Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Role of the Public Intellectual A Narrative of American Social and Political Discourse
Name: Boudewijn van Werven
Student number: 11350776
Email: [email protected]
Place/Date: Amsterdam, January 8, 2019
Course: Master’s Thesis American Studies
Supervisor: Dr. E.F. van de Bilt
Second Reader: Dr. G.H. Blaustein
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Abstract
In this thesis, I seek to position African American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates as a public
intellectual. This thesis analyzes the position of Coates as the newly acclaimed African
American public intellectual, and the way he situates himself in modern American society.
This thesis is not simply a biography of Coates. Instead, it will be a narrative of the role of
the public intellectual in the contemporary social and political discourse of American society.
By engaging with themes such as the role of mythology, African American identity and the
Civil War, the Obama era and the Post-Racial myth, and the role of identity politics in
contemporary democracy, Coates, as a public intellectual and an anti-racist thinker, reveals
a few of the problems that American society faces.
Keywords: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Public Intellectual, Edward Said, Barack Obama, the Post-
Racial Era, Color-Blind Racism, Mark Lilla, Identity Politics.
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Table of Contents 1) Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 4
2) Cultural Myths and the Becoming of the Public Intellectual ..................................... 11
2.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 11
2.2 Mythology and the Civil War.................................................................................... 12
2.3 The Use of Myth and Narrative in American Society ............................................... 18
2.4 The Myth of The Dream............................................................................................ 22
2.5 Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 27
3) Speaking Truth to Power and the ‘Post-Racial’ Myth ................................................ 30
3.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 30
3.2 The Symbolical Promise of Obama .......................................................................... 32
3.3 New Racism and Color-blindness ............................................................................. 34
3.4 The ‘Post Racial’ Era and the Persistence of the Color Line .................................... 39
3.5 Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 46
4) Problems of (White) Identity Politics in American Democracy ................................. 48
4.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 48
4.2 Problems of Identity Liberalism ................................................................................ 50
4.3 E Pluribus Unum and Citizenship in the Age of Obama .......................................... 53
4.4 Citizenship and Empathy in Democracy ................................................................... 56
4.5 Neoliberalism, Education, and Citizenship ............................................................... 64
4.6 Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 68
5) Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 70
Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 75
Primary Sources ................................................................................................................... 75
Secondary Sources ............................................................................................................... 76
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1) Introduction
“I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James
Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.”1 These words, by public intellectual and
literary icon Toni Morrison, mark the crisis that has been present within the black community
in the field of black intellectual and political leadership.2 According to Cornel West, this
crisis was caused by the improvement of a portion of the black community, which caused
new forms of class divisions. These class divisions “produced by black inclusion (and
exclusion) from the economic boom and the consumerism and hedonism promoted by mass
culture have resulted in new kinds of personal turmoil and existential meaninglessness in
black America.”3 Public intellectuals such as Morrison and Michael Eric Dyson have put
their faith into the hands of Coates, as “Baldwin’s Heir.”4 Nonetheless, it is a comparison and
embrace that did not come about without arguments, as especially West is highly critical of
the works of Coates.5
The debate sparked a re-thinking of what it meant to be a public intellectual, and how
s/he should position himself or herself within society, the public, and the community.
Philosopher Edward Said gave six lectures about the representation of the public intellectual.6
His main argument is that the “intellectual [should] represent emancipation and
enlightenment, but never as abstractions or as bloodless and distant gods to be served.”7 In
other words, the intellectual should represent his or her ideas independently from a leading
authority.8 Instead, s/he must dwell on the ongoing experiences in society, for instance of
“the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless.”9 Said also
argues that the modern intellectual needs to be an amateur. He defines the amateur as
“someone who considers that to be a thinking and concerned member of a society one is
1Toni Morrison quoted in Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2017), back cover. 2Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 37–40. 3Ibid., 37. 4Michael Eric Dyson, “Between the World and Me: Baldwin’s Heir?” The Atlantic, July 23, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/james-baldwin-tanehisi-coates/399413/. 5Ibid; Cornel West, “Ta-Nehisi Coates Is the Neoliberal Face of the Black Freedom Struggle,” The Guardian, December 17, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/17/ta-nehisi-coates-neoliberal-black-struggle-cornel-west; Ejike Obineme, “Too Terrified to Enter an Arena of Ideas? The Debate over Cornel West’s Critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates,” Truthout, January 4, 2018, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/43100-too-terrified-to-enter-an-arena-of-ideas-the-debate-over-cornel-west-s-critique-of-ta-nehisi-coates. 6Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (London: Vintage, 1994). 7Ibid., 84. 8Ibid., 90. 9Ibid., 84.
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entitled to raise moral issues at the heart of even the most technical and professionalized
activity as it involves one’s country, its power, its mode of interacting with its citizens.”10
The aspect of amateurism intends that the intellectual is not driven by profit, but rather by the
moral task of representing those who are unrepresented.11 The amateur intellectual in
opposition to the professional counterpart does not operate with a reward incentive and the
possibility of making a career, but is rather solely driven by a “committed engagement with
ideas and values in the public sphere.”12 In contrast, the professional pretends to be in
possession of a detached objectivity, made possible by the position of his or her profession.13
Consequently, s/he legitimizes opinion because s/he is a professional expert in the field. Said
is critical of specialization either as a scholar or a professional as it imbues thought with
canonical ideas and reduces the interest in independent ideas and values.14 The intellectual is,
therefore, the individual who independently raises questions and challenges social practices.15
Yet, this definition of the amateur intellectual represents an ideal image of the
intellectual, perhaps tinged by romanticism. Said creates an image of the intellectual as a lone
wolf, an individual who rises above external social influences and elements such as a
professional career or profit. His perspective is in danger of creating a heroic vision of the
role of the public intellectual: an idea of the intellectual as someone who is perfect. In other
words, the amateur public intellectual in the eyes of Said becomes the only thinker who is
capable of critically engaging with society without being influenced by external factors. S/he
is the only one who can reveal misunderstandings and problems within society as s/he must
remain independent.
This idea partly contrasts with the image that Jean-Paul Sartre created of the
intellectual writer. When he was given the Nobel Prize, Sartre refused to accept it because he
argued that a writer needs to stay “independent of interests and influences.”16 Still, Sartre is
more willing to acknowledge the ambivalence that surrounds the public intellectual. He
argues that the intellectual always stays at the level of the bourgeois, as he is driven by
10Ibid., 61. 11Ibid. 12Ibid., Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures, 1. Vintage Books ed, The Reith Lectures 1993 (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 107. 13Ibid., 107. 14Ibid., 76. 15Ibid., 82. 16Sarah Bakewell, De Existentialisten: Filosoferen over Vrijheid, Zijn en Cocktails, trans. Karl van Klaveren (Utrecht: Uitgeverij Ten Have, 2016), 23.
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“external” factors such as commercial interests and reputation.17 The intellectual is, therefore,
always influenced by the demands of society.18 Interestingly, these demands can also be
recognized in the career of Coates, and his path in becoming a public intellectual.
The definition of the public intellectual by Said functions as the framework within
which the role of Coates will be analyzed, as there are similarities between the amateur
intellectual and Coates. For instance, Coates, as a writer of The Atlantic, has positioned
himself as a leading spokesman in the debate about race and racism. Dyson states that Coates
“is an enormously gifted writer who, while feeding his hunger to eloquently tell the truth
about race, has also fed a nation starving for that same truth.”19 Coates universalizes the
sufferings of the African Americans in relation to the neoliberal system and capitalism.20 In
his major works Between the World and Me and We Were Eight Years in Power, Coates
exposes the institutionalization of racism in the context of neoliberalism and shows how race
and racism still influence social and political discourse. Furthermore, his analysis of the eight
years of Barack Obama’s administration shows him engaging with issues of political power.
Nonetheless, Coates was aggressively criticized, mostly by Cornel West, who argues
that his “perception of white people is tribal and his conception of freedom is neoliberal.”21
In other words, West directs his critique at the neoliberalism that Coates, as a Saidian
intellectual, is supposed to attack: according to West, Coates is explicit about the sufferings
of his people, but too lenient towards the powerful “centrist” Obama, who “embraced the
ostensible virtues of business supremacy and worked to modernize warfare against Black and
Brown bodies internationally.”22 To a certain extent, Coates fits into West’s perspective
about black intellectual leadership. For instance, Coates shows, in particular in Between the
World and Me, “engagement with battles in the streets.”23 Furthermore, he is not affected by
the “bureaucratization of the academy,” and he resembles Baldwin, for being “self-taught and
self-styled,” as he dropped out of university because he saw the schooling system as the
embodiment and institutionalization of racial myths.24 But West criticizes the comparison
between Baldwin and Coates, as he points out that Baldwin encouraged social movements
17Jean-Paul Sartre, “A Plea for Intellectuals,” in Between Existentialism and Marxism (London: Verso, 2008), 236. 18Said, 1996, 75. 19Dyson, “Between the World and Me.” 20David Humphrey, “Removing the Veil: Coates, Neoliberalism, and the Color Line,” Philosophical Studies in Education 48 (2017): 20–29; Said, 1994, 33. 21West, “Ta-Nehisi Coates Is the Neoliberal Face of the Black Freedom Struggle.” 22Obineme; See for more critique on Obama: West, “Ta-Nehisi Coates Is the Neoliberal Face.” 23West, Race Matters, 40; Coates, Between the World and Me (Melbourne: Text, 2015), 25–27. 24West, Race Matters, 41–43; Coates, Between the World and Me, 25–27.
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and collective action, while Coates remains at a distance, not paying enough attention to the
Black Lives Matter movement and political activists in Between the World and Me for
instance. In a reaction, Coates defended himself by stating that his intention is “to clarify
stuff for people that go to those marches, [to] clarify things that inspire people who go and
think about policy.”25 It is precisely this approach which serves as a crucial trait for the
public intellectual.
By going public with his views, Coates created the debate about his status. As one
critic argues, by dealing with political and social topics, “Coates cannot simply choose to
speak for himself as a private individual. His words have consequences, and he has, despite
his attempts at abdication, been given the moral and political authority for formulating ideas
that have a real material impact on the dominant culture.”26 This means that Coates has been
thrown, almost automatically, into the position of the public intellectual because of the
themes he discusses in his books and his articles.
Coates’s status as a public intellectual is remarkable in other ways as well. On the one
hand, he never intended to become a public intellectual, while on the other hand, his
intellectual intentions with Between the World and Me were clear as he stepped in the line of
the black intellectual tradition and followed in the footsteps of his predecessor Baldwin.27
Moreover, Coates has negative things to say about public intellectuals, as he accuses them of
formulating and expressing opinions without complete knowledge of the situation or a
personal understanding of the experiences of the social groups they are discussing.28 Coates
uses the example of growing up in a time in which white intellectuals were making
“breathless pronouncements about their world, about my world, and about the world itself.”29
He argues that white intellectuals were not familiar with the lives of African Americans and
their experiences.
Not only does Coates occasionally criticize the public intellectual, but he also
eschewed the fame and status that came with his writings. The profit that he made with his
writings was an excellent and necessary bonus, but he experienced how the distance between
himself and his writing disappeared. In other words, he was now identified with his public
25Coates quoted in Concepión De Léon, “Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Making of a Public Intellectual,” The Independent, October 5, 2017, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/ta-nehisi-coates-and-the-making-of-a-public-intellectual-a7984461.html. 26Obineme. 27Dyson, “Between the World and Me.” 28Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 160. 29Ibid., “What It Means to Be a Public Intellectual,” The Atlantic, January 8, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/what-it-means-to-be-a-public-intellectual/282907/.
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writings, and, even more, he became a writer about whom other people wrote. Coates, as a
writer, became an object of attention. Through this attention, he was more and more pushed
into the position of the public intellectual. This made him realize that The Atlantic, the
magazine he was writing for, had a reputation. As a result, every argument he would write
down was being seriously considered by others.30 Coates remarks: “How bizarre and
confusing it was to look up one day and see that I, who’d begun in failure, who held no
degrees or credentials, had become such a person.”31 In other words, Coates opposes the
legitimacy his arguments obtain because he writes for a renowned journal. He sees, like Said,
that the ideal role of the intellectual is in amateurism: he was unwilling to become a
professional intellectual.
Occasionally, in his work, Coates discusses the status of public intellectual. For
example, he writes in We Were Eight Years in Power, implicitly reacting to West: “I felt the
expectation that if I was writing or talking about problems, I should also be able to identify an
immediately actionable way out.”32 Coates argues that the role of the public intellectual is to
raise questions and to point out injustices instead of only interpreting them and providing a
message of redemption.33 He openly disdains public intellectuals for selling their opinions to
broad audiences by telling them stories of redemption, instead of questioning radical
malfunctions in American society.34
The position of Coates, as the declared new public intellectual, will be the leading
theme of this thesis. It is a problematic role, which had been ascribed to him by other
prominent public figures. The main argument is that, in the end, while Coates has become
one of today’s foremost anti-racist thinkers, he remains a highly ambivalent public
intellectual, operating in the mode of Said as well as Sartre. This ambivalence arises because
Coates, for instance, never intended to become a public intellectual, but he was pushed into
that role by the intentions of his work and by other public intellectuals. He positions himself
as the amateur public intellectual: he is not a professional specialist and does not speak from
within academic institutions. But he became an expert in describing African-American
experience. He saw making a profit on the basis of his writings as a convenient ancillary but
the profit he made has an impact on his position. He has become a black public intellectual by
speaking truth to power in opposition to political leaders, such as Obama, and white public
30Ibid., We Were Eight Years in Power, 160–61. 31Ibid., 161. 32Ibid., 152. 33Ibid. 34Ibid., 160.
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intellectuals, such as Mark Lilla and George Packer, but in this confrontation with power
remained remarkably moderate and in his conversation with his white counterparts distanced
himself from them. By distancing himself from white public intellectuals such as George
Packer and Mark Lilla, Coates became a black public intellectual.
This thesis will not simply be a narrative of the persona of Coates, but also a narrative
and analysis of modern American social and political discourse. The books of Coates
Between the World and Me and We Were Eight Years in Power that serve as the primary
sources for this thesis are supplemented with material from his other writings for The
Atlantic. Between the World and Me is a strange work as it is a personal letter to his son, a
warning about how to cope with his blackness and systematic racism, while at the same time
it is a public document that discusses the racial past of America and a few of its white myths.
It was his first major work that propelled him to the position of a public intellectual. We Were
Eight Years in Power is a testimonial of the eight years of Obama, which consists of specific
essays from The Atlantic. In particular, his essays “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil
War,” “Fear of a Black President” and “The First White President” will be of central
importance in this thesis. The essay “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War” deals
with the narrative of the Civil War, the creation of a national myth, and the exclusion of
African Americans, while “Fear of a Black President” and “The First White President,” deal
with the role of blackness and whiteness within social and political discourse and respectively
Obama and Donald Trump. The decision to focus on these books and essays of Coates
instead of his comic Black Panther is based on the fact that it is in these works that Coates
explicitly positions himself as a public intellectual. Furthermore, these works are a direct and
explicit account of his sufferings and experiences.
A close reading of these materials and related scholarly works will be used to discuss
Coates’s perspective on white mythology and race relations in current-day American society
and the role of intellectuals in the debates about these issues. The works of Coates and other
scholars such as Lilla, West, Dyson and Chantal Mouffe are used to examine crucial themes
such as the Dream, racism, identity politics, citizenship, and democracy. This will result in
the contextualization of the works of Coates and his position as a public intellectual, a
position he expressed doubts about but nevertheless embraced.
This thesis is divided into three chapters each covering a different theme, which show
the ambivalent position of Coates as the public intellectual and provide a sharp analysis of the
contemporary political and social struggles in American society. The first chapter will deal
with Coates becoming a public intellectual due to his early essays and the publication of
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Between the World and Me. It will argue how Coates was hesitant to become a public
intellectual, but in the end, decided to go public with his personal letter to his son.
Furthermore, it will discuss the engagement of Coates with cultural myths and the racial
connotations thereof. One of the primary examples is the construction of the Civil War myth,
which has been transformed into a white narrative excluding African Americans and other
minorities from the national narrative: Coates has written an essay “Why Do So Few Blacks
Study the Civil War?” that deals with the exclusion of blacks from the Civil War myth, and
shows how mythology constructs a national identity. The second chapter will engage with the
relationship of the public intellectual with power. This chapter will focus on the ambivalent
intellectual relationship of Coates with Obama. It will deal with the debate about a post-racial
era and the awareness that the United States remained divided on the bases of “race”: it will
deal discuss the occurrence of ‘new racism’ and ‘color-blind racism.’35 Coates, at first a
believer in the post-racial era in the United States, analyzed the important symbolism of the
“first black president,” but through the years became more skeptical about the truth of the
post-racial myth, as even during the presidency of Obama there seemed to be a “persistence
of the color-line.”36 The last chapter will deal with the intellectual position of Coates in
opposition to white intellectuals such as Lilla and Packer. Lilla called out Coates by his
remarks about identity politics and the Democratic Party. For instance, Lilla was highly
critical of the course of the Democratic Party; in his opinion the Democratic Party is losing
ground due to its emphasis on identity politics.37 According to Coates, this critique signals
the importance of whiteness in the United States, which is also a returning theme in the
election of Trump, who, Coates argues, is the “first white President.”38 The relation between
Coates and white intellectuals exposes a conflict about identity politics in which the role of
whiteness raises questions about the critical situation of American democracy and
neoliberalism, about a re-thinking of the definition of citizenship and the structure of the
educational system.
35Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists : Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2017). 36Coates, “Fear of a Black President”; Kennedy, The Persistence of the Color Line (New York: Pantheon, 2011). 37Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 2017); Lilla, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” The New York Times, November 18, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html. 38Coates, “The First White President.”
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2) Cultural Myths and the Becoming of the Public Intellectual
2.1 Introduction
You know you’re black, but in as much the same way that white people know they are white.
