Why everyone (except Tariq Toure) is wrong about Ta-Nehisi Coates, Part One

**This is part one of an I’m-not-sure-how-many-chunks-I-should-break-this-into-for-readability series.

When church member shared Ta-Nehesi Coates’ piece, Bernie Sanders and the liberal imagination with me on January 25th, I initially had this to say:

“Lillian*,

Thanks so much for sharing this with all of us! I enjoyed reading it and found myself challenged on several points as a Bernie supporter. Here's the problem though: Bernie Sanders is not a radical. If Bernie Sanders had run in 1992 or 1996 on the same platform he is pushing now, he would have been viewed as a populist, and life was, by every conceivable metric, better for black America then.

Bernie Sanders advocates for raising the minimum wage to $15/hr, which most of the country supports. But if wages were raised commensurate to the cost of living increased implemented since 1980, minimum wage would be around $25/ hour.

He advocates for making college free, which it is, in the majority of the developed world. Again, this is a populist idea that has been supported on both sides of the aisle.

If he ran in Canada or Great Britain, he would be in the Labour Party. And he would fall slightly right of center on that.

The fact that Bernie Sanders is viewed as a Leftist radical just serves to underscore how far the middle has moved in the past two decades. Ta-Nehisi Coates cites Abraham Lincoln as an example in his article, and while he pays tribute to the President's reluctance to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, he downplays one highly relevant detail of Lincoln's campaign: Abraham Lincoln was seen as a Populist. He gained his primary nomination by being more electable than the 'radical' William Henry Seward.

What we need is a truly radical leftist in the race; someone advocating for $30/ hr minimum wage, free healthcare, college, and graduate schooling, a national review of the legal code, tax code and public educational curriculum, salary caps on all companies who operate primarily on United States soil, reparations for Native Americans, Blacks, and Latinos, immediate release of all imprisoned persons, legalization of all drugs, supervised injection sites, an immediate redirection of 50% of all military spending directly to veterans, the dismantling of any banks that have been in existence longer than twenty years, and a host of other broad, sweeping changes that must be made for America to shift from a 'thing based society to a person based society'.

I guess what I am saying is I agree with the overall point of the article, but not the premise. I think I just discovered my next blog post.”

I was wrong. I was guilty of that infraction of which I so readily accuse others, forming an unqualified opinion. A few days later, pieces started coming out on Jacobin, Mother Jones, and even the Atlantic that had me feeling like I missed a beat, so I went back to TNC, and, sure enough, there was more to the story.

Turns out the piece I read first was just a chaser to wash down the stinging bite of January 19th’s Why precisely is Bernie Sanders against reparations?

There are about thirty reasons why I love this piece, but for your sake, dear reader, I’ll only share three:

1. TNC is the king of dry delivery clapbacks. Watch him ‘do wut it do’: “Sanders says the chance of getting reparations through Congress is “nil,” a correct observation which could just as well apply to much of the Vermont senator’s own platform.”
2. TNC drops words like Wayne freestyles-- with the bald faced braggadocio of a man who exists in a league of his own: “if Bernie Sanders truly believes that victims of the Tulsa pogrom deserved nothing...” I’ll save you a click. Pogrom means an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group.
3. TNC is damn good at his job. A writer thinks before they write. A great writer thinks on the page, edits, and then thinks again. A social thinker writes for the specific purpose of expanding the Overton window on social issues.

Coates does this in both pieces by providing the public with more questions than answers. The proof of his genius is in the twenty plus articles that have come out so far this month on reparations. Agree or disagree, America is talking about something that was still unthinkable in most circles last Christmas.

I remember when our church first considered reading The Case for Reparations. It was in 2014. Our (now) youth pastor had joined the Black History Month committee and she suggested that maybe we should read an article instead of a book.

I was initially taken aback. I felt that after all the wine and cheese book studies and small group dinners I had been subjected to in the past five years, the ‘white folk’ could read a book instead of an article about black life.

That’s the thing about being black in a WASP denomination*. The war is slow and endless, waged over coffee or chardonnay, and every compromise tends to feel like a concession.

An article, no matter how long, felt like a slippery slope to me in 2014. If we read ‘A Case’ that year, what would stop us from reading an even shorter essay the next year? I was certain that by 2020 we would be having a small group dinner discussion on Langston Hughes’ Black Workers. We took a vote. I voted for Henrietta Lacks. I was wrong then too.

Not wrong in wanting to read a book instead of an article. Our snapchat society discourages the growth of print media. Books, even when they are produced, are being read on computer screens and readers with alarming regularity.

**Mini- rant alert:

Have we learned NOTHING for Fahrenheit 451? When books go, society follows in their wake.

Anyway, this year we reconsidered TNC’s controversial essay. In the wake of #TamirRice, we found our racial tolerance stretched thin already, the “litany of black bodies” proliferated by online and cable news outlets pushing both blacks and whites towards an (inevitably violent) implosion. Did we really want to push the envelope by bringing money into the conversation?

That was around the time that it finally clicked for me. Coates, Baldwin, Kitwana, Welsing, Alexander-- even Kendrick and Queen B were all parts of an incomplete analysis, they were all reaching across the ether to tell us, in their way: Change the conversation.

We (black Americans) can no longer afford to allow our white brothers and sisters to stumble through life like a herd of blindfolded elephants tromping through the jungle.

James Baldwin’s words from Letter to my nephew, poignantly delivered by Chris Rock at last month’s #MLKNow Livestream keep replaying themselves in my mind:

“You must accept them, and you must accept them with love, for these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history in which they do not understand. And until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”

“If the word ‘integration’ means anything, this is what it means: that we, will love shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are. To cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”

“We can make America what it must become.”

“We cannot be free until they are free.”

We cannot be free until they are free. We, black, white, brown, and glitter, will never be free having a conversation that is based upon a lie:

We no longer live in a white supremacist society.

... Stay tuned for Part II, coming soonish...