he gives a bunch of “reasons” that lead directly, and inexorably, to that conclusion. Do you really think that message isn’t obvious?
So yeah, it reaches the heart of the current definition of “hate speech.” But to me, it’s just free speech. If he wants blacks to despise their white neighbors, he may be unethical, but he’s free to write opaque, painfully overwrought pieces saying so.
If you read what I wrote again, temperately, you will see that I was pointing out that Ta-Nehisi Coates was inciting the intemperate to hate white people and should have known it, without himself showing any such hatred. I just presented that the other way around because this post is at least suggesting that it was “hate speech” of the other sort, the kind that contains hatred. So nothing of what you have just written contradicts that in any way, and you have no need to ask me to support what I wrote any further.
My point was, perhaps inarticulately stated, that TNC is giving every black person reasons to hate whites. Your point about the “intemperate” ones certainly applies to those who will willingly swallow his argument whole, but I think even the temperate ones will see it in the same light. How could they not?
Enough reasons to anger and hatred will make rabble-rousers of us all, and perhaps nothing will affect the temperate more than the argument that there has been zero racial progress since the Civil War, and that African-Americans exist in a comparable state of non-freedom even now.
Fascinating thought. Speech that inspires hate is obviously more damaging than speech that expresses it.
The NAACP is a racist organization and spews its hate for white people. Yet they operate with impunity.