Since everyone else around you looks like you, you just take it as the norm, the standard,
unremarkable. Objectively, you know you’re in the minority, but that status hits home only when
you walk out into the wider world and realize that, out there, you are really different.1
With these words, Coates reflects on the construction of African American identity, as a
collective identity, in opposition to white Americans. The construction of black identity is
inseparable from America as a nation, but it encounters resistance in the form of myths and
narratives of American society.2 The construction of black identity not only reveals an
essential link between the construction of identities and the creation of myths and narratives,
but it also exposes the importance of history in particular and the role of history in the
shaping of identity. In particular, Coates writes in his essay “The Case for Reparations” that
the history and identity of America began in “black plunder and white democracy, two
features that are not contradictory but complementary.”3 In this essay, Coates makes a crucial
argument that the case for reparations for African Americans is such an issue not simply
because the U.S. government might lack the resources to do so, but more because it has a
greater and more intriguing meaning, i.e. it is a threat to “America’s heritage, history, and
standing in the world.”4
The argument that Coates makes about mythology is also elaborated in Between the
World and Me. It is an odd document because it is intended as a private letter to his son but
was published publicly. In other words, he aims to prepare his son for his life as an African
American, while at the same time he addresses and criticizes social discourse within
America. The publishing of the book raises the question if Coates solely wrote this book
because of personal fear for his son, or that he was trying to position himself as a public
intellectual, who was concerned with recent cases of racism in American society. This 1Coates, “American Girl,” in We Were Eight Years in Power, 52. 2Ibid., 54. 3Ibid., “The Case for Reparations,” in We Were Eight Years in Power, 180. 4Ibid., 201.
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question shows the ambivalence of Coates in relation to the public intellectual and the extent
to which he intended to be a public intellectual or not.
Between the World and Me established the position of Coates as a public intellectual.
On the one hand, it positioned him as an award-winning writer and it established his
reputation through endorsement by intellectuals such as Toni Morrison. On the other hand, it
situated Coates as a public intellectual because he set off to expose the cultural errors that
were part of the leading myths of American society. He already started this work in his essays
“The Case for Reparations” and “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War.” The book is
the beginning of the public career of Coates and gave him the title ‘public intellectual,’ but he
was overwhelmed by all this sudden attention. In essence, Between the World and Me
embodied the ambivalent relation of Coates with the title of public intellectual, as he wanted
to write a personal letter to his son, but he eventually went public with the book. He disliked
the fame that came with the book, but he liked the recognition from black intellectuals such
as Morrison.5 The ambivalence once more raises the question if Coates intended to become a
public intellectual or that he was pushed into that role by the fame of the book.
This chapter will deal with the rise of Coates as a public intellectual. It will engage with
the ideas of Coates concerning the role of the public intellectual. In a sense, Coates becomes
a public thinker with a moral agenda by exposing the cultural myths in American social
discourse and revealing how this discourse has racial connotations. He formulates an
argument about mythology and narratives that are deemed to be essential for the American
national identity but are repulsive in the eyes of African Americans, because they construct
an unjust and non-inclusive society.
2.2 Mythology and the Civil War
One of the key examples in American history that has produced a variety of myths and
narratives within social and political discourse is the Civil War. Coates presents in his essay
“Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” a representative image of how social groups
are excluded from a national narrative.6 In the light of the contemporary monument
controversy that is raging through the South-East of the United States, the essay of Coates
delivers fruitful insights, as he deals with his struggle with the Civil War, and his position in 5Ibid., We Were Eight Years in Power, 221. 6Ibid., “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” in We Were Eight Years in Power, 71.
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relation to monument sites such as Gettysburg.7 The current monument crisis revolves around
the upholding or removal of Confederate monuments and has exposed a conflict between
collective identities.8
The Civil War, as a historical event, produced a variety of narratives. For instance,
there is the narrative of the Civil War as the war that marked the end of slavery in the United
States. Additionally, it was also the first war in which African Americans could actively
participate in the resistance against slavery, as they were able to enlist in the Union Army.
This symbolized the opportunity to fight for their freedom, as one Corporal Thomas Long, of
the 33rd United States Colored Troops, stated: “If we hadn’t become soldiers, all might have
gone back as it was before… But now things can never go back, because we have shown our
energy and our courage and our natural manhood.”9 This response shows that active
participation gave African American men a form of agency.
The previous narrative represents stories that are essential to the African American
community, but the narrative of the Civil War that eventually became the mainstream
narrative that helped construct the American identity was a narrative of white Americans.10 In
effect, the variety of narratives was poured into a myth leaving out crucial elements that were
vital to black Americans. In other words, the myth of the Civil War is a construction of white
Americans, producing an ‘American design.’ In particular, Coates states: “The belief that the
Civil War wasn’t for us, [African Americans], was the result of the country’s long search for
a narrative that could reconcile white people with each other.”11 Coates argues that African
Americans have been excluded from the national narrative intentionally.
Currently, voices have risen in America that attack the white view of the Civil War.
Historians now argue “that one group of Americans attempted to raise a country wholly
premised on property in Negroes, and that another group of Americans, including many
Negroes, stopped them.”12 It is this part that has been excluded from the narrative,
transforming it into a more simplified and useful version. This results in the construction of
the Civil War myth, which means that “[i]n popular mind, [the] demonstrable truth has been
evaded in favor of a more comforting story of tragedy, failed compromise, and individual
gallantry. For that more ennobling narrative, as far so much of American history, the fact of
7Ibid., 80. 8Boudewijn van Werven, “The Replacement of Statues to Democratic Museums: Revisiting Identity Politics and the Modern Antagonism” (University of Amsterdam, 2018), 11. 9Thomas Long quoted in Coates, “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” 79. 10Coates, “Why Do So Few Blacks Study The Civil War?” 73. 11Ibid. 12Ibid.
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black people is a problem.”13 The reconstruction of the Civil War myth by Coates shows
essential elements of the role of mythology in society and collective identities.
On the one hand, Coates outlines the image of the myth as a crucial element in the
construction of a national identity, a national identity that excludes African Americans from
the national narrative. On the other hand, he shows how essential information is ignored to
create a simplified version of the narrative and transform it into a myth. Coates not only
criticizes the ignoring of the role of African Americans within the history of the United
States, but he also underlines that feelings of gallantry have replaced the feelings of trauma.
The white mythology that occurs from this distortion of facts plays a vital role in current
society.
Coates takes up the task of the public intellectual to question the moral issues that
arise from the mainstream social discourse within American society by criticizing the myth of
the Civil War. He exposes the influences of a leading narrative on American culture and on
modes of citizen interaction. Coates questions the established culture and the persistence of
race and racism therein. In other words, he reveals how cultural myths play an important role
in the moral issues of American society.14
For instance, the examples of the monument crisis in American society mainly
revolve around the Confederate monuments that are still apparent within the public space in
American cities. The monument controversy is evidence of the persistence of the color line in
the social realm. Specifically, the dispute exposes a conflict between black and white
identities.15 The examples of monuments that are being removed or have caused a fierce
debate are numerous, e.g., statues of Confederate officers such as Robert E. Lee in
Charlottesville, and Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis and Nashville, but also the Liberty
Place monument in New Orleans.16 The monuments, an sich, are presentations of a society
that represent racist ideals. Therefore, the monuments raise the question:
13Ibid. 14Said, 1996, 82. 15van Werven, 12. 16For all the examples see: Amber Ferguson, “Controversial Confederate Statue Removed in New Orleans,” Washington Post, accessed October 10, 2017, http://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/controversial-confederate-statue-removed-in-new-orleans/2017/04/24/aeb9e534-2957-11e7-9081-f5405f56d3e4_video.html; Becca Andrews, “Holy Crap, This Is the Worst Confederate Statue We’ve Ever Seen,” Mother Jones (blog), June 23, 2015, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/06/worst-confederate-statue-ever-nashville-nathan-bedford-forrest/; Cari Wade Gervin, “Nathan Bedford Forrest Statue Will Stay in Memphis — For Now,” Nashville Scene, October 13, 2017, //www.nashvillescene.com/news/pith-in-the-wind/article/20979209/nathan-bedford-forrest-statue-will-stay-in-memphis-for-now; Jeff Adelson, “New Orleans’ Battle of Liberty Place Monument Can Come Down, Judge Says,” The Advocate, accessed October 10, 2017, http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/politics/article_db2818ac-045e-11e7-b65d-1311ddf0e635.html; Nicole Chavez and Emanuella Grinberg CNN, “New Orleans Begins Controversial Removal of Confederate
15
Do we, as a society, have a duty to the past to continue to give pride of sacred place to
monuments to our (…) own ‘Lost Cause’ of the Confederates States of America in spite of
altogether persuasive arguments not only that this cause was racist at its core, but also that
some of the specific monuments (…) leave nothing to the imagination in terms of their
racism?17
The question raised by Sanford Levinson, an American legal scholar, is highly relevant as it
reveals the importance of race in the (post-) racial era of modern American society.
The monument controversy encloses the racial tensions within American society, in
the sense that they present the mythology of the Civil War. For instance, Monument Avenue
in Richmond, Virginia, is a crucial example of the remembrance of the ‘Lost Cause’ myth
with the monuments of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson.18 The street is
not simply a public space that commemorates Civil War heroes. Instead, it is “an exclusive
symbol of Southern white history and culture.”19 This standpoint became all too apparent
when the debate started to add a statue of the African American tennis champion and civil
rights activist Arthur Ashe. This case exposed the underlying friction in Richmond, which
involved “race relations, identity, and power.”20
Nevertheless, the debate was not merely a struggle between white Americans, on one
side, and black Americans, on the other side. On the one hand, there were white opponents of
the Ashe statue, who argued that the avenue was a white symbol that embodied the Southern
heritage. On the other hand, some African Americans opposed the Ashe statue, because they
did not want to be part of the “white” avenue. In other words, they despised the white
symbolism of Monument Avenue. But there was also a third group who sought a compromise
by creating a multiracial street, which would have made the public space identifiable to both
white and black Americans.21
Monuments,” CNN, April 26, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/24/us/new-orleans-confederate-statues/index.html; Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “The Fight Over Virginia’s Confederate Monuments,” The New Yorker, November 27, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/04/the-fight-over-virginias-confederate-monuments. 17Sanford Levinson, Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 32. 18Jonathan I. Leib, “Separate Times, Shared Spaces: Arthur Ashe, Monument Avenue and the Politics of Richmond, Virginia’s Symbolic Landscape,” Cultural Geographies 9, no. 3 (2002): 286. 19Ibid., 291. 20Ibid., 286. 21Ibid., 307.
16
The case of Monument Avenue in 1995 reveals a direct struggle between white and
black identities directly exposing the racial tensions within the public space. More recent
examples show the same characteristics. For example, the clash between white supremacists
and left-wing activists in Charlottesville, Virginia, was also sparked by the monument of
Robert E. Lee. Another example is the statue of Forrest in Memphis and Nashville.
According to the mayor of Nashville, Megan Barry, the statue should be removed to the
museum because it should not commemorate and celebrate Southern heritage in the public
space.22 Furthermore, the statues of Lee and Forrest unveil another crucial point, i.e., the
relation between the zeitgeist, the monument, and the public space. In other words, most
monuments of Civil War ‘heroes’ were placed during the Jim Crow Era. It is for this reason
that most statues are interpreted and seen as a presentation of white privilege and are deemed
offensive.23
Consequently, the examples of controversies surrounding Civil War monuments
underline the case that Coates makes about the Civil War. By way of explanation, Coates
states:
In [the] revisions of history lay the roots of the noble Lost Cause- the belief that the South
didn’t lose, so much as it was simply overwhelmed by superior numbers; that General Robert
E. Lee was a contemporary King Arthur; that slavery, to be sure a benevolent institution, was
never central to the South’s true designs. Historical lies aside, the Lost Cause presented to the
North an attractive compromise.24
In other words, the myth of the Lost Cause has found its way into popular media and has a
foothold in the public beliefs of Americans.25 The problematic part of this is that the myth
has formed a wedge between the collective identities of white and black Americans, as most
African Americans do not engage with the mythology of the Civil War and are, therefore,
excluded from the national narrative. Furthermore, these myths and narratives are still
engaged with racial discourse, meaning that the ‘post-racial’ era still seems a long way to go.
Coates explicitly attacks the social and cultural discourse of American society. He
substantiates his social critique by combining personal experiences with scholarly arguments.
Coates discusses how the comfortable narrative finds its way into the historiography. Battle
22Andrews. 23van Werven, 11; Gervin. 24Coates, “Why Do So Few Blacks Study The Civil War?” 74. 25Ibid., 75.
17
Cry of Freedom, for instance, discusses the tragedy of the war and how it developed essential
Western ideals, such as democracy and egalitarianism. This massive book about the Civil
War made Coates interested in the topic as he missed something. He missed the role of
African Americans during the war and how they “consecrated” the Western ideals of the
founders.26 Coates perceives that the problem is that the Civil War is mainly remembered and
referred to from a white perspective. He traveled to Civil War battlefields and always felt as
he was “dressed in another man’s clothes.”27
The central attention to history and the use of historians by Coates reveals the
ambivalent intellectual position of Coates, but also a tension between the role of the public
intellectual and the academic scholar. The professional scholar is perhaps easily influenced
by the whiteness of the curriculum of the American school and college system, while the
public intellectual is independent and, as a result, able to write down his thoughts and act
against the comfortable narrative.28 Coates points out a different perspective than the white
academic scholars and uses their narratives as an example to form an argument about the
myth of contemporary American society. Yet at the same time he relies on these professional
accounts to make his point. This reveals the ambivalent position of Coates as a public
intellectual. Moreover, Coates may engage in mythmaking as well. In essence, Coates creates
a counter-myth by using history and historians. He uses historians to learn more about the
inferior position of black Americans in the United States in order to create the counter-myth.
In addition, he learns from historians how the comfortable narrative found its way into the
historiography of America and mainstream presentations like the documentary of Ken
Burns.29 As a result, Coates exposes how the comfortable narrative found solid ground in the
public memory and academic history.30 He makes the claim that “we cannot escape our
history,” but history can be used to expose the cultural myths of American society. 31 In other
words, history resonates in our own time by the creations of narratives and myths, which are
crucial in the construction of collective identities.
26Ibid., 75–77. 27Ibid., 77. 28Ibid, Between the World and Me, 26. 29Ibid., “Why Do So Few Blacks Study The Civil War?” 76 30Ibid., 75. 31Ibid., “The Case for Reparations,” 206.
18
2.3 The Use of Myth and Narrative in American Society
In Between the World and Me, Coates attempts to write “something original and new,”
“something that black people would recognize as original and old” and “something classical
and radical.”32 The personal message that Coates gives to his son transcends the private
sphere by making a direct indictment of the leading culture that Coates perceives in American
society. It is the personal story of Coates about America, a story that is characterized by
tragedy and violence.33
In the book, Coates delivers a crucial message to his son, after his son saw on
television that the murderer of Michael Brown was acquitted, as he writes: “you have not yet
grappled with your own myths and narratives and discovered the plunder everywhere around
us.”34 Not only does Coates argue that his son must develop his own identity, but he also has
to deal with the oppression of myths and narratives that attack his blackness. In other words,
his son must struggle against the collectivity of white myths and narratives that are present in
American society. Coates rises to the position of a public intellectual, as he exposes racial
misconduct in American society. In doing so, Coates formulates a counter-myth that is
intended to question the morality of American society, and act against the status quo.35 In
essence, it shows the ambivalent position of Coates as a public intellectual, as he intends to
expose racial myths through the creation of a different myth. Specifically, he uses the
occasion of writing a private letter to his son to formulate a myth for African Americans that
covers the story about being black in America.
The myth of the Civil War can be seen as an example of what Robert Young called
“white mythology.” This means that it is a representation of Western American civilization,
which creates an illusionary image of history in which all other forms of civilizations are
subordinate.36 In the case of the Civil War, the narrative that became common ground has
become the master narrative, which intentionally left out the participation of African
Americans within Western civilization. In essence, the Civil War myth is a “story for white
people – acted out by white people, on white people’s terms – in which blacks feature strictly
as stock characters and props.”37 The Civil War is not only a story that portrays the rebirth of
32Ibid., We Were Eight Years in Power, 220. 33Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2005), 108. 34Coates, Between the World and Me, 21. 35Said, 1996, 22. 36Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, 2nd ed (London ; New York: Routledge, 2004), 51. 37Coates, “Why Do So Few Blacks Study The Civil War?” 76.
19
the United States, but also the beginning of “modern black America.”38 The questioning of
the Civil War monuments and the remarks of Coates expose the “Western culture’s
awareness that it is no longer the unquestioned and dominant centre of the world.”39
The historical narrative that is created by historical events not only plays a role in the
creation of social and cultural identities but also in the construction of a political myth. In
other words, it not only provides people with a sense of urgency and belonging to where they
come from, but it creates an image that provides political significance. The difference is that
the myth “in order to nourish a determination to act, has to put a drama on the stage, or,
rather, it has to be received as a drama. Political myths are stories that make their moral
explicit in order to prompt political action.”40 It is essential for the political myth to have a
form of significance. In other words, the political myth has “to be significant for someone
and under certain conditions.”41 The narrative, in opposition to the myth, only provides
meaning and no significance. It functions as a reference point that shapes the experiences of
the past collectively.42 This means that the political myth, which is extracted from the
historical narrative, provides a dramatic constitution of the narrative. The political myth
“answer[s] the need for meaning for a symbolic mediation of reality.”43 Furthermore, it must
create a clear image that delivers significance, which contains “a determination to act, and
this determination can affect the specifically political conditions of a given society.”44
The message of Coates to his son becomes even more striking because the son has to
deal with his own myths, by creating his own narrative that provides him with the meaning of
his existence. Eventually, he must turn this narrative into a myth that provides him with
significance. In order to do so, he has to step away from the narratives and myths of America,
as these narratives result in a white mythology of the Civil War and the United States.45
Coates was becoming more and more a public figure because of his message. He took
the responsibility, as a public intellectual, to expose the narratives and myths of American
society. For example, Coates revealed a crucial and persistent myth within American society,
which he called ‘The Dream.’ This exposure shows the tools of the public intellectual to
bring to light the narratives and myths of society. The Dream portrays the power structures
38Ibid., 82. 39Chiara Bottici, A Philosophy of Political Myth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 208. 40Ibid., 216. 41Ibid. 42Ron Eyerman, “The Past in the Present: Culture and the Transmission of Memory,” Acta Sociologica 47, no. 2 (June 1, 2004): 162, https://doi.org/10.1177/0001699304043853. 43Bottici, 224. 44Ibid. 45van Werven, 23.
