What would happen if large numbers of Americans actually understood the federal tax code? All sorts of questions might arise.
Why do we tax capital at half the rate of labor? That might be the first one.
Why is it fair that some inherited-money loser living off the interest from an investment portfolio he didn’t create pays half the taxes per dollar that you do? You get up every morning to go to work. He stays home, smokes weed, and watches online porn. You get hit twice as hard on April 15. He’s being rewarded, while you’re being punished. Is he twice as necessary as you are? Does he contribute twice as much to America?
Maybe he does. Maybe the people who wrote the tax code could explain precisely how. Maybe not. Either way, you can see how a conversation like that might quickly spin out of control and become a threat to the existing order. Better not to have it in the first place. Better to change the subject away from economics entirely.
Identity politics is a handy way to do that. It’s not a coincidence that since the life expectancy of working-class whites in America has declined, elite attacks on working-class whites have escalated. White men now kill themselves at about ten times the rate of black and Hispanic women. Yet white men are consistently framed as the oppressors, particularly blue-collar white men.
This happens to be the only group in America whose average wages have declined consistently over decades. Their privilege is nevertheless a threat to the rest of us, we’re told. They’ve managed to destroy entire cities very few of them have ever been to, from Detroit to Newark to Baltimore. They lower test scores in schools they don’t attend. They cause poor nutrition, asthma, and broken families in black neighborhoods, and in their spare time exacerbate global warming. They may be dying off before their time, but working-class white men are immensely powerful.
Who came up with this story line? It’s hard to know for sure, but you’d have to guess it was someone trying to cover his tracks. If you’d failed in your responsibility to the people you were in change of helping, if they started dying younger or found their drinking water contaminated with lead, you’d be very concerned about being blamed for that. You’d want people to blame one another instead. The quickest way to control a population is to turn it against itself. Divide and conquer. That’s how the British ruled India.
If you wanted to run a country for the benefit of the people who lived there, by contrast, you’d do the opposite of this. You’d deemphasize racial differences. You’d understand that in a society composed of many different ethnic groups, tribalism is the greatest threat to unity and order. Of course there will always be racism, because that’s the nature of people, and you’d work to discourage it. But you would resist using the existence of racism as an excuse for your failures. You would never, for example, blame an entire racial group for the sins of its ancestors. That would serve only to embitter and divide the population. It might make your job easier in the short term. But over time it would wreck your country. The ruling class once understood this.
In May 2017, Harvard University held its first ever segregated graduation ceremony. Black students have attended Harvard since just after the Civil War, and for almost 150 years they graduated alongside their white classmates, a fact the school was proud of. But in 2017, the school discarded that tradition and created something called Black Commencement, held two days before the regular graduation ceremony. Hundreds attended. Spoken-word performers reminded the audience, “we don’t need the white men nor white girl pity.”
Press coverage was adulatory. Boston’s local NPR affiliate described the event as an opportunity for black students “to celebrate their triumphs and remember the obstacles they have faced.” The Boston Globe agreed. “Unlike the clichéd send-offs often delivered at commencements,” the newspaper explained, “the speeches at this event spoke to the political and social concerns that students of color face at an elite institution.”
It’s hard to overstate how strange it is to see establishment figures celebrating a black-only graduation ceremony. For generations, school integration was the one issue that united every right-thinking person in America. The educated class fought segregation everywhere they found it. They celebrated when the Brown v. Board of Education decision abolished “separate but equal” schools nationwide. They supported James Meredith when he integrated the University of Mississippi. They despised George Wallace and other political leaders who fought to keep black and white students apart.
They weren’t satisfied with schools, either. Idealistic young members of the ruling class led the integration of restaurants, hotels, theaters, and public transportation. They argued that all human beings were equal in dignity and rights. Everyone deserved to be treated equally in the eyes of the law.
