Ta-Nehisi Coates Modifies His Thesis

The eternal rebirth of the author

Last month, Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the Obama-endorsed 2015 memoir Between the World and Me, appeared on MSNBC to comment upon Florida’s local government campaign against critical race theory.

Coates made two statements in an effort to refute some of the claims being made by the anti-CRT activists behind the Florida initiative. The first was that the harsh CRT goal of exterminating white people merely meant that the “category” of white people would cease to exist and that the point was not to physically eradicate white people (whatever real category of people that might mean, he doesn’t say). Once people stop believing they’re members of a special and unique category, they will stop believing they are entitled to mistreat non-members of the category.

This is an accurate reflection of the thesis of his book. For Coates, like the countless authors from the last 60 years of Black identity literature he recapitulates in his book, the white race is a social construct that is incoherent or a justification for exploitative relationships between humans, or both.

However, Coates then modifies the thesis of his book in the MSNBC interview to claim that the goal of CRT also is the eradication of the Black race in the same sense. This is absolutely not the thesis of his book. Although Between the World and Me wrestles with positivist skepticism about the vagueness of the concept “Black” it does not enlist that skepticism to destroy the concept in the same way Coates deconstructs “White.”

Instead, Coates refuses to capitulate to the deconstruction of Black and endeavors to reconstruct it as a positive and coherent group identity that retains the legacy grandiosity and exclusivity of racial supremacism. Coates does this by employing the group-narcissistic defenses of projection and idealization so that Blackness becomes a superior and exclusive culture created by the persecutory fiction of whiteness.

In my Why We Remain Blacks series, I’ve described this phenomenon in detail, specifically in this part. For Coates, people who believed they were white created the concept of whiteness to justify enslaving people with dark skin, and in so doing forced people with dark skin to create their own culture, which turns out to be unique and not a universal property of mankind.

This means, for example, that whereas Tolstoy’s body of work is a product of mankind and an achievement which all races can claim, Black genius is the product of the special history of persecution exacted against Black people which only Black people can claim as a group achievement.

Despite his own argument that race is a social fiction, Coates concludes of his group identity that he nevertheless “knew that we were something, that we were a tribe—on one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real.” This allows Coates to rationalize the Black supremacism inherent in legacy Black nationalism concepts like Black power:

This power, this black power, originates in a view of the American galaxy taken from a dark and essential planet. Black power is the dungeon-side view of Monticello—which is to say, the view taken in struggle. And black power births a kind of understanding that illuminates all the galaxies in their truest colors. Even the Dreamers—lost in their great reverie—feel it, for it is Billie they reach for in sadness, and Mobb Deep is what they holler in boldness, and Isley they hum in love, and Dre they yell in revelry, and Aretha is the last sound they hear before dying. We have made something down here. We have taken the one-drop rules of Dreamers and flipped them. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people. Here at The Mecca, under pain of selection, we have made a home

Coates’s thesis is therefore that while the unique social conditions that produced Tolstoy are not a basis for celebrating whiteness, the unique social conditions that produced Billie, Mobb Deep, Dre, and Aretha are a basis for celebrating black power. In other words, not only does he not hope for the elimination of the category “Black people,” he calls upon everyone to reify it. It’s as if he’s saying that the fictional social construction of race created a real and exclusive social construction called Black but not white.

As I’ve shown in my series, this is not a rhetorical conceit limited to Black identity politics. It has also been a feature of Jewish identity for a long time. The Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss arrived at the conclusion that although “Jew” is an unsatisfactorily vague and empirically unjustifiable identity, it is nonetheless a coherent and justifiable category because of the history of Jewish persecution at the hands of gentiles.

That this tendency can be found across multiple unrelated modern group identities suggests that we are dealing with a generalizable sociological phenomenon. I’ve used the metaphor of narcissism to describe this particular style of paradoxical and hypocritical abstract reasoning because it captures the mendacity and anti-social behavior of the individual narcissist.