20
between white and black Americans. In other words, it reveals a certain type of social
hegemony. Coates tries to promulgate this to encourage the development of new ideas and to
change the status quo. This is an important trait of the public intellectual, as Said saw him/her
as the “disturber of the status quo.”46 Coates reveals the subordinate position of black
Americans in order to unsettle the current social hegemony by formulating his vision of
American society in the Dream.
The unification of narratives has resulted in the creation of a master narrative that has
found a presentation in the Civil War monuments. It is at this stage that a ‘we’ is remembered
and a ‘they’ are excluded.47 In other words, Coates explicitly tells his son that he, as an
African American, is excluded from the ‘American identity.’ He cannot identify with the
whiteness of the national narrative. Coates questions the idea of a national identity in the
United States in order to encourage collective action. He fulfills the task of the intellectual by
insisting that the essence of African Americans is not something pre-given, but that African
Americans are capable of constructing, and should construct, their own narrative.48 This
means that African Americans should not define themselves through white narratives but
should found their own narratives.
For instance, in order for African Americans to grapple with their own founding story,
Coates argues that they have to make the Civil War and its monuments their own, by
becoming “custodians” of the Civil War.49 He remarks:
During my trips to battlefields, the near-total absence of African American visitors has been
striking. Confronted with the realization that the Civil War is the genesis of modern America,
in general, and of modern black America, in particular, we cannot just implore the Park
Service and the custodians of history to do more outreach- we have to become custodians
ourselves.50
African Americans, according to Coates, have to do so, because the Civil War currently has
become a compromise to the comfortable narrative, i.e., the comprise results in a narrative
that portrays the Civil War as “a significant battle in the long war against bondage and for
government by the people.”51 This compromise is a reminder to the times in which “our own
46Said, 1996, x. 47Van Werven, 23; See Also: Eyerman, 163. 48Said, 1996, 33. 49Coates, “Why Do So Few Blacks Study The Civil War?” 82. 50Ibid. 51Ibid., 80.
21
forefathers once explicitly rejected the republic to which they’d pledged themselves, and
dreamed up another country, with slavery not merely as a bug, but as its very premise.”52 The
bitter conclusion that Coates draws is that the narrative makes people understand that they
live “in a country that will never apologize for slavery, but will not stop apologizing for the
Civil War.”53 Furthermore, Coates states:
The Lost Cause was spread, not merely by academics and Hollywood executives, but by the
descendants of Confederate soldiers. Now the country’s battlefields are marked with the
enduring evidence of their tireless efforts. But we have stories too, ones that do not hinge on
erasing other people, or coloring over disrepute. For the Civil War to become Our War, it will
not be enough to, yet again, organize opposition to the latest raising of the Confederate flag.
The Civil War confers on us the most terrible burden of all—the burden of moving from
protest to production, the burden of summoning our own departed hands, so that they, too,
may leave a mark.54
There are several essential remarks in this passage of Coates. Not only does he reflect on
resistance against the Confederate symbols, but he also expresses the aim to make the Civil
War a narrative for black Americans. It is a plea to overthrow the status quo of white
mythology and to question and reform racial myths in American society. He sees it as his task
to encourage African Americans to embrace their stories, including the Civil War.55 In
conclusion, Coates by questioning the Civil War and myths in American society becomes a
public intellectual who fits into the tradition that is known for questioning “national symbols”
and “nobly unassailable ideas.”56 He, as a black American, tries to question and change the
white status quo of American society, which means that he takes the opportunity to represent
the African American community and to resist white hegemony.57 It is already at this stage
that Coates is positioning himself in the intellectual field, as a representative for black
Americans. Coates no longer wrote simply from a personal incentive, as Between the World
and Me was intended to be a personal letter to his son, but he intentionally went public with
the book in order to propagate his ideas among a wider public and fellow intellectuals. It is
evidence of the ambivalent position of Coates, as he initially wanted to write a personal
52Ibid. 53Ibid. 54Ibid., 82. 55Ibid. 56Said, 1996, 37. 57Ibid., 39.
22
indictment, but later engaged with the public debate and transcended the personal angle of his
message.
2.4 The Myth of The Dream
One of the contemporary and leading myths in American society that Coates explicitly refers
to in Between the World and Me is ‘the Dream.’ At first sight, the Dream looks like an
analogy of the American Dream; only it is more cynical and pessimistic. The exposure of the
Dream by Coates is an attempt to reveal a new narrative about the American Dream. In other
words, he attempts to rewrite the old myth of the American Dream and turns it into a darker
variant. In this attempt, the Dream itself is a composition of “complex ideals, perceptions,
values, and political concepts, as well as myths, omissions, falsehoods, and deceptions, which
together comprise a devastatingly destructive delusion about America.”58 For instance, it
includes the core belief of Americans in their democracy. In other words, Americans “deify
democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have.”59 This idolizing of the
‘government of the people, by the people, for the people,’ was not intended for all people, in
the sense that African Americans and women were excluded from this myth that was created
by Abraham Lincoln. Nonetheless, Americans did not betray the value of a government of the
people, only “the means by which ‘the people’ acquired their names.”60
Another example of a core belief that is crucial to the persistence of the color line in
American society is the belief in the reality of ‘race.’ The “modern invention” of race was
founded upon the myth of naturalism.61 This means that race is often perceived as something
that is “natural and inalterable.”62 Coates makes a crucial distinction between race and
racism, as he argues that “race is the child of racism, not the father.”63 Normally, the basic
idea is that the thinking in different human races causes people to act racially towards other
people. Coates turns this around, which means that “racism precedes the ideation of race.”64
He makes the point that acts of violence form the basis for the creation of the concept of race.
58Jill Gordon, “Black Bodies Matter: A Reading of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, June 30, 2017, 204, https://doi.org/10.5840/gfpj20173819. 59Coates, Between the World and Me, 6. 60Ibid. 61Ibid.,7; Gordon, 206. 62Gordon, 206. 63Coates, Between the World and Me, 7. 64Gordon, 206.
23
Therefore, “white supremacy is an ideation sustained through control of the Black body in
ways both brutal and institutional.”65
The Dream can be seen as the political myth of the dreamers, in the sense that it
consists of their beliefs and constructions of the world, which are radically different from
those of African Americans. It creates a discrepancy and struggle between white and black
Americans. The Dream is a crucial example of a political myth in modern American society
and is evidence that the post-racial society has hardly been realized. In the perspective of
Coates, the Dream consists of myths and narratives but also political characteristics (aspects
that will be discussed in the next chapter on Obama and neoliberalism). According to David
Humphrey, the Dream “is a category of thinking that is hegemonic; a category of thinking
that transcends race, yet at the same time operates within the frame of a racial contract.”66
The Dream is founded upon the “ongoing subordination of the dark other.”67 Charles W.
Mills first initiated the idea of a racial contract in his work The Racial Contract. Mills argues
that the tradition of the social contract lies at the basis of the Western political theory; only it
is not simply a “contract between everybody, but between just the people who count, the
people who really are people.”68 It is precisely in line with this tradition that Coates argues
that Americans have never defined the meaning of the people, as the credo of “we the
people,” can best be read as “we the white people.”69 The relation between neoliberalism and
the Dream is that “[t]he objectification of the self in neoliberalism perpetuates a prescriptive
and pernicious culture of silence upon the bodies of those on the margins.”70 This means that
neoliberalism functions as a system that upholds the inequities between races, by re-
inscribing “white mythologies of White supremacy and by extension Black subjugation.”71
Therefore, the formulation of the Dream, as the neoliberal upkeep of a racist society,
lacks an incitement to direct action, at least for whites. It is intended to expose the
institutionalization of white myths, such as the Civil War myth, which “is the lie of
innocence.”72 The lie itself is the Dream. It is the construction of a comfortable narrative that
forgets about the horrors against African Americans.73 The conception of the Dream
65Ibid., 207. 66Humphrey, 21. 67Ibid. 68Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 3. 69Ibid. 70Humphrey, 21. 71Ibid., 22. 72Coates, Between the World and Me, 102. 73Ibid.
24
presupposes a system that is based upon racial tribalism and is insurmountable.74 Coates
provides a pessimistic view of American society with a reason. He explicitly exposes the
reader to the systemic violence that has been done to black bodies in the United States. But he
also points out that no argument can persuade white Americans to change this brutality.
Coates sees it as his task to wake the American people and to make them aware of the
historical brutality against black bodies.75 In essence, Coates intends to expose the corrupt
and violent system, which entangles American society, by revealing the construction of
American society through mythologies of inclusion and exclusion.
The Dream “includes the subjugation of Black bodies needed to ensure white
superiority.”76 One of the instruments of the Dreamers to do so is violence against blacks.
One the crucial argument that Coates makes aims to solve this violence against the black
body, mainly male bodies.77 He does not explicitly differentiate between male and female
bodies, but his address to his son reveals that his message is mainly focused on the aggression
against black male bodies. One of the reasons for this was the dramatic impact of the death of
Prince Carmen Jones, a friend of Coates who was shot by a police officer.
Furthermore, the examples that Coates uses, such as Trayvon Martin and Prince
Jones, expose the critical message he has for the black male body.78 The message that Coates
passes on from father to son is that it does not matter whether black bodies can transcend the
economic backwardness, as they “remain shackled to a danger stricken planet.”79 The
message becomes more powerful by making an explicit comparison between his son and
Martin, as Coates states: “there is no real distance between you and Trayvon Martin.”80 In
other words, Coates teaches his son that he as a black male is essentially vulnerable to
violence, “no matter location, no matter social circumstance.”81 Coates underexposes the
dangers of the black female body, by only briefly mentioning the vulnerability of sexual and
physical violence. The lesson to his son about the female experience is left mysterious as he
writes: “The women around you must be responsible for their bodies in a way that you will
never know.”82 Hence, Coates exposes the power relations that are present in the construction
74West, “Ta-Nehisi Coates Is the Neoliberal Face.” 75Gordon, 215. 76Ibid., 207. 77West, “Ta-Nehisi Coates Is the Neoliberal Face.” 78See for the example of Prince Carmen Jones: Coates, Between the World and Me, 77. 79Derik Smith, “Ceding the Future,” African American Review 49, no. 3 (October 5, 2016): 187, https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2016.0031. 80Coates, Between the World and Me, 25. 81Smith, 187. 82Coates, Between the World and Me, 71; Brit Bennett, “Ta-Nehisi Coates and a Generation Waking Up,” The
25
and upkeep of certain myths.83 His message to his son is: “In America it is traditional to
destroy the black body—it is heritage.”84
The death of Prince Carmen can be seen as an important motivation for Coates to go
public with Between the World and Me, as the police officer who shot his friend was not
punished. For Coates, this was evidence that America “is ruled by majoritarian pigs,” and that
this majority was white.85 It motivated Coates to write this book, as he was afraid that his son
and other black males would suffer the same fate. Furthermore, he uses his writing to deal
with his fear and rage.86 The publishing of the book is evidence that Coates wants Americans
to know this ‘truth’: the ‘truth’ about the death of his friend and the violence against black
men. His work expresses Coates’s determination to vent his emotions and to expose the racial
misconducts of American society. The incentive for Coates to go public with his book was
not necessarily to become a public intellectual, but, with his son in mind, to reveal the
misconducts against black men in American society. The message, however, automatically
pushed him into the position of a public intellectual. He wrote Between the World and Me for
not just his son but also his fellow black Americans, as he hoped to write something that they
“could recognize as original and old.”87 The effort to raise his son’s awareness about certain
issues confronting black men made him try to raise awareness about the problems of of black
men more generally.88
The determination of Coates to raise awareness and to expose cultural myths is
evidence of him becoming the public intellectual as defined by Said. In essence, Coates
questions the origins of racism and argues that racism is more than simply a form of hate
against people of a different group.89 He uses the personal message to his son to portray the
difference between being black or white in America. He defines this difference by stating that
“[t]o be black in America was to be plundered. To be white was to benefit from, and at times
directly, execute, this plunder.”90 It is the task of the intellectual to criticize such persistent
forms of injustices and racism and to pinpoint and reveal the establishment of cultural myths.
Moreover, Coates uses the personal story to generalize the sufferings of his “own people” and
New Yorker, July 15, 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/ta-nehisi-coates-and-a- generation-waking-up. 83Gordon, 212. 84Coates, Between the World and Me, 103. 85Ibid., 79. 86Ibid., 83. 87Ibid., We Were Eight Years in Power, 220. 88Gordon, 212. 89Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” 132. 90Ibid., We Were Eight Years in Power, 211.
26
embody the “historical experience [of African Americans] in [an] aesthetic work.”91 The
personal message to his son automatically transcends the private sphere as it clear that Coates
attempts to create broad attention to the sufferings of African Americans. As a result, Coates
irreversibly becomes a spokesman of the black community and moves to the realm of the
public intellectual.92
The new position that came with Between the World and Me was profitable for
Coates, as his book became a bestseller and won awards. 93 In comparison, Sartre would have
despised the influence of awards on a writer/intellectual as he/she has to be independent of
such external interest and influences.94 In this sense, Coates fits the ambivalence that Sartre
perceived in the nature of the intellectual, as someone who would always be influenced by
external factors, such as profit and fame.95 Nevertheless, Coates had trouble with the
recognition that came with his fame. On the one hand, he wanted to stay anonymous, in order
for his ideas to be legitimized by their strengths instead of his reputation. On the other hand,
he wanted to receive respect from co-writers, such as Morrison.96 This shows the ambivalent
position of Coates in relation to the title of public intellectual: he did not want fame, but
sought and received the respect of other intellectuals. Coates received both with Between the
World and Me and he was slowly pushed into the role of the public intellectual by the
laudatory commentary of, among others, Morrison.97
The message that Coates tries to convey in Between the World and Me relies heavily
on two famous black public intellectuals, namely James Baldwin and Richard Wright. On the
one hand, the title of the book refers to a poem by Wright; on the other hand, the design of
the book shows similarities to The Fire Next Time by Baldwin with his message to his
nephew.98 Coates, in line with Baldwin, prepares his son to live in a country that is
“dedicated to black impossibility.”99 He provides his son with a message that makes him
aware of the dangers and injustices against African Americans. He continues the task that
Baldwin started in The Fire Next Time, which is to continue to expose the actual “national”
91Said, 1996, 44. 92Ibid. 93Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 221. 94Said, 1996, 76. 95Sartre, 236. 96Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 221. 97Ibid. 98Jonathan Holloway and Stephen J. Whitfield, “Two Takes on Ta-Nehisi Coates,” Patterns of Prejudice 50, no. 3 (May 26, 2016): 303, 306, https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2016.1195546. 99Ibid., 303
27
character of America.100 Moreover, he expresses the dangers of believing in the myth of the
American Dream.101 The book also seems to build on the tradition of The Souls of Black Folk
by W.E.B. Du Bois, as Coates positions himself in the line of Du Bois and Wright by placing
the shared collective experience of African American against the backdrop of a shared feeling
of violence.102 This skeptical message leaves no hope for transcending racial differences. In
the end it creates an individualistic responsibility that assumes public features, as he tells his
son: “But you are a Black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other
boys cannot know. Indeed you must be responsible for the worst actions of other Black
bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you.”103 The influence of black
intellectuals, such as Baldwin, Wright and Du Bois, characterizes the book as a work that
exposes injustices “amid assaults against black life, and amid renewed determination by
activists to create new American ideals.”104 The pessimistic message directly parallels
Wright’s Native Son, as Coates constructs a critique of American society, in particular, the
culture of poverty, as he tells the story of those who “are powerless and disembodied and
who ultimately fall victim to the culture of poverty.”105
It is clear that Coates engages in a tradition of writers that takes on the intellectual
task of criticizing the political and social discourse of society and of representing the
subordinate.106 Following Baldwin, Coates intended to create a work that would move the
thoughts of people and leave a mark in this world.
2.5 Conclusion
Coates reveals that myths and narratives play a crucial role in the creation of collective
identities and have political connotations. The Dream is a reformulation of the American
Dream. It is a pessimistic formulation of a myth that corrupts the minds of white Americans
and maintains a racial system. The effort to expose cultural myths turns Coates into a public
100Ibid. 101Michelle Alexander, “Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘Between the World and Me,’” The New York Times, August 17, 2015, sec. Sunday Book Review, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/books/review/ta-nehisi-coates-between-the-world-and-me.html. 102Gordon, 211. 103Coates, Between the World and Me, 71. 104Dana A. Williams, “Everybody’s Protest Narrative: Between the World and Me and the Limits of Genre,” African American Review 49, no. 3 (October 5, 2016): 182, https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2016.0030. 105Ibid. 106Said, 1994, 26.
28
intellectual, as Said formulates it. Coates uses his “uncompromising freedom of opinion and
expression” to represent the subordinated group within society, i.e., African Americans, and
also other minorities.107 In other words, Coates takes the initiative to criticize the current
culture, and successfully challenges the myths and narratives of society as well as those who
read him.108
The Dream is a direct attack on the way of life of white Americans. West accuses
Coates of fetishizing white supremacy, in the sense that he “makes it almighty, magical and
removable.”109 Coates presents a version of white hegemony that is according to West based
on a tribal perspective of white people and a neoliberal conception of freedom: Coates
presupposes homogenous racial groups and individual freedom.110 Nonetheless, Coates tries
to break through the established racial relations by exposing the myths that reveal the current
racial relations and the flaws of white hegemony. The Dream as the embodiment of white
hegemony must be something African Americans should leave alone, or as Coates states:
“you cannot arrange your life around [the Dreamers] and the small chance of the Dreamers
coming into consciousness.”111 Furthermore, white hegemony and white supremacy are so
persistent because they are built upon the identity politics of whites, but are yet not perceived
as such.112
Coates’s engagement with the myth of the Civil War and his construction of the
Dream position him in the public debate. The position has always been a somewhat
ambivalent one, as he felt uncomfortable with the title of public intellectual that came with it.