They were right about all of this. Racial segregation was wrong, and not just because black schools tended to get less state funding. Segregation divided people on the basis of things they couldn’t control. It suggested that a person’s race, an entirely immutable characteristic, was the most important thing about him, and should determine how he was treated by others. Segregation was dehumanizing. It reduced the individual to a faceless member of a group.
It was also, its critics often pointed out, absurd. Beneath the skin, we’re all the same. Civic leaders said that constantly in the 1970s and ’80s. They recited Martin Luther King speeches to drive home the point.
For decades, racial integration was the central project of American elites. Some may believe it still is. But a remarkable transformation has taken place: Elites no longer oppose segregation. They no longer insist on treating all races equally. Many instead call for segregation. They consider race the center of human identity. They demand that individuals be exalted or punished because of their skin color.
In the spring of 2018, CNN interrupted its ongoing coverage of the Russian plot to undermine democracy with a breaking story. According to several sources, Trump’s interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, may have once endorsed the principle of meritocratic hiring. Zinke, a former Navy SEAL, apparently said out loud that diversity was less important than “having the right person for the right job.”
CNN made it clear that this was a scandal, if not a threat to the country. Skills-based hiring? In 2018? The network ran this ominous chyron beneath the coverage: “Zinke angers many by saying it’s more important to find the best people.”
Washington erupted. Zinke’s spokeswoman did her best to quell the fury. She assured reporters that the rumors were false. Secretary Zinke, she said, absolutely does not hire employees on the basis of their skills or ability or experience. Instead, Zinke uses criteria like genetics and physical appearance to make the call. Ryan Zinke believes in diversity.
Journalists remained skeptical. “Zinke has said he cares about excellence, and what’s important is having the right person for the right job,” CNN reminded viewers. “Statements like this reinforce the dated and bigoted thinking that diversity threatens quality.” These ideas “threaten the security of the country.”
Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, recently returned from an acquittal in his federal corruption trial, released a statement equating meritocratic hiring with racism. Zinke, Menendez said, is trying to create a “lily-white department.”
If you’ve been following the evolution of elite views on race, this is all a little bewildering. It is precisely the opposite of what people like Bob Menendez were saying forty years ago. Meritocratic attitudes were once considered the answer to racism, not a manifestation of it. People should be judged on what they do, not on how they look or who their parents were or what their ancestors did. Our elites said they didn’t believe in collective punishment or reward. They stood with the individual. That’s why they opposed segregation.
In the fall of 2016, a protest broke out at the University of California, Berkeley. Protests over racial questions are common at Berkeley, and have long been. The campus was the site of some of the first student demonstrations against racial segregation in the early 1960s. But this protest was different. It was staged in favor of segregation.
Activists raised a banner that read, “Fight 4 Spaces of Color.” They formed a human chain to block white students from entering the campus. “Whose University? Our University,” they chanted. They demanded public spaces from which heterosexual whites could be excluded.
At the time, Berkeley already supported a number of race-centered facilities. The school funded an Equity Resource Center, the Fannie Lou Hamer Black Resource Center, the African American Student Development Center, the office of Native American Student Development, the Chicanx/Latinx Student Development, and the Asian/Pacific American Student Development space.
These facilities were designed for students of color, but they weren’t officially limited to them. The protesters demanded space entirely off-limits to white people. Whites are a shrinking minority at Berkeley, at just 24 percent of undergraduates, but according to the protesters, any was too many. They demanded a segregated meeting area within the university’s MLK student union. Nobody acknowledged the irony of banning people on the basis of skin color from a building named after Martin Luther King.
At the University of Michigan, students followed suit. They called for school administrators to “create a permanent designated space on central campus for Black students and students of color to organize, and do social justice work.” Activists criticized the existing “multicultural center” for not being “solely dedicated to community organizing and social justice work specifically for people of color.” They wanted a black-only space, a segregated space. Similar demonstrations took place all over the country.
