How Ta-Nehisi Coates Gives Whiteness Power
- 7 years ago
How Ta-Nehisi Coates Gives Whiteness Power
“It took generations to make them white, and it will take more to unmake them.”
So expansive is the racial netting we are wrapped in, Mr. Coates writes, “it’s likely
that should white supremacy fall, the means by which that happens might be unthinkable to those of us bound by present realities and politics.” Elsewhere in the book he notes “that white supremacy was so foundational to this country that it would not be defeated in my lifetime, my child’s lifetime, or perhaps ever.”
Amazingly, despite his near godlike status within white liberal circles, in the collection’s finest essay, “The Case for Reparations,” originally published in The Atlantic in 2014, Mr. Coates worries
that “today, progressives are loath to invoke white supremacy as an explanation for anything.” It is a jaw-dropping sentence if you take even a moment to consider the current discourse in progressive circles.
This week he published “We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy,” a collection of essays bridging the Obama
and Trump eras, and here Mr. Coates deepens his vision of American sonderweg.
The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so
that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return.” The book won Mr. Coates millions of readers and fans, many of whom are white.
And I feel it not just because of the black people swept away but because I know
that “gentrification” is but a more pleasing name for white supremacy, is the interest on enslavement, the interest on Jim Crow, the interest on redlining, compounding across the years, and these new urbanites living off of that interest are, all of them, exulting in a crime.
“It took generations to make them white, and it will take more to unmake them.”
So expansive is the racial netting we are wrapped in, Mr. Coates writes, “it’s likely
that should white supremacy fall, the means by which that happens might be unthinkable to those of us bound by present realities and politics.” Elsewhere in the book he notes “that white supremacy was so foundational to this country that it would not be defeated in my lifetime, my child’s lifetime, or perhaps ever.”
Amazingly, despite his near godlike status within white liberal circles, in the collection’s finest essay, “The Case for Reparations,” originally published in The Atlantic in 2014, Mr. Coates worries
that “today, progressives are loath to invoke white supremacy as an explanation for anything.” It is a jaw-dropping sentence if you take even a moment to consider the current discourse in progressive circles.
This week he published “We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy,” a collection of essays bridging the Obama
and Trump eras, and here Mr. Coates deepens his vision of American sonderweg.
The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so
that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return.” The book won Mr. Coates millions of readers and fans, many of whom are white.
And I feel it not just because of the black people swept away but because I know
that “gentrification” is but a more pleasing name for white supremacy, is the interest on enslavement, the interest on Jim Crow, the interest on redlining, compounding across the years, and these new urbanites living off of that interest are, all of them, exulting in a crime.