He disliked the fame that came with the title, yet wanted to be recognized by other writers.
He believed that ideas should not be legitimated based on the reputation of the writer, but
more on the originality and plausibility of the argument. Coates stated when he was
becoming a public intellectual: “How bizarre and confusing it was to look up one day and see
that I, (…) had become such a person.”113
In Between the World and Me, he uses a personal message to his son to reveal the
systemic violence that African Americans have suffered in the past and in the present. The
decision to go public shows a commitment to question misconduct in American society and
position himself as a public figure. He sketches an image of American society that has seen
107Ibid., 26, 89. 108Alexander. 109West, “Ta-Nehisi Coates Is the Neoliberal Face.” 110Ibid. 111Coates, Between the World and Me, 146; Smith, 190. 112Coates, The First White President,” 359. 113Ibid, We are Eight Years in Power, 161.
29
progress on racial issues in comparison to the 1960s, but he also points out that America is
still struggling with its diversity. Coates is presenting his work “to expose the extravagant
hoax of whiteness,” in a time when people started to believe in the ‘post-racial’ era.114 Coates
intends to “compose a powerful moral force for good; his words aid a thinking populace to
find its ethical orientation and its justifications for actions.”115 As a result, Coates becomes a
public intellectual who wants to make Americans aware of the racial problems in American
society in order to change the status quo.116
The decision to go public with Between the World and Me and the intentions that
Coates has with his work ensure that, despite (and perhaps also because of) his hesitations, he
fits into the intellectual tradition that Said and Sartre depict. He emphasizes that
“contemporary racial trauma cannot be disentangled from historical origins” and that the
intellectual can push back “narratives of historical progression that might sanguinely suggest
that black-life prospects are better today than they were at some point in the past.”117 Coates
does not provide answers but intends to “challenges us to wrestle with the questions on our
own.”118 Thus, Coates becomes a public intellectual by raising particular questions and
challenging public opinion in order to encourage collective judgment and action.
114Dyson, “Between the World and Me.” 115Ibid. 116Said, 1994, 74. 117Smith, 188. 118Alexander.
30
3) Speaking Truth to Power and the ‘Post-Racial’ Myth
3.1 Introduction
The election of President Barack Obama in 2008 was initially seen as a significant
achievement of the politics of de-racialization.1 In other words, “Obama was the realization
of generations, a black ambition as old as this country.”2 He was seen as the perfection of
black Americans’ desire to obtain power. Nevertheless, the election of the first black
president was not all rosy, and sometimes even seen as a “half-victory.”3 This skeptical view
resulted from two of the main problems of the Obama presidency. On the one hand, he was a
black president able to represent African Americans’ “aspirations and hopes,” but on the
other hand, he “could never forthrightly address the source of [their] agony.”4 Secondly,
Obama had to deal with the heritage of U.S. crimes, e.g., Afghanistan, and Iraq. Therefore,
the first black presidency became a compromise between, on the one hand, “paralyzing
constriction” and on the other hand “an assumption of the full weight of America’s crimes.”5
The presidency of Obama has been highly criticized by black intellectuals, among
others West and Dyson, while, in comparison, Coates in his essays remains relatively mild in
his analysis of the Obama presidency. As a result, West has accused Coates of being “the
neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle,” in the sense that the remarks by Coates on
racial tribalism and neoliberalism are not sharp enough on topics such as “Wall Street greed,
US imperial crimes or black elite indifference to poverty.”6 This critique marked the
ambivalent intellectual position of Coates in relation to the Obama presidency. Coates was
empathetic in relation to Obama, as he underlined the symbolic power of the Obama
presidency while underscoring the difficulties Obama faced. For instance, Coates criticized
Obama for lacking a specific approach in his policy message to blacks, and for supporting
1Hermon George, “Neoliberalism in Blackface: Barack Obama and Deracialization, 2007-2012,” Journal of Pan African Studies 6, no. 6 (December 1, 2013): 242. 2Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 116. 3Ibid. 4Ibid., 115. 5Ibid. 6West, “Ta-Nehisi Coates Is the Neoliberal Face.”
31
instead a “race-neutral progressive agenda.”7 Coates argued that the standard progressive
approach was to “mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy.” The
reason for this was that “asserting the moral faults of black people tend to gain votes.
Asserting the moral faults of their government, not so much.”8
Coates and Obama have a special relationship that showcases the ambivalent position
of Coates as a public intellectual. On the one hand, Coates, as an African American writer,
considered it his responsibility to reflect on what he saw as “Good Negro Government.”9
Most of his essays are written from this perspective. On the other hand, Coates had the
intellectual task to speak truth to power. This task was made difficult because of his and
Obama’s blackness. He had to judge black power critically as a black critic.
Coates developed his reputation as a writer and intellectual alongside the political
career of Obama and became the “black writer” of The Atlantic.10 Coates saw Obama as an
example of the convenience with which “black people could be fully integrated into the
unthreatening mainstream of American culture, politics, and myth.”11 Nonetheless, Coates in
his essays exposed the fears about “Good Negro Government,” as the American myths had
never been colorless, something already seen in chapter 1. In essence, Coates engaged with
the intellectual task set by Said to criticize the Obama administration and expose leading
myths of colorblindness in political discourse. By doing so, Coates spoke truth to power and
criticized the ‘post-racial’ myth. The task was more complicated because Coates remained
close to black power, as the power was black. And that showed in his relationship with
Obama.
This chapter will deal with the development of Coates as a public intellectual in the
Obama era. It will explore the relationship between politicians, power, and the public
intellectual. In particular, it will focus on the ambivalent intellectual position of Coates in
relation to the Obama administration. It will do so by detailing a few of the racial difficulties
that arose during the presidency of Obama and revealed the lasting importance of the color
line in the twenty-first century, that is to say the failure of creating a post-racial society.
7Dyson, The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America (Boston New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), 30. 8Coates, “Color-Blind Policy, Color-Conscious Morality,” The Atlantic, May 13, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/05/color-blind-policy-color-conscious-morality/393227/. 9Ibid., We Were Eight Years in Power, xv. 10Ibid., 113. 11Ibid., xiii.
32
3.2 The Symbolical Promise of Obama
The election of Obama, as the first black president, was seen in the United States as a
“foundational event.”12 While the election realized the dream of black people and other
people of color, white Americans used it to argue that the United States had reached the
phase of a “color-blind nation.”13 The “Obama phenomenon” promised a better and more
inclusive United States, a United States for all Americans.14 The main objective was to create
“a more perfect Union.”15 The promise for African Americans, according to Michael Eric
Dyson, was that Obama gave “African legs to the Declaration of Independence and a black
face to the Constitution.”16 Coates also stated that “Obama was the realization of generations,
a black ambition as old as this country.”17
Obama propagated a message of “Hope and Change” during his election and
presidency. In order to win the White house, he divided his campaign program into four
central elements: “change versus a broken status quo; people versus special interests; a
politics that would lift people and the country up; and a president who would not forget the
middle class.”18 During his presidency, it became clear that the expectations about the first
black president were too high.19 One of the reasons was that, in the end, the campaign of
Obama was fed up with the racial question, as the United States was still a country “with a
florid and still powerful system of racial hierarchy.”20
During his campaign and presidency, Obama was never really outspoken about race.
When he talked about race, he was conservative in his comments.21 The reason for this was
that Obama had to deal with a white and black electorate. As a result, he was afraid of being
too black, and create friction with the white electorate. This struggle with his blackness
caused him to distance himself from “most leaders of the civil rights movement, (…) from his
12Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Robert L. Reece, “From Obamerica to Trumpamerica: The Continuing Significance of Color-Blind Racism,” in Racism without Racists : Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2017), 203. 13Ibid., 204. 14George, 242; Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union” (Philadelphia, PA, March 18, 2008), http://obamaspeeches.com/E05-Barack-Obama-A-More-Perfect-Union-the-Race-Speech-Philadelphia-PA-March-18-2008.htm. 15Obama, “A More Perfect Union.” 16Dyson, The Black Presidency, xii. 17Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 116. 18George, 243. 19Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 115. 20George, 243. 21Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” 119.
33
church, and from anything or anyone who made him look ‘too black’ or ‘too political.’”22
This juggling with black and white identity not only affected Barack Obama but also his wife
Michelle, as she was refitted by the campaign team to become a “white-lady-like” pleasing
for the white electorate.23 Coates remarked that the first time he saw Michelle he “almost
took her for white."24
Additionally, Coates had hoped that Michelle would be the voice of the poor and
oppressed, but instead, she became the voice of the sainted place of women in American
society. In doing so, she remixed “black America into another ethnic group on the come-up,
many Americans saw her largely through the prism of her belated, and wanting, expression of
American pride.”25 Consequently, both Michelle and Barack Obama tried to combine their
ethnicity with white America, because of electoral reasons, but also because they wanted to
be the embodiment of an United States that looked beyond race.
According to Dyson, the struggle with whiteness and blackness is created by the
“paradox of American representation.”26 President Obama represented “his” people in three
ways. First, he was a representative for all Americans, as the president is the symbol of the
country. Secondly, there was the representation to the American people: Obama represented
the progress of the nation by being the first black president. Thirdly, Obama was the
representative of a black population that, until his election, had not been included within the
highest reach of the political representation.27 These different kinds of representation caused
the difficulties that Obama endured during his political career.28
The symbolical meaning of Obama can be summarized in one sentence: “a member of
a minority group deliberately excluded from opportunity now stands at the peak of power to
represent the nation.”29 The black presidency of Obama, as Dyson described it, represented
the story of the importance of race in the political sphere of America. It exposed the “racial
limits and possibilities,” the “tortured past and [the] complicated present,” the “moral
conflicts and aspirations,” the “cherished national myths,” and the “contradictory political
behavior” of America.30 In other words, the presidency of Obama not only had a political
22Bonilla-Silva and Reece, 210. 23Ibid. 24Coates, “American Girl,” in We Were Eight Years in Power, 45. 25Ibid., 47. 26Dyson, The Black Presidency, xi. 27Ibid. 28Ibid. 29Ibid., xii. 30Ibid.
34
impact but also a cultural impact.31 For many African Americans, including Coates, this
cultural impact was quite personal. Coates saw Obama as the “individual black [man] capable
of defying the bonds of white supremacy.”32 Before Obama, the dream of having a black man
in the center of power was a utopian image. It was a hunger for a black leader, who would
end the struggle against racism and better the lives of African Americans. For many, as for
Coates, Obama embodied the type of leader who could lead the United States into a post-
racial era.33
The personal bond with Obama made the position of Coates as critical intellectual
problematic. He was proud of Obama as a symbol for African Americans. Obama was a
crucial achievement for the black community. Nevertheless, Coates eventually began to
expand his position during the campaign and after the election of Obama, which rapidly
changed Coates’s status. Coates became the “black writer” for The Atlantic by the end of
Obama’s first term.34 Coates, in the same way as Obama, struggled with the stigma of
blackness, an identity that he eventually embraced. As Coates obtained a new intellectual
title, he developed into the public intellectual that Said had propagated. He began to represent
the subordinated and the unheard, not from “some corner of American society but from the
heart of it, from the plunder that was essential to it and the culture that animated it.”35 Coates
began to reflect on American society and the role of race and racism from the center of
power. He realized that writing about race in relation to Obama was not a “marginal and
provincial” venture, but essential to uncover the truths about American society. This task of
speaking truth to power was deemed essential for the public intellectual.36
3.3 New Racism and Color-blindness
The election and re-election of Obama encouraged the belief that American society would no
longer be percieved as racist if it were to elect a black man for president.37 Nevertheless, by
the end of his first term, it became clear that the rise to power by a black individual also had 31Ibid. 32Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 38. 33Ibid., 38–39. 34Ibid., 113. 35Ibid., 114. 36Ibid; See for the trait of the public intellectual to speak truth to power: Said, 1994, 75. 37Helen A. Neville, Miguel E. Gallardo, and Derald Wing Sue, eds., “Introduction: Has the United States Really Moved beyond Race?” in The Myth of Racial Color Blindness: Manifestations, Dynamics, and Impact, First edition (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2016), 3.
35
its downsides. For example, Coates remarked that Obama was a “black president whose
power was bracketed by the same forces that bracketed the lives of black people
everywhere.”38 Obama had been unable to address the fears that were present within the
black community. The idea of white innocence strengthened this inability.39 During his
presidency, Obama demonstrated that through his words and actions, he was not able to help
minority groups improve their precarious social positions. Thus, the Obama presidency
fostered a “new racism.”40
The term ‘new racism’ includes the increasing growth of racist political movements
after the election of 2008, such as the Tea Party and the Birther movements.41 These groups
are evidence that the traditional forms of racism in America, which had been apparent during
slavery and the Jim Crow era, had now reappeared in different manifestations. The cessation
of racism in the United States revealed itself as a misconception, particularly as a fallacy
emerging from an incorrect definition of racism in general. For instance, racism is often
associated with racist movements, such as the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and the Birthers. As
a result, white Americans see racism as prejudice towards other ethnic groups, whereas
African Americans experience racism not only as prejudice, but also as the institutionalized
form of a racial hegemony built upon power structures of racial domination and
subordination.42 In other words, the popular definition of racism encloses the “irrational
beliefs some people have about the presumed inferiority of others.”43 Coates did not unravel
racism as simply being about the hate against the other, but more as the inability to empathize
with the other. This implies that people tend to develop feelings of skepticism towards the
unknown, which causes them to sympathize with their own community.44
The standardized definition of racism is problematic because it fails to deal with
racism as an institutionalized problem. It has created a tunnel vision that perceives racism as
a “matter of good versus bad people” or “the racists versus the nonracist.”45 For example,
Coates argued that racism is not merely hatred against other people, but has more profound
consequences.46 Increasingly, he positioned himself in the realm of the public intellectual by
38Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 115. 39Ibid. 40Bonilla-Silva, “Down the Rabbit Hole: Color-Blind Racism in Obamerica,” in The Myth of Racial Color Blindness, 26. 41Ibid. 42Ibid., 27. 43Ibid. 44Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” 123–24. 45Bonilla-Silva, “Down the Rabbit Hole,” 27. 46Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” 123.
36
unraveling racism in a systematic sense, as opposed to a limited sense. He attempted to create
a new form of thinking about racism in order to solve the problem and change the debate.
Nonetheless, the reductionist view had suffocated any form of progressive debate, as it was
based on a harsh dividing line between friends and enemies, or an “us” and a “they.” As a
result, any form of political compromise had been made impossible; a consequence of this
was the violent outburst in Charlottesville, Virginia.
A broader definition of racism can be used to solve the racial issue in American
society, as it explains racism as a foundational problem in American history. In this way,
racism is not an issue that is founded upon pure hatred against black Americans, but an issue
that refers to the social and political benefits of being a white American. Fundamentally,
racism must be seen as “[w]hite privilege.”47 For Coates, the influence of white privilege and
white supremacy explains why Obama was unable to speak explicitly about race. As a public
intellectual, Coates took up the task to speak explicitly about race and Obama, and questioned
the role of white privilege in American society.48 An argument that was also made by
sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva as he argued that racism did not only exist “as a remnant
from the past or as the behavioral expression of prejudiced (bad) people,” but rather as a
phenomenon that remained in place because white Americans benefited from it.49
The second issue regarding racism is that it is often portrayed through direct acts, i.e.,
explicit discrimination of people of color. This approach ignores the more structural problems
that are present in the United States. Bonilla-Silva states how racism has become dormant in
the public eye. As a result, racist events are often interpreted as “isolated incidents,” then
consequently, structural problems are overlooked.50 Furthermore, Coates suggested that
racism was sparked by the election of Obama because it caused a shift in the racial power
balance, ergo striking fear in white supremacists.51
Defining racism simply as a dormant structural problem exposes the aspects
insufficiently accounted for in the debate. It exposes the “myth of racial color blindness” and
illustrates that “the United States remains a racially hierarchical society in which people of
color face individual and institutionalized discrimination. Race matters regarding social
indicators and peoples’ lived experiences.”52
47Bonilla-Silva, “Down the Rabbit Hole,” 27; Paula S. Rothenberg and Kelly S. Mayhew, eds., Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study, Ninth edition (New York, NY: Worth Publishers, 2014). 48Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” 124. 49Bonilla-Silva, “Down the Rabbit Hole,” 27. 50Ibid. 51Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, xiv. 52Neville, Gallardo, and Sue, 8.
37
The new racism that followed the 1960s Civil Rights era was a reshuffle of the
“systemic racism” that characterized the Jim Crow segregation in the ‘60s. This new racism
is the “set of arrangements, mechanisms, and practices responsible for the reproduction of
White privilege at all levels.”53 This structural institutionalization of a social hegemony is
different from the occurence in the ‘60s as it seems often, at first sight, nonracial. An
example of this is how segregation, in concert with the Jim Crow era, has not improved
because of discrimination being present in housing and lending markets. The difficulty to
detect racism within the housing market and banking sector leads to a harsh conclusion; it is
arduous to prove that an institution acts purely out of racial incentive.54 In this regard,
American society has not shown significant progress or exhibited willingness to act against
these forms of dormant racism. Coates argued that the Obama administration was captured by
a mixture of “color-conscious moral” and “color-blind public policy.”55
The mixture, according to Coates, was the reason that the Obama administration
lacked policies aiming to improve the position of black people. Coates accused the Obama
administration of acquiring votes by not emphasizing the government’s moral faults, but
rather emphasizing the errors of the black community. This issue was not prominent only in
the Obama administration. Coates cites a conversation about poverty between Obama, an
acclaimed progressive political scientist and an important liberal columnist. In this
conversation, no one mentioned the term ‘racism’ once. For Coates, this was evidence that
“the progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy
is simple – talk about class and hope no one notices.”56 According to Coates, color-blind
racism refocuses the issue towards class difference rather than race. He argued that the
language used by the Obama administration projected the immorality of the black
community, while the government policies remained vague and broad. Overall, Coates
reveals Obama’s feebleness to criticize mistakes within the American government and its
racial policies.57
The criticism of Coates and other intellectuals, such as Dyson and Bonilla-Silva,
highlights the task of the intellectual to speak truth to power. Coates questions the motives of
those in power, as he argues that the Obama administration’s racial policies were influenced
by electoral motives, and because of this, relied on a form of color-blind racism. The critique
53Bonilla-Silva, “Down the Rabbit Hole,” 28. 54Ibid., 29. 55Coates, “Color-Blind Policy, Color-Conscious Morality,” 2015. 56Ibid. 57Ibid.