Once colleges accepted segregated public spaces, there was no reason not to segregate living quarters as well. The University of Colorado–Boulder now has housing exclusively for black students. So does the University of Connecticut. California State University, Los Angeles, maintains what it calls “black focused” housing. Cornell College in Iowa has a dormitory for black students, which the school describes as “a place of refuge for anyone who has felt discriminated against because of their race, sexuality, spirituality, gender, or ideas as a human being.”
The University of Iowa offers a “Young, Gifted, and Black” community for students who seek to “strengthen knowledge and empowerment of Black students.” Stanford has “ethnic theme dorms” reserved for Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, and black students.
Reed College, a liberal arts school in Oregon known for progressive politics, is at the forefront of segregating minority students. According to the school’s website, its “Students of Color Community” offers nonwhite students a place “to heal together from systemic white supremacy, recover the parts of ourselves and our cultures that have been stolen through colonization, and dream new visions as we build vibrant, loving community together.”
While the race politics at most colleges are driven by students, many school administrators have become enthusiastic supporters of segregation on campus. When a group of black students at Northwestern refused to allow two white students to sit at their lunch table, the school’s president, Morton Schapiro, defended the exclusion in the pages of the Washington Post.
“Is this really so scandalous?” wrote Schapiro in an op-ed, apparently forgetting the bitter battles liberals once fought to integrate lunch counters. “Many groups eat together in the cafeteria, but people seem to notice only when the students are black. Athletes often eat with athletes; fraternity and sorority members with their Greek brothers and sisters; a cappella group members with fellow singers; actors with actors; marching band members with marching band members; and so on. . . . The white students, while well-meaning, didn’t have the right to unilaterally decide when uncomfortable learning would take place.”
In other words, there’s nothing wrong with segregation. It’s the natural order; all groups want it, and you can understand why. Even eating lunch with members of another race is, as Schapiro put it, “uncomfortable.” And that’s now okay with the American establishment.
Segregationists in the American South once made similar points. In his 1947 book, Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization, Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi noted that it is “to the credit of the black or Negro race in the United States that no right-thinking and straight-thinking Negro desires that the blood of his black race shall be contaminated or destroyed by the commingling of his blood with either the white or yellow races.” Bilbo would have applauded as Morton Schapiro defended segregated lunch tables.
If Brown v. Board ruled that school segregation was illegal, how are any of these modern efforts to divide people by race legal? They quite possibly aren’t. In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled that Bob Jones University should lose tax-exempt status because of its policy against interracial dating. The justices explained that the government had a legitimate interest in ending discriminatory practices and “eradicating racial discrimination.”
Subsequent court decisions have upheld affirmative action, a practice that by definition discriminates on the basis of race, but only on the grounds that giving preference to nonwhite students furthers the goal of integration. Writing for the Court’s majority in Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor cited the “educational benefits that flow from student body diversity” and noted that “the skills needed in today’s increasingly global marketplace can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas, and viewpoints.”
You could debate whether O’Connor was right about the global marketplace. You can’t argue that segregating campus life along racial lines “increases exposure to widely diverse” people. It does just the opposite. There is nothing diverse about segregation.
For generations, it was an article of faith among elites that integration was the key to racial harmony. Bigotry grows from ignorance. That was the assumption. The more personal exposure you have to different groups, the more you’ll come to see that everyone’s basically the same. It may or may not have been wholly true, but it was less divisive than the alternative.
You no longer hear much from our leaders about the importance of racial harmony. Almost nobody claims we’re really all the same beneath the skin. The emphasis is on our differences. That’s the essence of the diversity agenda.
Not surprisingly, that has led to an explosion of racial hostility in American life. It was once considered the gravest possible sin to criticize someone for his skin color. It is now regarded as a sign of enlightenment. It’s everywhere, especially on campuses:
In 2015, a sociology professor at the University of Memphis announced that Dylann Roof, the deranged Charleston church shooter, was just another example of “white people acting how they’re conditioned to act.”
