Yesterday Fredrik deBoer gave us a provocative take on the way Ta-Nehisi Coates’ writing—especially his recent argument for reparations—has been received by Coates’ white, left-leaning readers:
At its worst, though, it’s an example of a really ugly tendency of white readers to treat black writers as a blank canvas on which to work out their own personal shit about race. Years ago, a commenter on Coates’s blog took this to a certain extreme: “I wish that I could articulate how this article reverberated in my soul. Better, I wish that you, TNC could feel that reverberation, and I could read how you described it.” I don’t know what that is. But it’s not real praise and it’s not real respect. The first respect to pay a writer is the first to pay to any human being, and that’s to treat them as their own particular human self.
If you’ve followed Coates over the years—and if you know other people that do too—then you’ll be familiar enough with this phenomenon. It’s very real and very recognizable. When deBoer described it, I was just happy that I wasn’t crazy—that I wasn’t imaging the “smarm.” It seemed so obvious, and yet no one pointed it out.
I don’t want to quibble or argue with deBoer’s analysis. But I do suspect there is more to the smarm than racial politics and liberal guilt. Like deBoer, when I read Coates, I often find myself checking my enthusiasm, trying not to become another sycophant. I love Coates’ writing; he’s perhaps the only pundit that makes use of academic history with any success and consistency. And he’s even better than the historians he reads at making American history relevant and morally resonant. But at the end of the day, Coates is not a historian. He’s a moralist, like his hero James Baldwin. (I know there are vaguely negative connotations to being a moralist, but I mean none here; it’s simply the only roughly accurate word for Coates.)
In an era in which so much of our highbrow political discourse is couched in (allegedly) morally neutral, technocratic wonk-speak, it’s refreshing to read Coates—to read about what’s right, not just what works. It’s no surprise that Ezra Klein is one of Coates’ biggest fans: if you spend all day reading and editing quantitative analyses of policy debate, well, then, at the end of the day, reading Coates must be pure tonic. That’s not to say that Coates doesn’t have his own sense of empirics or that he’s wishy-washy with evidence. It just means that he was never seduced by the promise of wonky centrism—which says that deep political and moral disagreements can be resolved with a pragmatic functionalism. If you remember the Coates-Chait debate from a few months back, then you saw these modes of discourse in action. In fact, it’s what made the whole debate so frustrating. Chait and Coates’ disagreements were comparatively slight, and yet—iteration after iteration of the debate—they talked past each other. Chait was forward looking and pragmatic, concerned primarily with the most effective ways of ameliorating the effects of white supremacy. Coates, on the other hand, saw that the debate itself had a political and moral valence: why, in 2014, were we still having a debate about “cultures of poverty” at all?
Don’t get me wrong, technocratism has much to offer: in fact, in a pluralistic political culture we can hardly do without it. Pluralist politics requires, to a certain extent, a discourse that is intelligible to multiple political ideologies, and, in 2014, wonk-speak seems to be the only language that meats that criteria. Technocratism—through its emphasis on empiricism—also imposes a certain honesty and rigor on discourse, which is so sadly lacking in American politics outside the blogosphere. But wonks too often succumb to a naïve faith in the power of numbers and studies and facts to substitute for justice. As everyone knows, intuitively or not, arguments about efficiency always presuppose aims and goals—aims and goals that are normative, not empiric.
Coates never forgets that, and it’s perhaps why we devour his writing time and time again.