38
shows that the intellectual, in opposition to the politician, can question and expose these
forms of social problems, while the politician has to incorporate electoral considerations.
Furthermore, Coates shows how forms of racism are still present in American society. He
attempts to show how the debate about race transformed into a debate about class, which
ignores the racial connotations fundamental to the problem.
In this way, Coates fits the description of the public intellectual offered by Said and
others, such as Michel Foucault. Said argued that the intellectual is always in a position in
which he is not in power, but able to criticize the problematic state of society.58 Foucault
described this situation as a “relentless erudition,” which means “scouring alternative
sources, exhuming buried documents, reviving forgotten (or abandoned) histories.”59 By
uncovering different perspectives which are concealed from the public, the public intellectual
is able to criticize the leading power, often resulting in a lonely condition for the intellectual
himself.60 Coates participates in the public realm with his works, which are based upon his
belief of “justice and fairness that allows for differences between (…) individuals.”61 The
exposure of new forms of racism and the Obama administration’s motives and policies are
part of the intellectual’s task to speak truth to power. For instance, in his argument about
color-blind racism, Coates reveals his notion of equality and harmony. He connects these
notions to real situations “where the gap between the profession of equality and justice, on
the one hand, and the rather less edifying reality, on the other, is very great.”62
An example in which Coates revealed his convictions of equality and harmony was in
his critique of a 2008 speech by Obama at the NAACP convention. In this example, Coates
questioned the color-blind racism of Obama, who stated:
That's why if we're serious about reclaiming that dream, we have to do more in our
own lives, our own families, and our own communities. That starts with providing the
guidance our children need, turning off the TV, and putting away the video games;
attending those parent-teacher conferences, helping our children with their homework,
and setting a good example.63
58Said, 1996, xviii. 59Michel Foucault quoted in Said, 1996, xviii. 60Said, 1996, xviii. 61Ibid., 94. 62Ibid. 63Obama quoted in Coates, “Color-Blind Policy and Color-Conscious Morality,” The Atlantic, June 6, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/color-blind-policy-and-color-conscious-morality/276567/. See this source for more examples of color-blind speeches by Obama.
39
This speech does not explicitly mention the black community, but it refers to the moral
position of African Americans. For Coates, Obama’s color-blind approach was extremely
incorrect. Coates stepped up as speaker for the black community by stating: “What these
people have never tired of hearing is another discourse on the lack of black morality or on the
failings of black culture.”64 He argued that equality and harmony will not arise from a moral
lesson from the president, but only from direct action in the form of policies. It is a specific
example of the public intellectual’s ability to criticize power, by formulating a response to
change the situation and support the subordinate.65 It is a role that Sartre, who was himself
from the privileged class, deemed essential for the intellectual. Both Sartre and Coates used
the power of the pen to give voice to the views of the subordinate and criticize power
structures and authorities.66
3.4 The ‘Post Racial’ Era and the Persistence of the Color Line
Coates argued that the election of the first black president meant the end of racial inequality.
On a symbolical level, it might have appeared as if American civilization became a post-
racial society. For instance, Coates wrote: “Watching Barack Obama crisscross the country to
rearing white crowds, and then get elected president, I became convinced that the country
really had changed—that time and events had altered the nation, and that progress had come
in places I’d never imagined it could.”67 However, the social imagination that Obama
embodied was not as rosy as it seemed.
The remarks from Obama about the killing of Trayvon Martin marked a decisive
moment in the presidency. Coates stated that the comments and its responses captured the
biggest irony of Obama’s presidency, since he had been very conservative on topic of race.68
Additionally, his empathetic comments marked a turning point in the commentaries on his
presidency and proved that the aspects of race were not yet transcended. Obama stated: “But
my main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.
64Coates, “Color-Blind Policy, Color-Conscious Morality,” 2015. 65Said, 1994, 74. 66Bakewell, 314-315. 67Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” 146. 68Ibid., 119.
40
I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the
seriousness it deserves and that we’re going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.”69
The reactions to the remarks from Obama were quite bitter. For instance, Republican
politician Newt Gingrich argued that the president was suggesting how it would have been
acceptable to shoot the boy if he was white since he would not have looked like the president.
Another example can be dervied from a racist article by John Derbyshire in the Taki’s
Magazine.70 In his column, he suggested to his children that they should never help African
Americans, they should avoid larger assemblies of blacks, and they should make African
American friends in order to protect themselves from accusations of being a racist.71
The Martin case and the response of Obama created a “racialized political fodder.”72
After Obama’s words “[y]oung people began ‘Trayvoning’—mocking the death of a black
boy photographing themselves in hoodies, with Skittles and iced tea, in a death pose.”73
These intended racial responses are evidence that the post-racial era was not a reality. Instead,
it showed how prominent white people brought the aspect of race into the presidency of
Obama.
Dyson argued that the post-racial narrative was built upon an opportunistic paradox,
as “Obama was seen as an exceptional black man who was not quite like most other blacks,
but enough like them to relieve white guilt in his election.”74 Coates claimed that this denying
of blackness was the true spirit of American racism. Obama did not represent the black man,
as he “was not raised on chitterlings” and his “mother had not washed white people’s
floors.”75 The portrayal of Obama as non-black was based on racial stereotypes. This
stereotypical thinking placed blacks in different boxes and protected the area of the whites.76
Obama was ascribed with extraordinary traits by white Americans, which placed him
outside of “the box of blackness”. This became an important aspect in order to relieve white
Americans from white guilt.77 In other words, white Americans hoped that voting for a black
president would set them free of any racist accusations hanging dishonorably above their
heads which emanated from the misacts of their predecessors. Obama, in that sense, was seen 69David Graham, “Quote of the Day: Obama: ‘If I Had a Son, He’d Look Like Trayvon’,” The Atlantic, March 23, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/03/quote-of-the-day-obama-if-i-had-a-son-hed-look-like-trayvon/254971/. 70An iconoclastic libertarian publication, see Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” 121. 71See for the complete list of examples: Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” 121. 72Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” 121. 73Ibid., 146-177. 74Dyson, The Black Presidency, 48. 75Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 37. 76Ibid. 77Ibid.
41
as the opportunity for white Americans and the nation to be cleansed “by his ascension on
high, thus bypassing all the ugly business of suffering and death that usually precede such
elevation.”78
Furthermore, white Americans used the rise to power of the first black president to
suffocate the discussion about racism. The idea was that they would help him get elected
while subsequently agreeing the president should not talk extensively about race. It is
precisely this pact between white voters and Obama that would withstand during his
presidency, and what is characteristic of the debate about post-race.79 This belief of a post-
racial era also stuck with Coates, who hoped and believed that the election of Obama would
eliminate white supremacy and create a post-racist age.80
According to Dyson, it was harmful that during the presidency of Obama, white
Americans believed that they also suffered from the racial debates. For example, white
Americans, who acknowledged the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow, felt misread as a racist,
while they were committed to ending racial problems. Furthermore, white Americans felt
disadvantaged by affirmative action, which had a purpose to support progression in the black
community.81 Coates stated that such anti-racist programs were under attack by conservatives
and liberals because people did not want to acknowledge it as a racial problem, but rather a
class problem.82 The approach to the difficult position of African Americans from race to
class was made to create an electoral base with the white working class. It highlighted a
decline in the significance of race with the ultimate goal to “never having to confront white
voters, still the mass of voters, with the weight of ancestral sins and all the privileges accrued
from them.”83 In other words, the problem of race was swept under the carpet. An argument
that was also made by Dyson where he accused whites of not being able to discuss race at all,
as they often referred back to old forms of racism by which they hoped to free themselves of
contemporary struggles as well as point the finger away from themselves.84 The increase in
racial tensions led to the argument by Coates that the presidency of Obama marked an era
that was characterized by “the power of anti-black racism.”85
78Dyson, The Black Presidency, 48. 79Ibid. 80Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 37. 81Dyson, The Black Presidency, 48–49. 82Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 154. 83Ibid. 84Dyson, The Black Presidency, 49. 85Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” 124.
42
The argument by Coates shows the role of the public intellectual as an individual who
raises questions against power structures and tries to expose the ‘true’ nature of power and
society. Coates emphasized how racism was still a pervasive problem but was now being
obscured as a class problem. It is a crucial example of the intellectual who raises “moral
issues” at the center of society. Coates criticized the nation and its power, but also the
structures that are present in the interaction between the nation and its citizens. He exposed
the persistence of anti-black racism in American society.86
Forms of anti-black racism came in the form of resistance by the Republican Party
against the presidency of Obama. This was not only resistance towards the policies and
political beliefs of Obama, but also part of the growing polarization in the nation.87 Cornell
Belcher, a pollster for Obama during the 2008 campaign stated that the problem in America
was how “a black man can’t be president in America, given the racial aversion and history
that’s still out there. (…) However, an extraordinary, gifted, and talented young man who
happens to be black can be president.”88 According to Coates, this remark showed the
incapability of white Americans to talk about race and to accept the situation that a black
candidate made it into the White House. The main issue is that the aspect of race is ultimately
denied. In other words, the Obama era was a time “marked by a revolution that must never
announce itself, by a democracy that must never acknowledge the weight of race, even while
being shaped by it.”89 The election of an African American as president displayed a
progressing America, but subsequently demonstrated the incapability of white Americans to
face and accept this fact.90
More examples of the increase in anti-black racism arose after the ‘A More Perfect
Union’ speech by Obama. On March 18, 2008, Obama delivered his address to the nation in
Philadelphia. It was a direct response to the criticism of the media, such as FOX News, who
accounted for a sensational story about the relationship between Obama and Reverend
Jeremiah Wright. The speech caused a variety of anti-black responses. These remarks often
attacked him on his Americanism by stating: “’He’s not one of ours’; ‘He’s’ not like us’;
‘He’s alien’; ’He’s a Muslim’; He’s a socialist.” These examples are just implicit examples,
86Said, 1996, 83. 87Ibid. 88Cornell Belcher quoted in Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” 124. 89Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” 125. 90Ibid.
43
as Obama is also often referred to as “nigger,” “ape,” and as an individual who must be sent
back to Africa.91
Although Obama faced several severe anti-black responses, he provided a message of
hope and change by stating: “I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time
unless we solve them together - unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may
have different stories, but we hold common hopes.”92 This message of incorporating all
Americans into a ‘more perfect union’ was the key message of Obama. He had previously
expressed this idea in his biography The Audacity of Hope, wherein he explained the idea of
creating common citizenship and that American society needed “a new kind of politics, one
that can excavate and build upon those share misunderstandings that pull us together as
Americans.”93
Obama presented a new narrative that was the opposite of the old vision of the elder
black generations, e.g., Rev. Wright. This narrative should replace the “black rage” and
should provide a narrative that was ascribed to all Americans.94 He presented a vision that
should be united instead of “divisive,” an accusation on the address of Wright. Obama argued
that racially charged statements are not useful, since American society should be united as it
faces “monumental problems.” These monumental problems are “neither black or white or
Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.”95 Obama seemed to propagate a
‘post-racial’ message. Coates argued that black Americans had a “broad sense that integration
had failed [them], and a growing disenchantment with [their] appointed spokespeople”.
However, they gained new hope when Obama began to win the election in “predominantly
white states.”96 Moreover, African Americans gained hope from the post-racial rhetoric of
Obama, but Obama was not completely oblivious to racism as he stated: “Race is an issue
that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.”97 For Obama, the racial tensions
had to be embraced as “a part of our union that we have yet to perfect.”98
Nonetheless, there is a contradictory message in the speech. On the one hand, Obama
argued that the use of race in political rhetoric is “divisive” and the generation of Wright
consists of black men and women using their anger in a “counterproductive” manner. Obama
91See for all examples: Kennedy, 15. 92Obama, “A More Perfect Union.” 93Ibid., The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, 1st ed (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006), 9. 94Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” 138–39. 95Obama, “A more Perfect Union.” 96Coates, 138. 97Obama, “A More Perfect Union.” 98Ibid.
44
argued that talking about race how Wright did was “divisive,” which spawned disagreement
from race scholars like West, since they had argued that racism was “endemic” and, therefore
a “divisive matter.”99 According to Obama, the old generation denied the “progress” of
American society and the “audacity to hope.” On the other hand, he stated that race was
important in politics to discuss “the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the
races.” Nevertheless, this cannot be achieved through anger and bitterness, as it “prevents the
African American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real
change.”100 According to Coates, the ambiguity of Obama was also part of his genius in a
sense, because he showed his remarkable talent of calming down the “race consciousness
among whites.”101
Furthermore, Obama, in order to compose and to uphold the pact with his white
electorate, made a peculiar analogy between white and black anger. He stated, “[a] similar
anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working and middle-class white
Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race.”102 This
analogy not only ignores the difference between direct racism/subordination and economic
prosperity, but it also overlooks the social and economic crises within the black community
(e.g., loss of wealth by African Americans, and mass incarceration).103 Furthermore, the
comparison is false, as black and white anger cannot be compared on the basis of power. In
other words, black Americans have lacked the institutional power to set up a “pro-black
agenda,” in contrast to white privilege which is obtained by whites from the day that they are
born.104 This is a crucial distinction, as it underlines the problematic transition to a ‘post-
racial society.’ It exemplifies how one black president cannot simply make the transition, as
the racial problem is systematic and structural.
The racial “stalemate” between “black anger” and “white resentments” has captured
American society, debunking the myth of the post-racial era. It has been proven that this is an
era that cannot be reached through “a single election cycle.” Nonetheless, Obama provided
two methods for the nation to engage with race. The first option is that Americans can deal
with it as a “spectacle” and accept “a politics that breeds division, and conflict and cynicism.”
The second option is to “come together” and start serious discussions about issues within the
99Ibid; Bonilla-Silva and Reece, 211. 100Obama, “A More Perfect Union”; George, 244. 101Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” 147. 102Obama, “A More Perfect Union.” 103George, 245. 104Bonilla-Silva and Reece, 211.
45
school system, health care, and other problems that influence every American citizen.105
Obama attempted to create a “post-racial call”106 by stating that race should be overcome in
order for society to come together and deal with the real economic and political problems.107
According to Coates, the ‘A More Perfect Union’ speech was a key example of the
“twice as good” myth. This myth holds that that “African Americans—enslaved, tortured,
raped, discriminated against, and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement
in American history—feel no anger towards their tormentors.”108 Coates argued that Obama
was influenced by this myth, as he, in his speech, called out race as a structural problem, but
ignored the problem during his presidency. In this way, the myth holds deep consequences on
major topics that are essential to the racial history of America, such as the mass incarceration
problems and the drug war. For instance, there have been possibilities for Obama to legalize
marijuana and to solve the drug problem among African Americans, but he failed to pursue
this opportunity. Coates exposed such a failure as “small inconsistencies” in the presidency of
Obama. These incongruities were evidence of the incapability of Obama to talk openly about
race. It arises from his vulnerability to be criticized by right-wing politician. Hence, it reveals
that race was indirectly a central theme of the presidency of Obama and a crucial perspective
for Americans.109
The incapability of Obama to speak about race and the resulting commentary from
Coates reveal an essential difference between the politician and the intellectual/writer. For
instance, Obama was vulnerable to right-wing critique and a loss of the white electorate if he
was more open about race and blackness. On the other hand, Coates was independent to
speak and criticize the racial misconducts within political discourse freely.110 Therefore, it is
the task of the intellectual to bring these improprieties to light and to propagate a message
that declares emancipation and freedom.111
In essence, the intellectual position of Coates is ambivalent as he fulfills the task of
the intellectual independently from the academic world, but it does earn him a reasonable
reputation and profit. Furthermore, he established his name by becoming the champion black
writer of The Atlantic, but he was scared by the new title. He was apprehensive of being
105Obama, “A More Perfect Union”; George, 245. 106Bonilla-Silva and Reece, 211. 107Ibid. 108Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” 139. 109Ibid., 139-140. 110Ibid., 140. 111Said, 1996, 73.
46
“boxed in” as a writer, who could only discuss racial problems.112 This fear shows the
ambivalence of Coates towards the title of a black public intellectual. Later on, this fear was
averted as he realized that writing about race was crucial in American society, and that he
was able to discuss it from the center.113 He exposed “the plunder that was essential to
[American society] and the culture that animated it.”114 He stated that he was writing from
“the perspective of those whom that society excluded and pillaged in order to bring those
values into practice.”115 Coates positioned himself directly as a public intellectual, as he
explicitly engaged with the task of revealing the sufferings and experiences of African
Americans and to write from a different perspective to speak truth to power.116 He showed
that the status quo was still formed by racism, with the difference being that it was now
characterized by new forms, such as color-blind racism.
3.5 Conclusion
The presidency of Obama has inflicted hope among African Americans and other minorities
while providing a moral shield for white Americans. Nonetheless, Obama had been absent on
the topic of race in his words and actions in order to deflect from the image of being “too
black” by the white electorate. Coates developed a special relationship between the
presidency of Obama and themes such as color-blindness, the post-racial era, and
neoliberalism. During the presidency, Coates had compromised between sharp critique and
laud commentary on Obama. Eventually, Coates obtained the title of a black public
intellectual with this ambivalent position.
