Atlantic Magazine national correspondent Ta Nehisi Coates is a leading, if not the leading, Black spokesperson on racial issues. He recently received a MacArthur (Genius) award bringing his prestige to a new peak. His ascendancy may be bad news for Black Americans. Since 1980, 315,000 African Americans - who make up 13% of the population - have been murdered out of the total of 630,000. Blacks are four times as likely to be murder victims than whites! In spite of decreases since the mid'90's, rates remain high--12,253 homicide victims in 2013-- and many inner-city dwellers still fear being mugged or murdered.
Coates believes nothing much can be done to decrease the violence short of major structural changes, including reparations for slavery and racism, an end to all discrimination in housing, the workplace and school, and the release of virtually all African Americans prisoners. If we follow Coates's lead, years spent arguing for reparations, release of prisoners, and an end to all institutional racism could well mean the loss of thousands of black lives that may have been prevented.
Between the World and Me, his best-selling book, recipient of the 2015 National Book Award for non-fiction, is addressed to his 15 year old son. It was occasioned by numerous recent incidents of police killing innocent black people and going unpunished. Coates, like so many African Americans, fears for his son's safety.
Coates describes growing up in a high crime neighborhood: "To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked... before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape and disease." At age 11, a boy aimed a gun at him - "in his small eyes I saw a surging rage that could in an instant erase my body." Fortunately, the boy's friend pulled him away before he pulled the trigger. For Coates, the violence that surrounded him is "the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear." Because racism continues to oppress them, so many young men "transmuted their fear into rage... They would break your jaw, stomp your face, and shoot you down to feel that power, to revel in the might of their own bodies." In this deterministic view, there is little room for personal responsibility and social intervention to effect significant change as long as racism prevails.
Coates applies the same deterministic outlook towards the beatings he experienced at the hands of his father. He writes: "My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt . . . " Since his father's violence grew out of the same fears as the street muggers and murderers, like them he bears no personal responsibility and Coates manifests no anger at him.
In a June 30th Aspen Conference debate between Coates and New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, Landrieu agrees institutional changes are necessary, but as mayor, he has to deal with the immediate epidemic of violence killing young black men - cutting down on it is a major goal of his administration. It has led him to fund state of the art schools; recreation centers with music programs, swimming pools, basketball courts; job training; working with black churches; and connecting police and young blacks in a positive way.
Coates assures Landrieu - who is white - that he totally believes in his sincerity and commitment to saving black lives. But he is skeptical about it doing much good. When moderator Jonathan Goldberg asks what he would do if he were mayor, Coates responds: "I would immediately begin to find ways to get people out of prison . . . I include violent criminals; I include gun crimes."
For Coates, black men's incarceration rates result from structural racism. In an interview with Gwen Ifill, he points out that European countries and Canada also experienced a sharp increase in crime rates in the 1980's and early 1990's but did not turn to mass incarceration.
But foreign homicide rates and increases were never remotely comparable to the U.S. , so there was not the same public clamor for incarceration - it's one thing to fear having your wallet stolen or car broken into; it's quite another to fear for your life. Rates fluctuate but the U.S. is always the frontrunner. According to International Statistics on Crime and Justice in 2008 the U.S. homicide rate was 5.22 per 100,000; Canada 1.67, France 1.35, Germany .08.
According to Michael Javen Fortner, City University of New York Urban Studies professor and author of Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and Politics of Punishment, Coates's attribution of black incarceration to racism is an oversimplification. Fortner like Coates, grew up in a crime ridden black neighborhood - one of his brothers was stabbed to death. In the 1960's and 70's, he points out, crime had become a major concern; in 1969 the Manhattan N.A.A.C.P. warned that the "decent people of Harlem" had become the prey of "marauding hoodlums" and proposed that criminals, including muggers, pushers, vagrants and murderers, be subjected to steep criminal sentences. According to a 1973 New York Times poll approximately ¾ of blacks and Puerto Ricans favored life without parole for convicted drug dealers. African Americans who supported "tough on crime" policies could hardly have anticipated its disastrous effects on inner-city communities including unequal enforcement of drug laws, movement away from preventive programs in favor of juvenile imprisonment, and growth of a prison-industrial complex profiting financially from mass imprisonment of black males.
If, as Coates claims, nothing much can be done to move young black inner city males away from violence and drugs, how did he succeed where so many failed? He explains in a Huffington Post interview with Nico Pitney:
"I had two tremendous parents . . . My parents believed in reading . . . there were books everywhere. The books were, for the most part, about African-Americans and about people of African descent -- they were tools for me to understand why my world looked the way it did . . ." Coates's father, a research librarian at Howard University, and founder of Black Classic Press was in his youth, a Black Panther Party Local Captain. Coates notes, "I read through all of Dad's books about the Panthers . . ."
Ta-Nehisi Coates's two major demands strikingly resemble the Black Panther Party's 1967 Ten-Point Program which includes:
"We want freedom for all Black and oppressed people now held in U.S, federal, state, county city and military prisons and jails." And reparations: "Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as redistribution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities."
When Gwen Ifill, in her PBS interview, asked Coates for his solutions to decreasing black homicide rates, echoing his June 2014 Atlantic article, The Case for Reparations, he responded "The first thing to do . . . is reparations."
A demand for reparations will not help inner-city African Americans. While it is tragic that the end of slavery was not followed by decades of intensive reparations, the likelihood of reparations being enacted now is nil.
In keeping with the Panthers' perspective, Coates did not admire Martin Luther King's non-violent Civil Rights Movement." Freedom Marchers, Freedom Riders and Freedom Summers" struck him as "ridiculous," he tells us in Between The World and Me.
He remains unimpressed with the changes the Civil Rights Movement brought about.As long as deep structural changes have not taken place and racism remains, whatever advances are made are not significant. So instead of learning from his own experience, he shows no interest in programs which encourage parents to talk and read to their young children, or in working to get young black males to do as well in school as their sisters who are far more likely to attend college.
Coates accepts statistics indicating violent crime is much higher among Blacks than the rest of the population, but rejects the term "black on black crime." People commit crimes in their neighborhoods, so whites kill whites and blacks kill blacks, but no one talks about white on white crime. This linguistic point - which ignores that the terminology reflects Blacks being four times more likely to be the victims of homicide - combined with his lack of focus on what can be done now, lends support to the aversion that so many left wingers, especially whites, have to acknowledging black crime. In a January 8, 2015 AlterNet blog, Adam Hudson writes: "Ongoing protests against police brutality have revealed how distorted the American discourse on crime is. The biggest myth animating this discourse is black criminality ... the notion that black people commit more crime, and therefore deserve more heavy-handed policing." Hudson's contrary to fact assertion about black crime is hardly unique. I have frequently heard similar comments from fellow left-wingers. The "discourse" Hudson refers to is that of right wingers like Rudy Giuliani who change the topic to the much higher victimization resulting from black on black crime whenever police violence is brought up.
So for many if not most on the left, the focus is entirely on what to do about police violence against black people. But anyone genuinely concerned about black lives needs to address both police violence and black on black violence. Unfortunately Coates has facilitated ignoring the latter.
While Coates occasionally expresses some approval of steps taken or recommended to ameliorate the lot of Black Americans short of a complete end to racism, his overarching message is deeply pessimistic. In keeping with this he tells his son, "I do not believe that we can stop them, [powerful white racists]" from continuing the racism that oppresses black people. "And still I urge you to struggle . . . for the memory of your ancestors . . . "