Ta-Nehisi Coates is a compelling writer.

He works at the crowded left-liberal intersection, where we can find so much phooey. But Coates’s work isn’t phooey, which vaults him to the upper ranks of this crowd. He brings something new, I think particularly (though not exclusively) to white audiences.

I recently read We Were Eight Years in Power. It’s a collection of Coates’s essays from The Atlantic, placed into a common narrative. The common theme of Coates’s essays is black power and white backlash. This post is about his book, and I’ll include some page numbers in case anyone’s interested in following along.

But it’s not just about Coates’s book. I think it’s worth reading Ta-Nehisi Coates alongside one of his hardest-hitting critics internal to black political debate.

Coates is probably familiar to anyone in intellectual or political circles. But who’s Touré Reed?

Reed is a Professor at Illinois State University. He specializes in black American history and politics. He wrote a rather scathing, entirely fair, and largely accurate review of Coates’s book for Catalyst.

Coates and Reed represent competing approaches to political ideology and black politics. To some extent I think this cuts across both historical and contemporary black political debate. With a little creativity, it’s possible to draw a line from the time of W. E. B. Du Bois to competing contemporary visions.

Coates writes, convincingly, from his experience. But he’s long been rather cagey about his broader ideological project. When you put these essays together, I think Coates brings a much greater clarity. In particular, this is a clarity around experience and policy knowledge.

The Ideology of Ta-Nehisi Coates

Coates believes that racial oppression is at the core of American life. He calls white supremacy the “foundational crime of this country” (p. 114). This goes beyond the better known claim that race and class are separate, intersecting systems. In each essay, Coates presents a new domain in which race acts as the fundamental driver.

In the early essays, he focuses on internal black politics. Race divides Booker T. Washington and black nationalists, on the one hand, from W. E. B. DuBois and race integrationists (pp. 19-20), on the other. Coates is not the only recent writer who has pointed out some of the conservative aspects of black nationalism. See, for example, James Forman Jr.’s Locking Up Our Own. He might be the most famous writer, though, linking black nationalists to Booker T. Washington.

Race drives the Obamas – Barack (p. 39) and Michelle (pp. 50-55) – toward carving out unique political space. On Coates’s account, race is personally meaningful, but politically verboten, to the Obamas.

Race and Class

Beyond these obvious realms, Coates grounds class issues in race. Race is the fundamental force that drives gentrification. Its class-warfare aspects are grounded in a racial interest, accrued by (all) whites, from slavery (pp. 85-86). Slavery itself is fundamentally grounded in race. Coates acknowledges that white slave owners economically benefited from slavery, but he denies this a fundamental role. White supremacism, for Coates, comes before class (pp. 66-68).

Coates is at his best when he’s documenting racial inequities in American social policy. He places these inequities alongside references to his personal experience, which lends weight and persuasive power to his points. And the greatest strength of the book is that he takes on so many threads in one place. On these issues, Coates is both a fantastic journalist and essayist.

What I get from Coates’s book is an ideology, Specifically, one of the best defenses of that ideology I’ve read. The ideology is race-identitarianism, which I’ve written about before. Coates’s central claim, as I read him, is that a wide range of issues – from health care to housing to gentrification to slavery – are fundamentally driven by racial oppression and white supremacism.

Critique of Coates’s Race-Identitarianism

This brings us to Reed. Reed claims, correctly, that race simply can’t play the role Coates thinks it does. Reed refers to ‘racial ontology’, whereas I prefer ‘race-identitarianism’, but the critique is roughly the same. I’ve laid it out before. On Reed’s critique, Coates must mystify race, turning it into an all-powerful force that causes people to behave contrary to even their narrow, short-term interests.

The mystification of race leads Coates to some serious misdiagnoses of history, politics, and political strategy. One example Reed focuses on is Coates’s arguments against the Affordable Care Act and the Pell Grant program. Coates’s problems with these programs stem from what he calls their ‘universal’ nature. He thinks we should spend less time on ‘universal’ and ‘class-based’ programs like the ACA and more time on race.

The line of reasoning is bizarre, given that both programs clearly are not universal. They’re prime examples of means-tested programs, a hallmark of neoliberal legislation and very much the opposite of universal programs. The best solution to the problems with the ACA and Pell Grant programs is to support real universal programs. Programs like Medicare for All and free college.

Error Theory

Our only recourse here is to construct an error theory. How could Coates have gotten it so wrong on this? By ‘universal,’ he appears to mean something like ‘applied to members of all races.’ This is a definition of ‘universal’ that could only flow from an ideology like race-identitarianism (or ‘racial ontology’ in Reed’s terms). If you think race is the fundamental driver, and that racial groups are internally equal, but externally ranked, then the rest follows. ‘Universal’ must simply mean ‘cross-racial.’ That universal clearly doesn’t mean this shows a problem with the underlying ideology.

Another example is Coates’s objections to LBJ-era War on Poverty programs. He rightly points out that these programs have serious shortcomings. But the problem, as Reed points out, is that many of these programs looked too much like what Coates advocates. Many focused largely on race alone to the exclusion of the economic foundations of systems of black poverty. In particular, LBJ-era legislation refused to address automation and deindustrialization. I’m not necessarily fond of Reed’s remedies, which may make the opposite mistake. But some balancing of race qua race with the economic foundations of racial inequality was necessary for successful policymaking. LBJ didn’t get there.

Moving somewhat beyond Reed’s critique, what I find most frustrating about Coates’s essays is his discussion of working class and ‘middle class’ whiteness under neoliberalism. Coates repeatedly assumes, and even states directly, that whites are a universal social class that benefits from neoliberalism (e.g., p. 153, p. 182). The idea that working class and/or ‘middle class’ whites are better off now than when they worked in heavily unionized industries, had living wages, and had accessible healthcare is hard to take seriously. This claim calls for the same error theory as above.

Conclusion

If you followed the link above to Reed’s critique of Coates, you probably know the title of this post is a riff on the title of Reed’s essay. Maybe it’s not one of my more clever references. Reed saw a common thread between Barack Obama and Ta-Nehisi Coates. They have starkly contrasting rhetoric, but an underlying ideological continuity.

There’s little such continuity between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Touré Reed. I see a gulf between them. Coates defends race-identitarianism, while Reed argues for something like the social democracy of Bernie Sanders. These are two options, not especially compatible, for the future development of ideas and policies.

Postscript

I think people associate Ta-Nehisi Coates with two things. One is his case for reparations, which is one of the essays included in this book. The other is his very complicated relationship with Barack Obama and the Obama presidency.

I didn’t say much about either of these issues in this post. That’s intentional. I may have something to say about the issue of reparations later, and it’s a large enough issue to merit its own post. But I found, surprisingly, that the case for reparations wasn’t really essential to this book. The case flows pretty naturally from Coates’s general ideological orientation. That orientation stands or falls on its own merits, and likely with it Coates’s case for reparations. We might, of course, make different arguments for or against reparations.

The relationship with Obama is, by contrast, very important to the book. Coates references it in the title, of course. But he also grounds it in a deeper historical analogy to the period after the Civil War. Ultimately it’s an issue I didn’t feel as though I could discuss in a knowledgeable way. It’s both very personal for Coates and grounded in elements of black political and social history that go beyond my expertise.

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