The position of a black public intellectual was not solely achieved with his remarks on
Obama. Coates also dealt with crucial themes, which entangled the political and social
discourse in the United States. He wrote about these themes from his own experience and the
experiences of African Americans on the street. The commentary of Coates on Obama dealt
with the myths of the post-racial era and the traits of the neoliberal system. Coates remarked
that debates about race were silenced. In other words, he stated that this “progressive
approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple—talk
112Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 114. 113Ibid. 114Ibid. 115Ibid. 116Said, 1996, 44, 97.
47
about class and hope no one notices.”117 Coates, first fulfilled by hope, began to criticize the
political system of America.
In conclusion, Coates positioned himself as the voice for the African American
community, by criticizing racial misconducts in the United States. He was critical against the
Obama administration that told African Americans “the lack of black morality or (…) the
failings of black culture.”118 Although Coates had a special relation to Obama, he was
eventually capable to speak truth to power and criticize the programs of the Obama
administration. Coates revealed forms of color-blind racism in the policies of Obama and
exposed that there was still a “color divide” within American society.119 The rhetoric of
color-blind racism tattered any constructive debate about racial struggles and inequalities in
the United States. Coates became a black public intellectual who questioned power and
authority by exposing structural racial problems in America, despite his ambivalent
intellectual relation to Obama.
117Coates, “Color-Blind Policy, Color-Conscious Morality,” 2015. 118Ibid. 119Said, 1994, 72–73.
48
4) Problems of (White) Identity Politics in American Democracy
4.1 Introduction
“[Liberals] threw themselves into the movement politics of identity, losing a sense of what
we share as citizens and what binds us as a nation.”1 According to Mark Lilla, eight years of
Democratic identity politics during the Obama administration have created a void in
American society, as the aim for a more diverse and inclusive country only reinforced
American individualism. Lilla argues that liberalism not only caused a more fragmented and
individualistic American society but also caused the decline of the Democratic Party, which
potentially handed the victory to Trump on a silver platter.2 Coates argues against Lilla by
stating that “[a]ll politics are identity politics—except the politics of white people, the politics
of the blood heirloom.”3 In other words, the institutionalization of slavery and white
supremacy are all founded upon the principles of identity politics but are not perceived as
such, because they are white politics.
Coates makes the point that in the election of Trump and the concomitant rise of white
supremacy it is uncomfortable to talk about the solidarity and unity that Lilla is proposing.
Where Lilla talks about the creation of common citizenship, Coates points to the dangerous
development of the increasing importance of whiteness. The main point of Coates is not that
every Trump voter is a white supremacist, but rather that “every Trump voter felt it
acceptable to hand the faith of the country over to one.”4 The candidacy and election of
Trump have made whiteness a central theme in the United States again--evidence of a
continuous polarization which could already be observed during the election and presidency
of Obama. From this perspective, it is painful to discuss a united America. Furthermore,
Trump has made it his main objective to roll back the legacy of Obama.5 Coates explicitly
disagrees with Lilla that the Democratic Party lost the white working-class electorate and
1Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal, 9. 2Ibid., 9–11. 3Coates, “The First White President,” 359. 4Ibid., 358. 5Ibid., 344.
49
became an elitist party by spending less attention to “commonsense everyday economic
issues like job creation for the social softer fare of social justice.”6
Both Coates and Obama have shown a grave concern, either passively or actively,
with identity politics and neoliberalism. Coates noticed these elements in the conflict
surrounding the Civil War monuments, which exposed a diversification in the national
narratives and myths. Here was a problem that showed the importance of identity politics and
was strongly influenced by the neoliberal education system. The promise of Obama was a
rebirth of hope, and an attempt to re-create a unified America, an America for all Americans.
His promise and attempt raised the question of how every American citizen could be included
in society.
Coates placed himself in opposition to white public intellectuals, such as Lilla and
Packer, as they tend to designate identity politics as the main problem in the neoliberal path
of the Democratic Party, while Coates argued that whiteness plays a crucial role in the
contemporary situation. Lilla, but also other intellectuals, such as West and Packer, called out
Coates to position himself within the public debate. In response, while positioning himself as
a public intellectual, Coates distanced himself from white intellectuals, albeit ambivalently:
he was driven into the corner of the black intellectual, which gave him a certain
responsibility. In comparison to the white intellectual, the black public intellectual should
come up with solutions for the racial problems. As a result, Coates felt uncomfortable placing
himself against white intellectuals, as that position spawned expectations that he could
promise redemption, instead of asking questions.7
This chapter will explore the intellectual position of Coates in relation to thinkers such
as Lilla and Packer, by reviewing the remarks of Coates concerning identity politics and
whiteness. He defined his position by questioning the structures of whiteness that became
apparent with the election of Trump and identity liberalism. Coates, in contrast to Lilla,
formulates different solutions to solve the democratic crisis that is caused by the struggle
between whiteness and blackness. As a result, Coates directly placed himself against white
intellectuals, which pushed him into the role of the black public intellectual. He became a
public thinker who exposed and questioned the power structures of whiteness that are still
present in American society.
6Ibid., 344–45; Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal, 13. 7Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 152
50
4.2 Problems of Identity Liberalism
“One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant
outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end.”8 In this quote, Lilla
refers to the presidential election of 2016, particularly to the strategic approach of Hillary
Clinton. According to Lilla, her major flaw was to exclude social groups, i.e., white
Americans, by explicitly calling out to African Americans, Latino, L.G.B.T., and women
voters. The downside of this approach was that people felt left out due to this strategy of
identity politics. As a result, large numbers of the white working class and white evangelicals
felt forgotten by the Democratic Party and voted for Trump.9
The main problem of identity liberalism, according to Lilla, is that it has lost sight of
the white working class, as an economic and social group, as liberalism turned into “a kind of
moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity.”10 As a result, the Democrats let the
white working class slip into the hands of the Republican Party and Trump; the Democratic
Party had become an elitist party.11 This means that identity liberalism has failed at the level
of electoral politics. In other words, identity politics has dislocated the American electorate
and national politics because it tends to concentrate on the differences between Americans,
while it should strengthen the commonality of the American people and provide a clear idea
to advance the nation.12
Coates engages with the scholarly debate concerning identity politics and observes
two problems. On the one hand, Lilla does not see that identity politics played a major role in
the elections of both Obama and Trump, which means that there is a discrepancy between
Republican identity politics and Democratic identity politics, a case clearly found in Obama
and Trump.13 On the other hand, there has been an idolization of the community of the white
working class. In other words, “the white working class functions in the rhetoric and
argument not as a real community of people so much as a tool to quiet the demands of those
who want a more inclusive America.”14 This means that the white working class is presented
as a collective and homogenous group to undermine the struggle for justice by minorities, 8Lilla, “The End of Identity Liberalism.” 9Ibid. 10Ibid. 11Ibid., The Once and Future Liberal, 2017, 13; David Remnick, “A Conversation with Mark Lilla on His Critique of Identity Politics,” The New Yorker, August 25, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-conversation-with-mark-lilla-on-his-critique-of-identity-politics. 12Lilla, “The End of Identity Liberalism.” 13Coates, “The First White President,” 359. 14Ibid.
51
such as African American, Latino, and L.G.B.T.15 Coates, therefore, distances himself from
intellectuals such as Lilla, by embracing the role of the “anti-racist thinker.”16
Lilla is highly critical of the Democratic Party and its approach to identity liberalism.
He sketches an America that is utterly divided not only by a variety of collective identities
but also between the two leading political parties. He pleads for an America with a common
goal that does not abandon the electorate by stating that “they [the electorate] want America
to be America again.”17 In other words, American politics and policies should be concerned
with favoring all Americans, a message that was previously expressed by Obama.
The proposition of Lilla to “make America, America again” sticks to liberalism as the
leading ideology, but with a renewed focus on education and citizenship. This should lead to
a “post-identity liberalism,” which “would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to
Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them.”18
Lilla centralizes the importance of a national identity, as the most prominent collective
identity to bind citizens together. In other words, he propagates a form of neo-nationalistic
citizenship. In order to establish this
[The] short-term strategy must be to direct every bit of that energy into electoral politics so we
can actually bring about the change we profess to seek. (…) This will require a reorientation
of our thinking and engagement, but above all it will mean putting the age of identity behind
us.19
The search for a form of “new nationalism,” by centralizing a common identity that all
Americans share, has led to a variety of critical comments from the left, among others from
Coates.20 In opposition to the ‘post-identity liberalism’ of Lilla, Coates argues that white
identity politics has become a stranger in our midst, in the sense that all politics are seen as
identity politics, except for white politics.21 Coates is directing his critique at what he calls
15Ibid. 16Thomas Chatterton Williams, “How Ta-Nehisi Coates Gives Whiteness Power,” accessed May 22, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/opinion/ta-nehisi-coates-whiteness-power.html. 17Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal, 16. 18Ibid., “The End of Identity Liberalism.” 19Ibid., The Once and Future Liberal, 17. 20Samuel Moyn, “Mark Lilla and the Crisis of Liberalism,” Text, Boston Review, February 27, 2018, http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/samuel-moyn-mark-lilla-and-crisis-liberalism; John Buschman, “Between Neoliberalism and Identity Politics: Academic Librarianship, Democracy and November 8, 2016,” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 44, no. 2 (March 1, 2018): 287–94, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2017.12.020; Coates, “The First White President,” 359. 21Coates, “The First White President,” 359.
52
“white tribalism.”22 He argues that “to Trump whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but
is the very core of his power.”23 The loss of the Democratic Party is not necessarily caused by
their approach to identity politics, but it is also influenced by the revival of whiteness within
American politics.
Moreover, Coates is highly critical of the use of white identity politics. He argues that
it is, to some extent, understandable for the politician to engage with white identity politics,
as the white working class forms a large part of the electorate. Nonetheless, it is not possible
that journalists and intellectuals are unaware of the presence of white identity politics. Coates
explicitly uses Lilla as the main example of the type of white intellectual who embraces a
“self-serving identity politics.”24 This means that white intellectuals are denying the fact that
white identity politics have played an important role in recent elections, and that whiteness
and racism were fundamental in these elections.
Consequently, the different visions on identity liberalism that Coates and Lilla exhibit
reveal a major rupture between Coates and his fellow intellectuals. Coates explicitly places
himself directly in opposition to white thinkers such as Lilla. As a result, he becomes the anti-
racist intellectual, who exposes the controversial tendency of whiteness within political as
well as intellectual discourse. Coates argues that whiteness is a key factor in the current
political rhetoric, but also plays a role in the denial of white identity politics by white
intellectuals. This argument automatically places Coates in the center of public debate, as he
directly engages with the intellectual debate. He takes on the task of criticizing the current
political discourse and exposing the influence of bigotry. Importantly, he tries to remain
impartial by stating that it is also within left-wing politics that “white honor” and whiteness
are still powerful forces.25 In essence, Coates was assigned the title of black public
intellectual. The title gave him a certain responsibility, as he should now provide answers and
solutions for redemption.26 Coates’s distancing in relation to Lilla exposes the ambivalent
intellectual position of Coates. On the one hand, he embraces the role of public intellectual as
he publicly engages with the intellectual discussion. On the other hand, it pushes him into the
corner of the black public intellectual.
22Ibid., 360. 23Ibid., 343. 24Ibid., 358. 25Ibid., 362 26Ibid., We Were Eight Years in Power, 152.
53
4.3 E Pluribus Unum and Citizenship in the Age of Obama
The division between identity politics and white politics is not the only problem that Coates
sees in the works of Lilla. The other problem is that Lilla never mentions the name of Obama
in an essay called “The End of Identity Liberalism.” Coates argues that this shows that Lilla
“never attempts to grapple, one way or the other, with the fact that it was identity politics—
the possibility of a first black president—that brought a record number of black voters to the
polls, winning the election for the Democratic Party.”27
According to Coates, Lilla denies the fact that Obama won the presidency as a leading
symbol for a subordinated group in the United States. Lilla is oblivious to the fact that Obama
was the embodiment of the African American ability to mobilize a resistance to the current
establishment and to obtain the highest form of power.28 Coates stands up as a public
intellectual for the subordinate group of African Americans, as he sets himself apart from
white intellectuals, such as Lilla and Packer. In other words, Coates becomes the
representative of African Americans, as the white intellectual has no engagement with the
experiences of black Americans and ignores events that are essential to the African American
community.29
Coates argues that the example of identity politics in relation to the white working
class shows a “maintenance of white honor,” causing “whiteness [to] remain at the core of
liberal American thinking.”30 The critique on the resistance of African Americans and the
summoning of the white working class are evidence of the bigotry that still has its grip on
American politics. Lilla shows forms of empathy towards the white working class and their
voting for Trump. This form of empathy is primarily based on numbers and statistics
providing an argument that it is understandable for the white working class to vote for Trump
as president.31 Coates sees an undercurrent of racism underneath this empathetic claim. In
other words, the emotional approach of the Republican Party towards the white working class
serves as the “emblem of America’s hardscrabble roots, inheritor of its pioneer spirit, as a
shield against the horrific and empirical evidence of trenchant bigotry.”32 Moreover, the new
image of the Democratic Party as a “coalition of the cosmopolitan élite and diversity” that
27Ibid., 359. 28Ibid. 29Ibid., “What It Means to Be a Public Intellectual.” 30Ibid., 362. 31Lilla, “The End of Identity Liberalism”; Coates, “The First White President,” 362–63. 32Coates, “The First White President,” 363.
54
only discusses soft liberal subjects such as “diversity” instead of “hard economic issues” is a
characteristic of the bigotry in the political arena. This view of the Democratic Party is
primarily endorsed by white thinkers such as Lilla and Packer.33
Coates places a strong emphasis on racial issues within identity politics, while Lilla in
his most recent work, The Once and Future Liberal, tries to end identity politics. In this
work, Lilla finally mentions Obama as an example in the creation of an inclusive democracy.
He praises Obama for his appeal to all Americans: “We is where everything begins. Barack
Obama understood this, which is why he so often said Yes, we can and That’s not who we
are. (Though, characteristically, he never got around saying who exactly we are or who we
might become).”34 The initial goal of Obama was to fulfill the American creed of E Pluribus
Unum (out of many, one) by abandoning identity liberalism. This means that Obama tried to
centralize his campaign around every American in order to represent the white electorate, not
just minorities. Policies, such as Obamacare, were not solely intended to provide health care
for African American families in need, but were also planned to help the uninsured white
electorate.
Obama, in his autobiography The Audacity of Hope, pledged for the creation of a
common goal, or what Lilla had called, a reforming of the collective identity of citizenship.
Obama wrote: “Perhaps more than any other time in our recent history, we need a new kind
of politics, one that can excavate and build upon those share misunderstandings that pull us
together as Americans.”35 Obama set off to solve the fierce partisan struggle that
characterizes modern American politics and tried to find potential common values that could
serve as a bridge in order to create compromises.36 He searched for a ‘complete collective
identity’ that would include every American, white, black or Latino, which shows similarities
with the ideas of Lilla, as Lilla argues that the creation and preservation of citizenship is
essential to “create or sustain liberal democracy.”37 According to Lilla, populism has gained
more support in the United States with Trump because the Democratic Party failed to
“articulate a vision of America and its destiny that would rally all Americans, whatever their
identities.”38
33Ibid. 34Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal, 120. 35Obama, The Audacity of Hope, 9. 36Ibid. 37Lilla, “The Dog That Didn’t Bark: The Disappearance of the Citizen,” Eurozine (blog), August 18, 2017, https://www.eurozine.com/the-dog-that-didnt-bark-the-disappearance-of-the-citizen/. 38Ibid.
55
The connection between the creation of the people sharing common citizenship and
the history of suppression of minorities lacking citizenship made this debate more
complicated. The idea of common citizenship as an essential part of democracy ignores the
racial struggles of the past and the current inequalities that are still present in the modern U.S.
society. Coates makes a comparison between citizenship and whiteness by arguing that
whiteness was crucial in the identity politics of Trump.39 The relationship between
citizenship and whiteness has been fundamental in American society, since throughout the
centuries there have been several examples of legislation from whites to withhold the status
of citizens from African Americans.40 Therefore, it was a major achievement that “a country
that once took whiteness as the foundation of citizenship would elect a black president.”41
Nevertheless, it did not indicate the end of racism, as that would “forget the precise terms on
which it was secured, and [ignore] the quaking ground beneath Obama’s feet.”42 Not only are
the racial accusations concerning Obama evidence of the persistence of bigotry, but they are
also a sign of the perseverance of whiteness.43
For instance, The New Yorker journalist Packer questioned a voter about the role of
race in the primaries in Kentucky in 2008. The voter responded by stating: “I thought about
it. I think he would put too many minorities in positions over the white race.”44 The opinion
of the voter was not an individual opinion.45 The remarks express a deep feeling of fear, a
fear best described by Coates:
The expansion of [the] cultural power, [the implementation of black cultural practices and
tropes in the White House], beyond the private province of whites has been a tremendous
advance for black America. Conversely, for those who’ve long treasured white exclusivity,
the existence of a President Barack Obama is discombobulating, even terrifying. For surely as
the iconic picture of the young black boy reaching to touch the president’s curly hair sends
one message to black America, it sends another to those who have enjoyed the power of
whiteness.46
39Coates, “The First White President,” 359. 40See for the specific examples: Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” 128–30. 41Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” 131. 42Ibid. 43Ibid. 44George Packer, “The Race in Eastern Kentucky,” The New Yorker, August 12, 2008, https://www.newyorker.com/news/george-packer/the-race-in-eastern-kentucky. 45Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” 131. 46Ibid., 127–28.