In December 2016, a professor at Drexel tweeted, “All I want for Christmas is white genocide.” Sarcasm? “To clarify,” he wrote, “when the whites were massacred during the Haitian revolution, that was a good thing indeed.”
A professor at the University of Hawaii posted antiwhite messages on Facebook, writing that she doesn’t “trust white people.” The next day, she explained: “Cis white het people need to lose more. Cis het white people don’t know how to not be in control. They want to even control their dismantling of privilege.”
A professor at the University of Pittsburgh observed that “we’re all screwed because white people are in charge.”
The State University of New York at Binghamton offered resident assistants training on “StopWhitePeople2k16.”
“I sometimes don’t want to be white either,” explained Dr. Ali Michael of the University of Pennsylvania. Michael was referring to the story of Rachel Dolezal, the racial poseur forced to resign from the NAACP after it was revealed that she was pretending to be black. In a piece for the Huffington Post, Michael empathized with Dolezal, saying she faced her own crushing guilt about her whiteness. Michael said she finally concluded “that I couldn’t have biological children because I didn’t want to propagate my privilege biologically.”
In May 2017, a black professor specializing in “critical race theory” at Texas A&M posted a video in which he speculated about when it’s okay to kill white people.
In June 2017, soon after the politically motivated shooting of Republican congressman Steve Scalise, a sociology professor at Trinity College in Connecticut called white people “inhuman assholes” and tweeted the hashtag #LetThemFuckingDie. Outraged alumni withheld their donations. More than a dozen accepted students withdrew their applications. Yet the school didn’t even seriously consider firing the professor.
At Evergreen State College in Washington State, students informed a white biology professor that he would have to leave campus along with his white colleagues, as an expression of atonement for their race. The professor refused to leave, on the grounds that people ought to be treated as individuals regardless of their color. Students threatened him with violence. He later resigned from Evergreen.
Several smallish, right-of-center news organizations picked up the Evergreen story. Most of the media ignored it. A white professor driven from his job by threats of racial violence? That didn’t fit the approved story line. Instead, news organizations ran headlines like these:
Time: The Revenge of the White Men
Huffington Post: An Open Letter to White Men in America (hint: it’s not a love letter)
Atlantic: This Is How We Lost to the White Man
CNN: What Happens When the White Guys Are Back in Charge?
New York Daily News: How White Privilege Is Allowing White Men Across the Country to Assault Black Men and Beat the Rap
San Diego City Beat: God Give Me the Confidence of a Mediocre White Man
One progressive news site, Salon, started what was in effect an antiwhite news beat. It produced headlines like “White Men Are the Face of Terror,” “White Guys Are Killing Us,” and “The Plague of Angry White Men.”
Concerns about white racism reached levels of clinical hysteria in American media after Donald Trump was elected. In a single year, 2017, news organizations ran stories about how the following objects, icons, trends, or consumer products were effectively racist:
Credit scores
Ice cream truck songs
Car insurance
Halloween costumes
Milk
Disney movies
Dr. Seuss books
The antisegregation novel To Kill a Mockingbird
Tanning
Mathematics
Makeup
Science
Shakespeare
English grammar
Facial recognition technology
SAT test
Bitcoin
Wendy’s
Pornography
Military camouflage
The nuclear family
The song “Jingle Bells”
Lucky Charms cereal
Pumpkin spice latte
Lacrosse
Star Wars
Legalized marijuana
Coca-Cola
White babies
The Oscars
Wal-Mart
Background checks
Art history
Founding Fathers
McDonald’s
The Bible
Craft beer
There were many more. Some of these stories may have been sophisticated parodies that made it past sleepy editors. Most were deadly serious. In order to justify coverage like this, you have to show that white men pose an imminent and existential threat to everyone else. Evidence for that is in short supply, so the press highlighted what they claimed was an epidemic of hate crimes. Many of those turned out to be hoaxes.
At SUNY Albany in 2016, three female black students claimed that a white mob had assaulted them while riding a public bus. The school held a public rally on their behalf. