Did you see Ta-Nehisi Coates on The Daily Show last night? He was talking about his new book, Between the World and Me, which everyone in the office (okay, maybe just Jen and Sean, but it FEELS like everybody) has read. Except me. I was gonna wait to pick it up until the week before Coates speaks at Seattle Arts and Lectures (October 29—snatch up them tickets while you still can), but after watching him casually dropping depressing thought-bombs on Jon Stewart, there’s no way I can wait that long.
In their conversation, Coates argues against the popular but unfair notion that people of color can escape the history of violence perpetuated against them if they work twice as hard and do twice as much as white people. “That didn’t help Tamir Rice,” Coates says, nor did it help countless others.
People are reluctant to accept this notion, Coates says, because it rejects the bedtime story of American exceptionalism that helps us go to sleep at night:
If you accept, as I argue in this book, that the plunder of black communities isn’t a bump along the road, but that it is, in fact, the road itself—that you can’t have America without enslavement, without Jim Crow, without everything that came after that—it makes it very, very hard to preach to other countries and say listen, ‘We are the un-besmirched land of the free.’
This idea that there isn’t an America without the plunder of black communities is discussed in real terms not only in Coates’s essay about the case for reparations, but also in a debate that featured the late Christopher Hitchens, who argued:
We can’t make up for the middle passage, for the uncounted millions of people who were captured and raped and tortured before they even made it across the Atlantic to be other peoples’ property… But in my hometown of Washington, DC, there’s hardly one official brick piled on another that wasn’t piled there by unpaid labor under the whip. And that dead labor becomes dead capital, and dead souls, dead money, and it’s piled in the Treasury Department… And it’s backpay, and it’s owed, and it’s overdue.
The other thing that interested me was Coates’s rebuttal of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous phrase, “The arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.” Coates suggests that it bends not toward justice, but toward chaos. Coates says we have to respect individual arcs. Look at Michael Brown’s arc. Look at Sandra Bland’s. When we take this view, it’s unclear whose arc gets the privilege of bending toward justice.