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Nevertheless, Obama did not favor minorities. On the contrary Obama was critical of black
Americans. Moreover, he tried to create a common goal but encountered many blockades,
including partisan and racial blockades, for example through the theory of birtherism.47 This
theory tried to undermine the right to citizenship of Obama by distributing the story that
Obama was an illegal immigrant. It is direct evidence of the relationship between race and
citizenship, and it shows that it is possible to “trace attacks on black citizenship from the very
origins of American citizenship itself right up to the present day.”48 Lilla goes beyond this
point by presuming the right to citizenship for racial and sexual minorities. This is a denial of
the path of resistance that these groups had to take or even still have to take.
According to Coates, the argument that the white working class felt betrayed by the
Democratic Party and joined the Trump movement is proof of the importance of whiteness.49
Also, the fact that African-Americans and other people of color, who have suffered more
economic anxiety, have not supported Trump suggests the importance of white identity
politics.50 This means that Lilla forgets the point that an implication of racism permeated the
Trump campaign. In essence, it cannot be denied that Trump “appealed to the white
supremacist impulses that are still powerful for a portion of the white population.”51 This
means that the presidency of Trump can be seen as a direct counter movement to the Obama
era, i.e., a response to the eight-year rule of an African American President.52
4.4 Citizenship and Empathy in Democracy
The political clash between blackness and whiteness, which Coates perceives, and the
concern about identities undermine an essential feature of democracy: democracy is built
upon agonisms. This idea from Chantal Mouffe implies that a democratic society is
fundamentally built upon disagreements between citizens.53 The consequence of this is that
47Coates, “The Longest War,” The Atlantic, May 4, 2011, https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/05/the-longest-war/238334/. 48Ibid. 49Coates, “The First White President,” 359. 50Asad Haider, “Idylls of the Liberal: The American Dreams of Mark Lilla and Ta-Nehisi Coates,” Viewpoint Magazine, September 11, 2017, https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/09/11/idylls-of-the-liberal-the-american-dreams-of-mark-lilla-and-ta-nehisi-coates/. 51Ibid. 52Coates, “The First White President,” 344; Remnick, “A Conversation with Mark Lilla on His Critique of Identity Politics.” 53Chantal Mouffe, On the Political, Thinking in Action (London ; New York: Routledge, 2005), 16; Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal, 117.
57
democratic politics should be about persuasion and public argumentation in order to
compromise with those who disagree. The intellectual should engage with this form of public
argumentation, as it is through public argumentation that “competing ideals of identity and
political legitimacy are articulated, contested and refined.”54 The public intellectual must use
this strategy to speak critically about the society he/she lives in, and create a “common
pursuit of a shared ideal.”55
The assumption that democracy is built upon a form of struggle presupposes a
distinction between a ‘we’ and a ‘them.’ As a result, the ‘we’ that Lilla and Obama pursue,
must be constructed within the context of diversity and conflict.56 The presumption that
modern society is constructed upon a we/they distinction requires a re-thinking of the notion
of ‘citizenship.’ In other words, the disintegration of a collective ‘we’ through identity
politics or the division of society through white tribalism share in the idea that the collective
demos, which is envisioned within a perfect democracy, seems to be under pressure.
Therefore, the division of the demos into different collective identities, such as whiteness and
blackness, could benefit from a clear collective denominator. This denominator could be
either nationalistic, as perceived in the black nationalism of Coates or the nationalistic
citizenship of Lilla, but it can also be more neutral. In general, the collective denominator is
crucial in creating a common goal in order to establish a collective demos and create a society
for all Americans.
The central position that Coates attributes to whiteness and the systematic oppression
of African Americans has led him to a message of black nationalism, which set him apart
from black public intellectual predecessors such as Dyson, bell hooks, and West, who
envisioned a more post-nationalistic approach.57 Later, Coates saw that black nationalism
was not the solution, but he continued to walk the path of the black public intellectual, as he
searched for meaning concerning the questions of freedom and democracy.58
The agonism between left and right as well as between social movements and the
established hegemony is essential to democracy. The antagonism in a democracy is
essentially built on a we/they relation, which is constructed from an enemy relationship
54Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves, “Hannah Arendt and the Idea of Citizenship,” in Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community, ed. Chantal Mouffe, Phronesis (London ; New York: Verso, 1992), 158. 55Said, 1996, 102. 56Mouffe, “Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community,” in Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community, ed. Chantal Mouffe, Phronesis (London ; New York: Verso, 1992), 243. 57Smith. 58Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 213-214.
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without a common ground. This relation must be transformed into a situation where the
conflicting parties acknowledge that it is impossible to solve the gap between them but they
recognize the justice and legitimacy of their opponents.59 Coates argues that the struggle
between blackness and whiteness plays a crucial role in American society. For instance, the
presidency of Obama and the responses to it were evidence of a polarizing nation.60 In
opposition, Lilla states that liberal politics has crumbled into divisive identity politics. In both
cases, the struggle must be transformed into a we/they situation, without the hostile division.
The end of identity politics, according to Lilla, must be found in the revival of the
liberal notion of citizenship. A renewed emphasis on citizenship has not only an enormous
Democratic potential but also a democratic potential. In other words, the Democratic Party
could benefit from a collective citizenship just as American democracy in general. Lilla states
that “to say that we are all citizens is not to say that we are all alike in every respect. It is a
social fact that many Americans today think of themselves in terms of identity groups, but
there is no reason why they cannot simultaneously think of themselves as political citizens
like everyone else.”61 In essence, citizenship must be adopted as a collective identity in order
to homogenize the current diversification of identities.
The aversion of Lilla against social recognition and his idolization of ‘nationalistic’
citizenship are profoundly influenced by his idea of a national American identity. This means
that he seems to forget that there are social groups that do not participate in the national
narratives such as the Civil War stories. Coates argues that it is difficult to have such an
emphasis on national identity, as it is still constructed upon several controversies.62
Therefore, the importance of explicit ‘nationalistic’ citizenship lacks itself the purpose of
creating a common goal, or what can be called a respublica.63
The formulation of the respublica by Mouffe shows similarities with the notion of
citizenship that Lilla defends, but it is not centralized around the collective identity of the
nation. Instead, it is a formulation that is concerned with the creation of a ‘we’ by connecting
people through a “common recognition of a set of ethico-political values.”64 This formulation
of ethico-political values must create a common goal that connects people instead of
upholding the contradictions that create a hostile environment of enemies or antagonists. The
neo-nationalistic approach can be averted by connecting people through ethico-political 59Mouffe, On the Political, 20. 60Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” 123. 61Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal, 121. 62Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 64. 63Mouffe, “Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community,” 232. 64Ibid., 235.
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values. The respublica is simply the rules that “prescribe norms of conduct to be subscribed
to in seeking self-chosen satisfactions and in performing self-chosen actions.”65 It is a
construction of rules that creates a common bond instead of a common good. In other words,
it unites citizens by the creation of a public concern.66 According to Mouffe, the respublica
serves as the common political identity, which binds together the political community by the
creation of a common public concern. Moreover, the identification of citizens with the
respublica creates a common political identity among citizens who would otherwise be
engaged in different activities.67
Nonetheless, the identification will vary due to the different interpretations of the
respublica. Mouffe uses the liberal democratic regime as the example in which equality and
liberty for all can be conceived as the respublica. In this case, the interpretation of the
respublica “will emphasize numerous social relations where relations of domination exist and
must be challenged if the principles of liberty and equality are to apply.”68 In other words,
critical citizens and public intellectuals should challenge these relations of domination to
perfect the democratic ideas of equality and liberty.
According to Mouffe, critical citizens are shaped by a common set of political
principles as opposed to a collective moral idea of the good. For example, within the liberal
tradition, equality and freedom for all can be perceived as the common political principles
that construct our political identity as critical citizens. It is from the recognition of these rules
that citizens should judge and act in a society. This means that our active citizenship is
founded upon the identification with the principles of freedom and equality.69 The public
intellectual should engage with the formulation of these notions. For example, Coates
criticized color-blind racism, a critique that was implicitly founded in his beliefs of a free and
equal society. In other words, he participates in the formulation of these notions by exposing
misconducts within the current society and pushes for a change.
The participation of critical citizens is crucial to the upkeep of modern democracy.
According to Lilla, the status of American democracy is now attacked by three influences.
Firstly, the ideology of neoliberalism. Secondly, populism, and at last, identity politics.70 In
opposition, Coates is mainly concerned about the history of American democracy, which is
concealed by foundational myths. The most crucial of these myths is that “black people are 65Ibid., 233. 66Ibid. 67Ibid. 68Ibid., 236. 69Ibid., 231. 70Lilla, “The Dog That Didn’t Bark.”
60
outsiders without the capacity for citizenship.”71 The connection between American
democracy and mythology has never been colorless for Coates.72 In essence, Coates mainly
sees a problem in the persistence of race and racism in social and political discourse. Withal,
the crisis of democracy that is apparent in the works of Lilla and Mouffe is related to the
problematic relation of American democracy and color that Coates presumes.
The debate about American democracy currently revolves around the terms of
inclusiveness, diversity, citizenship, and individualism. Lilla makes a distinction between
identity and diversity, as he states that “[d]iversity as a social goal and aim of social reform is
an excellent thing. But identity politics today [is] about personal identity… more narcissistic
and less connected to larger political themes [with] a loss of a sense of proportion.”73
Consequently, American democracy is declining due to a lack of empathy and a glorification
of individualism motivated by neoliberalism and the presidency of Ronald Reagan.74
The underlying idea about the role of empathy in identity politics is crucial in
understanding the difference between Coates and Lilla, as both intellectuals sketch an image
of a divisive American society but envision a different role for empathy. For example, Coates
states: “I see the fight against sexism, racism, poverty, and even war finding their union not
in synonymity but in their ultimate goal—a world more humane.”75 This expression of
Coates is mainly characterized by a notion of empathy that is highly emotional. A further
divergence of social groups is caused by a lack of empathy and makes any form of empathy
to other groups impossible. For example, the revival of whiteness, with the election of
Trump, has called into question the possibility and value of empathy. According to Coates,
the election of Trump has especially shown the reality of systematic bigotry in politics. In
essence, it showed that the country is “susceptible to that bigotry, that the salt-of-the-earth
Americans whom we lionize in our culture and politics are not so different from those same
Americans who grin back at us in lynching photos.”76 Hence, Coates argues that the
American people have not transcended racism due to a lack of empathy. In this case, empathy
71Ismail Muhammad, “Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Uneasy Hope,” The New Republic, October 26, 2017, https://newrepublic.com/article/145525/ta-nehisi-coatess-uneasy-hope. 72Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, xiii. 73Evan R. Goldstein, “Campus Identity Politics Is Dooming Liberal Causes, a Professor Charges,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 15, 2016, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Campus-Identity-Politics-Is/238694. 74Buschman, 289; Lilla, “The End of Identity Liberalism.” 75Coates, “The First White President,” 367. 76Ibid., 362.
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is better defined as skepticism towards others and a feeling of sympathy towards their own
social group.77
In opposition, Lilla argues that empathy within a liberal democracy serves as a
rational, gradual, and statistical compass, as he bases his empathy on “economic
nationalism.”78 The term was coined by Steve Bannon, who stated: “The Democrats, the
longer they talk about identity politics, I’ve got ‘em. I want them to talk about racism every
day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can
crush the Democrats.”79 According to Lilla, identity politics does work for the Republican
Party and not for the Democrats because Democrats use the “rhetoric of difference.”80 This
abandonment should lead to a revival of the values that characterize the American people. As
a result, “people who don’t share this identity somehow can have a stake, and feel something
that other people are experiencing.”81 In other words, Lilla argues that in order for people to
bolster feelings of sympathy and empathy for others it is essential to have a set of
fundamental values and principles. It is only due to these basic values and principles that
people tend to identify with each other. However, the problem is that Lilla constructs
fundamental values which are founded on the idea of a national identity, which has been a
problematic denominator.
The notion of empathy by Lilla reveals two specific things. On the one hand, he
argues that the identity politics of the Republican Party is not divisive, like the Democratic
Party, because it has been able to merge one specific group of Americans, i.e., the white
working class. The Republican Party has used empathetic rhetoric to unite the experiences of
this particular social group that has been the ‘victim’ of the policies of Obama and the
Democratic Party, e.g., Obamacare. On the other hand, he formulates a notion of empathy
that seems too forgiving towards white identity politics.82 For example, Lilla is highly critical
of the Black Lives Matter movement, while he is more empathetic to the white identity
politics of the Republican Party. He argues that the Black Lives Matter movement is a
principal example of the failure to create a form of solidarity, as there is
no denying that the movement’s decision to use this mistreatment to build a general
indictment of American society, and its law enforcement institutions, and to use Mau-Mau
77Ibid., “Fear of a Black President,” 124. 78Remnick. 79Ibid. 80Ibid. 81Ibid. 82Coates, “The First White President,” 359.
62
tactics to put down dissent and demand a confession of sins and public penitence played into
the hand of the Republican right.83
The discrepancy here is that the demand of victimhood by black Americans is the cause for
the ‘white supremacy’ identity politics of the Republican right during the election of 2016. It
is striking that Lilla seems to be more empathetic to the victimhood of the white working
class and the divisive white identity politics of the Republican right than he is to the Black
Lives Matter movement. Moreover, he accuses the Black Lives Matter movement of using
‘Mau-Mau tactics.’84 Additionally, he seems to forget that the resistance of black people
against repression uses a different strategy in order for the subaltern to obtain a voice. The
case between African Americans and the white working class is incomparable as white
Americans have always been in power of the political and public domain. The Black Lives
Matter movement follows the tradition of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement
in the sense that they “bet on the creation of a new constituency across racial lines to be
brought about in an unpredictable concatenation of imagination and interest.”85
Nonetheless, Lilla perceives a lack of empathy and sympathy within the social
movement, which he sees as evidence for the existence of an ‘age of narcissism.’ This age is
mainly characterized by a fixation on diversity.86 It is problematic to align the theory of
narcissism with the Black Lives Matter movement, as it “was a response to the impunity of
police, and the liberal choice to collude with conservatives in building a carceral state for the
urban black poor rather than reinventing what Lilla praises as Franklin Roosevelt’s
dispensation to serve them.”87 In other words, the Black Lives Matter movement is a
response to the neoconservative and neoliberal path of American society as a whole. This is
in contrast to Lilla’s argument that the movement was part of a revival of Romanticism,
which created an image of politics, as a “zero-sum confrontation,—the People against the
Power.”88
According to Coates, one of Lilla’s significant errors is based on a misinterpretation
of the term ‘diversity.’ Therefore, it is crucial to unravel the definition of ‘diversity,’ which
includes:
83Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal, 129. 84Remnick. 85Moyn. 86Lilla, “The End of Identity Liberalism.” 87Moyn. 88Ibid; Quote by Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal, 107.
63
resistance against the monstrous incarceration of legions of black men, resistance against the
destruction of health providers for poor women, resistance against the effort to deport parents,
resistance against a policing whose sole legitimacy is rooted in brute force, resistance against
a theory of education that preaches ‘no excuses’ to black and brown children, even as excuses
are proffered for those ‘too big to jail.’ 89
Intellectuals like Lilla and Packer who dismiss these concerns are, in Coates’s perspective,
evidence of the lack of empathy towards the situation of African Americans and other
minorities, but also evidence of the protection of whiteness.90 Coates places himself on the
side of minorities and questions the leading structure of whiteness that is present in American
society. He argues that the influence of whiteness can be found in more dormant ways in the
works of white intellectuals. Therefore, he pleads for a change of morality and a renewed
attention to empathy. In this way, he engages in the public debate and positions himself as an
important public intellectual. Only, he is pushed into the role of the black public intellectuals,
as he reveals that whiteness plays an important role in the works of Lilla.
For instance, Coates criticizes Lilla for arguing that it was purely the identity politics
of the Democrats that caused the failure to unite American citizens. For example, after the
election of Obama, Republican Mitch McConnell stated that the strategy of the GOP was to
make Obama “a one-term president” by opposing his policies in order to find no common
ground.91 The major cause was the proposition of Obamacare that was denounced as a form
of socialism, while a comparable program had been previously suggested by a Republican
governor and a conservative think tank. It seems that the members of the Republican Party
had taken it as their major task to explicitly aim for the negation of Democratic policies that
were done by the first black president. These attacks were not merely part of a critical attitude
organized by right-wing media such as Fox News, but were a representation and execution of
something more important.92 In essence, the criticism was “a hunger for revanche so strong
that a political novice and accused rapist could topple the leadership of one major party and
throttle the presumed favorite of another.”93 The lack of empathy between both parties is
hereby reduced to a struggle between blackness and whiteness. Therefore, Coates argues that
the presidency of Trump cannot be seen without the presidency of Obama. Coates claims that
89Coates, “The First White President,” 363. 90Ibid. 91Ibid. 92Ibid., 364. 93Ibid.
64
“racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and
broader skepticism toward others”.94 In other words, racism is based on a lack of social-
cultural and emotional empathy and all forms of politics are reduced to identity politics
except for white politics, while “Trump, more than any other politician, understood the
valence of the bloody heirloom and the great power in not being a nigger.”95
In conclusion, Coates perceives a discrepancy between the presidencies of Obama and
Trump due to an increased focus on collective identities. The identity politics that is being
used on both sides has created a massive wedge not only between the two parties but also
between social groups. The lack of empathy has served as fertile soil for the creation of a
harsh and rude political climate, in which a president such as Trump could rise to power.
4.5 Neoliberalism, Education, and Citizenship
Coates not only see the rise of whiteness as a major problem in American society, but also the
neoliberal system, as he states:
There can be no conflict between the naming of whiteness and the naming of the degradation
brought about by any unrestrained capitalism, by the privileging of greed and the legal
encouragement to hoarding and more elegant plunder. I have never seen a contradiction
between calling for reparations and calling for a living wage, on calling for legitimate law
enforcement and singlepayer healthcare.96
One of the critical elements is the “mythologization of White supremacy and Black
subjugation,” which is strongly influenced by the neoliberal system and has profound
effects.97 In Between the World and Me, Coates unveils “a narrative and system of violence,
oppression, and fear, specifically through the lens of the Dream and innocence, and the
Dream and lie of meritocracy.”98 Coates argued that the Dreamers had established a system
of white hegemony that created a veil of “passive acceptance of innocence.”99
94Ibid., “Fear of a Black President,” 124. 95Ibid., “The First White President,” 359; Quote in Coates, “The First White President,” 364. 96Ibid., 367. 97Humphrey, 24. 98Ibid. 99Ibid.
