If you’re looking for hope, you might, as I did, find a little in Jason D. Hill’s open letter to Ta-Nehisis Coates at Commentary. Here’s a snippet:
Mr. Coates, you write that the American Dream is the enemy of so much that is good: “The Dream thrives on generalizations, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers. The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing.†The pursuit of this Dream saddens you and all the people in America you describe as being lost “in a specious hope.†The Dream, you say, was built on “the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white,†and that progress was built on looting and violence. You write: “‘White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. However it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, ‘white people’ would cease to exist for want of reasons.â€
I am saddened by your conviction that white people wield such a great deal of metaphysical power over the exercise of your own agency. In making an enemy of the Dream that is a constitutive feature of American identity, you have irrevocably alienated yourself from the redemptive hope, the inclusive unity, and the faith and charity that are necessary for America to move ever closer to achieving moral excellence. Sadder still, you have condemned the unyielding confidence in self that the Dream inspires.
The portrait that he paints is a lot more like what I see around me than the picture of Dorian Gray that others are portraying.
As I’ve noted before, I’m an empirical sort of guy and I don’t expect you just to take my word for it. Look at the direction the canoes are paddling.
I am always leery of explaining other’s motivations, essentially pseudo-psychology, but this is the internet, so what the heck. It seems like Coates becomes more bitter as he becomes more financially successful. Have to wonder if he feels that his early deprivations and troubles were due to his color and those become harder to accept as he experiences what he, apparently, thinks he could have been experiencing all along absent that bias.
Steve
Memory says Coates just spent 4-5 years living in Paris. Apparently he was treated as just-this-guy-who-happens-to-be-black, without having to be especially obsequious to the cops, or having to persuade his neighbors he was not peddling drugs, or recently released from prison, or awaiting trial for rape, and so on. It’s given him a skewed perspective on his natural place in society