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In short, the orientation of neoliberalism is mainly concentrated around the creation of
“strong private rights, free market, and free trade.”100 This tradition of American capitalism is
strongly linked with white hegemony, as the system has perpetuated the racial inequities as
“not many people of color have been able to emerge from the shadow of the White
supremacist and capitalist structure of the United States to become successful politically or
otherwise.”101 The most obvious counterexample of this is Obama.
In essence, neoliberalism has maintained a gap between white and black, as well as
rich and poor. For instance, “[for] ordinary poor Black and Brown people who live in
disfranchised and racially segregated communities, who have attended poorly funded schools,
and who have faced dire socioeconomic, political, and legal challenges, fundamentally
nothing much has changed.”102 Arguably, the growing gap between rich and poor is moving
the nation towards a “class-based society.”103 The direct link between civic engagement and
class is striking within the United States, as a significant group of poor people are not
civically engaged. The problem is that black Americans still remain over-represented in the
working and lower socioeconomic classes. As a result, it is highly possible that the black
community remains one of the least civilly engaged social groups. This is a large crisis for
modern American democracy, as African Americans are not being represented in American
politics.104 In other words, in order to establish an inclusive and equal society or a ‘post-racial
era,’ this crisis should be solved.
One of the problems is that the neoliberal economy has provided difficulties for the
black community to participate in class mobility.105 This is also the point that West makes in
his critique of Coates. West argues that political neoliberalism influences Coates as he misses
out on topics, such as the greed of Wall Street, US imperial crimes and the indifference of the
black elite to poverty. Moreover, West is particularly critical of Coates for disconnecting
“white supremacy from the realities of class, empire, and other forms of domination – be it
ecological, sexual, or others.”106
Nonetheless, the Dream that Coates perceives is evidence of the difficult relation
between neoliberalism and the experience of being an African American in American society.
100Ibid., 25. 101Pierre W. Orelus, Race, Power, and the Obama Legacy (New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), 34. 102Ibid. 103Wilbur C. Rich, “Civic Engagement Generations Make: Race, Options, and Actions,” Phylon (1960-) 52, no. 2 (2015): 40. 104Ibid. 105Ibid., 39. 106West, “Ta-Nehisi Coates Is the Neoliberal Face.”
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The new generation, which Wilbur Rich calls the “presentation generation,” is a group that
knows racial progress, in opposition to the eighties. They are trying to move beyond racial
thinking but are being cut-off by extreme forms of police violence.107 It is this group that is
extremely vulnerable economically and socially. The dilemma that the middle-class blacks
are now facing is to “embrace the role of race vanguard,” while at the same time seeing black
American people just as poor people.108 It is their shared history of subordination that makes
it difficult to completely turn off this racial perspective, as the state insufficiently supports the
lower classes of American society.109 This means that black identity politics is vital in
solving the crises of American black people, e.g., police violence, and poverty.
Furthermore, the neoliberal system upholds the Dream by moving “towards
individualistic frames of thinking privileges myth-making grounded in perspectives of
individual social mobility devoid of historical narratives of privilege and White
Supremacy.”110 In other words, the power of the white establishment to create and form
myths creates a veil of innocence of white Americans, i.e., it maintains the Dream. This
means that the resistance from movements, such as the Black Lives Matter movement against
police violence or any other party of the neoliberal system, is met with fierce opposition. The
example of Blue Lives Matter as an opposite pole of Black Lives Matter is evidence of this
lack of historical awareness of the context of policing, and shows a view “outside of a
historical hegemony of oppression and violence, disconnecting the Dreamers from any
awareness of oppressive systems.”111
One of the important neoliberal systems of constructing “privileged narratives of
Whiteness” is the American schooling system. The system perpetuates a gap between
white/black, rich/poor.112 Lilla sees a reformation of the educational system as the solution to
overcome traditional identity politics and to cause a revival of modern democracy.113
According to Lilla, education is crucial to create and form citizens in order to make them
politically aware.114 The education system must become the system that fosters the feeling of
a collective we, in a time when “America has become more diverse and individualistic.”115
107Rich, “Civic Engagement Generations Make,” 38–39. 108Ibid. 109Ibid. 110Humphrey, 25. 111Ibid. 112Ibid., 26. 113Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal, 131. 114Ibid. 115Ibid., 133.
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Coates’s critique of the schooling system shows similarities with this perspective but
is centralized around whiteness and myth-making. Coates argues that the “schools were
hiding something, drugging [African Americans] with false morality so that [they] would not
see.”116 The school system for African Americans was presented as the way to escape a life
of imprisonment and death.117 Nonetheless, the schools do not teach black kids these realities.
Coates dwells on his own experience. This reveals a crucial distinction between the white
intellectual and the black intellectual, as Lilla ignores the experience of African Americans
within the American educational system. Coates reveals the perspective of a marginalized
group that has a different relation with the educational system than white Americans.
Therefore, the foundation of a collective we, as Lilla argues, cannot be founded without the
acknowledgment and change of this persistent whiteness. In essence, the school system has
created a system of white epistemologies, which
reinforce prescriptive silence and banking models of education, valuing compliance,
discipline, and rote memorization over those that embrace alterity as normative and essential
to the development of critical thought and the cultivation of conscious agents who actively
and democratically engage in the creation and re-creation of meanings and values.118
The point is that the neoliberal system prepares students “for industry and social mobility at
the cost of democratic equality and preparation for civic and political engagement,” by using
“prescriptive silence and banking model forms.”119 The schooling system in the U.S. is
responsible for the creation of non-critical agents and the perseverance of white hegemony by
the reproduction of white narratives.
Coates is extremely critical of the educational system in the United States. He
dropped out of school as he felt that black experience was not taken into account and that he
was participating in a stronghold of whiteness.120 He argues that schools are an upkeep of the
Dream and that it is seen, for African Americans, as a place that should prevent them from
falling back into the street. He perceives a correlation between the failure in school and the
destruction on the streets, as people would say “[he] should have stayed in school.”121 In this
way, Coates denounces the relation between the educational institutions in American society
116Coates, Between the World and Me, 26. 117Ibid. 118Humphrey, 26. 119Ibid. 120Coates, Between the World and Me, 26. 121Ibid., 33.
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and the responsibility of black Americans, while there is a massive disconnection between the
whiteness of the educational schooling system and African Americans.122
Coates’s difficult relationship with the educational system has characterized him as a
writer/intellectual. He desired to follow in the footsteps of one of his examples, Malcolm X.
He wanted to be as free as Malcolm. This freedom for Coates was not to be found in the
classroom, but instead in the library. The classroom was filled with the ideas and morality of
others and held no correspondence with his experiences.123 It is an implicit reference to the
ideal of the black public intellectual, who is self-taught and dwells on the experiences of the
street, as Coates used his own experience to address the problems of the black community
and misconducts in the American educational system.124 Said remarked that the intellectual
should not be completely influenced by the educational system or specialize too much in the
university system as it tends to corrupt thinking with “a set of authorities and canonical
ideas.”125 Coates has explicitly resisted the canon and tried to change neoliberal white
mythologies.
In conclusion, the white epistemologies within the education system lead to ‘non-
critical agents,’ which means that students are ignorant about the variety of narratives that are
left-out from the American myths and are not trained to participate within the democratic
system through civic engagement. Furthermore, Coates perceived that African Americans are
left-out from the school system as the American myths do not reflect their experiences and, as
a result, they do not participate in the democratic system.
4.6 Conclusion
Coates sketches a critical image of modern American society, which is characterized by
antagonisms between collective identities, such as whites/black, rich/poor, and
Republican/Democrat. He ascribes a crucial role of whiteness to the presidency of Trump.
White identity politics, a lack of empathy, and neoliberalism are still constructing a society
that is characterized by forms of bigotry. Coates sees it as his task to tell the story of
blackness in America. He argues that his personal achievements are subordinate to the story
122Ibid. 123Ibid., 36, 48. 124West, Race Matters 40-43. 125Said, 1996, 76.
69
of African Americans, which he sees as a tragedy. He tries to focus his writings on the
failings of American society and to provide possibilities for change.126
For Coates, in order to create a new collective identity based upon shared citizenship,
there needs to be a re-institutionalization of the educational system. In other words, the
educational system must be reformed, which is currently influenced by neoliberalism. To
completely abolish racism and to create an inclusive educational environment, the education
system should no longer be determined by the curriculum of white mythologies. It should
focus on the creation of critical agents, who will participate in civic programs. It should train
critical democratic citizens to ensure a well-functioning democracy.
In conclusion, the position of Coates as a public intellectual is ambivalent, as he was
pushed into the position of the black public intellectual by opposing white intellectuals, such
as Lilla and Packer. The works of white intellectuals challenged him to enter the public
debate and to intervene in the discussion. As a result, he became the anti-racist thinker of The
Atlantic reflecting on the presidency of Trump and the degradation of the policies of Obama.
The success of Coates and the reputation of The Atlantic contributed to the ambivalent
positioning of Coates as a public intellectual, as he had to live up to his reputation as a black
public intellectual. He had now become the public intellectual that he always despised.
Nonetheless, he sees it as his task to participate in the public debate about political and racial
issues ultimately to provide a counterforce against whiteness and to represent blackness.
126Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 289-290.
70
5) Conclusion
The study of Coates has revealed characteristic traits that are to be attributed to the public
intellectual. It is an irony that Coates has been assigned the title of public intellectual, as he
always detested that label. Nevertheless, the works Between the World and Me and We Were
Eight Years in Power have irreversibly earned him the title of public intellectual, due to the
themes he discussed and the responses that came with it.
Coates has become a prominent spokesman of the anti-racist movement and many
white American liberals. He has taken on the task “to think what we are not doing.”1 In other
words, he saw it as the task of the public intellectual to formulate words which would cause
people to rethink their judgment. He intended to draft the words that encourage people to
rethink their deeds.2 The case of Coates not only reveals the role of the public intellectual, but
it also discloses some major problems in American society.
The ideal public intellectual is the thinker who speaks for subordinate groups without
a voice and agitates against the establishment by speaking truth to power. He/she acts without
the incentive of money and profit, and his/her task is to make the sufferings of a social group
known. The intellectual, therefore, uses his/her “thought and judgment (…) for representing
(…) culture itself and making it prevail.”3 In this way, the outcome should not only benefit
different classes or small groups of society, but it should be constructive for society as a
whole.4 The romantic definition of the amateur intellectual that Said provided, means that
he/she is driven by a deep affection for a cause rather than having profit or fame as a major
incentive to specialize as a professional or scholar.5
In this light, the position of Coates, as an amateur intellectual, can be seen as
ambivalent. On the one hand, he dropped out of school and became an example of the self-
learned amateur intellectual without the influence of societal institutions and the corruption of
thinking caused by academic discourse. In that sense, he is, to a certain extent, free to express
and write down his ideas. On the other hand, he became the black writer of The Atlantic,
which enabled him to make a reasonable profit out of his work, and more importantly, gave
him a legitimacy based upon the reputation of The Atlantic and his fame. He received several 1Corey Robin, “How Intellectuals Create a Public,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 22, 2016, https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Intellectuals-Create-a/234984. 2Ibid. 3Said, 1994, 22. 4Ibid. 5Ibid., 1996, 82.
71
awards for his work, most notably with his book Between the World and Me. The profit
conveniently supported him in his daily life, but it never felt like the fulfillment of a dream.
He always wanted to remain incognito and only receive attention from fellow black
intellectuals.6 He considered it problematic that he became that person he always opposed,
i.e. he had trouble with the reputation that came with the title. He wanted his ideas to be
independent of any reputation or title.7 Additionally, the role of public intellectual was
ambivalent for Coates, as he never intended to become a famous public intellectual, but he
saw it as his duty to raise questions concerning social and political injustices.
The idea of a purely amateur intellectual is a rather romantic ideal image. Sartre
admits that the position of the public intellectual is more ambivalent. Nevertheless, aiming
for an ideal role of the public intellectual is noteworthy, and Coates comes close to fulfilling
this ideal role. The ideal image and the study of Coates reveal crucial traits for the public
intellectual in general. First, they expose how the modern public intellectual should be
engaged with the contemporary cultural myths that construct collective identities and
influence social and political discourse. Secondly, they reveal the role that the public
intellectual has relative to the leading powers of a state. Thirdly, the public intellectual must
be engaged in the public debate with other intellectuals. Herein, the public intellectual makes
known his idea to solve the problems that are present in society.
The public intellectual must be engaged with encouraging people to re-think the
current cultural situation in order to end injustices and racial misconducts in society. He
brings forth new ideas for society to benefit as a whole in ending such wrongdoings.
Therefore, the public intellectual must base his/her ideas on constructive principles, such as
freedom and equality, in order to portray an image of a radical functioning democracy.
He/she must question the cultural myths, the political powers, and their institutions in order to
formulate ideas for a more just society.
The success of Between the World and Me led to the designation of Coates as the
black writer of The Atlantic or the ‘anti-racist’ thinker. This pushed him into the position of
the black public intellectual. It was a result of his engagement with the role of racism in
social and political discourse in American society, and his observations and criticism of the
role of whiteness in identity politics. Coates exposed the sufferings of the African American
people by pointing to the social/cultural and political landscape. He engaged with the
exclusive character of American myths and narratives, using the Civil War as a specific 6Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 211. 7Ibid., 161.
72
example. This discussion went beyond the role of victimhood, which African Americans
suffered during slavery and Jim Crow, as it emphasized the current situation of inclusion and
exclusion of African Americans and minorities in general. To transcend race in American
society, there must be a re-thinking of these national narratives and myths. Coates pointed out
that the oppression of blacks occurred not only through violence but could also have more
dormant characteristics.
The construction of the Dream as a new version of the myth of the American Dream
shows the capability of the public intellectual to open up the debate and to raise questions
about social structures that are not perceived anymore by those who are influenced by them.
In other words, Coates tried to break through the status quo by presenting a different opinion
with the intention to challenge the public opinion and to encourage people to re-think their
judgment. Coates became a public intellectual by questioning the leading culture by
criticizing white hegemony. In particular, the success of Between the World and Me played a
vital role in obtaining the title of public intellectual.
The public intellectual not only engages with the social and moral misconducts of a
society, but he/she is also critical of the political discourse. In particular, he/she is concerned
about the authorities and power, and obliged to expose any errors and injustices and to speak
truth against this power. For instance, Coates perceived an American society that was able to
elect the first black president, but next went for a different man as president. His view was
pessimistic and mainly revolved around the distinction between blackness and whiteness.
Coates argued that American society has not been able to transcend the question of race.
Coates entered a special relationship with Obama, as he made his way to become a public
intellectual by reviewing the election and presidency of Obama. Coates was hopeful for
American society with the election of Obama, but throughout the years he developed a more
pessimistic voice concerning the policies of Obama to help the African American
community. Nonetheless, he remained on the side of Obama, by expressing the value of the
symbolism of Obama, as he stated: “Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by
some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing ‘mere’
about symbols. The power embedded in the word nigger is also symbolic. Burning crosses do
not literally raise the black poverty rate, and the Confederate flag does not directly expand the
wealth gap.”8
8Coates, “My President Was Black,” in We Were Eight Years in Power, 295.
73
The relation of Coates with Obama shows the ambivalent role of Coates, as he stood
close by Obama, but also needed to speak truth to this power. Coates, eventually, embraced
the duty of speaking ‘truth to power.’ He disclosed the influence of new forms of racism,
such as colorblind racism, within the Obama administration. Coates, like other intellectuals
such as Dyson and Bonilla-Silva, demonstrated that the election of Obama was not solely a
historic victory. He criticized the Obama administration and the political responses to it.
Coates showed that race still played a vital role in the social and political climate of America.
He unraveled the social and political structures that were still causing racial injustices within
American society, while a large part of America has been oblivious to these after the election
of Obama. In other words, he denied that America had reached a post-racial era, as there was
still a strong persistence of the color line.
Furthermore, Coates positioned himself as a public intellectual through his debate
with white intellectuals. He entered the public debate by arguing that there are influences of
dormant racism in the opinions of white intellectuals such as Lilla and Packer. In this sense,
Lilla and Packer called out Coates to intervene in the debate publicly and to step forward as a
public intellectual and a spokesman of the black community. Coates argued that whiteness
plays a crucial role in identity politics, but it is mostly underexposed. He accused Packer and
Lilla in particular of being too positive about whiteness while criticizing the identity politics
of the Democratic Party. According to Coates, whiteness has become more persistent within
American society, especially with the election of Trump. Coates centralized the debate
around race and racism to prevent it from sliding into a color-blind debate about
neoliberalism. He placed himself in the public debate against white intellectuals and pointed
out that whiteness is still a crucial force within American society. He exposed how this
persistence leads to the polarization of society and to democratic problems. For instance, he
described his experiences with the education system of the United States and showed how the
exclusiveness of white epistemologies within it disconnects African Americans from the
system. As a result, a large part of African Americans is not civically engaged.
In conclusion, Coates remains an ambivalent public intellectual. He had always been
hesitant to become a public intellectual but was ultimately coerced into the position by
deciding to go public with his ideas. Coates took on the intellectual task to present a different
backdrop of American society, one characterized by problems of racism. He did not reveal
this point for his own benefits, but he tried to open the eyes of others to think differently and
to change the current system of ‘racial’ neoliberalism, which has far-reaching consequences
in the educational system. Coates revealed that American society has not yet reached a state
74
of post-racialism and is still struggling with racial issues. He revealed the counter-myth of
American society, still stamped by “white honor and whiteness,” and as long as this remains
at the center of American social and political thinking, American history cannot be
transcended.9
9Coates, “The First White President,” 362.
75
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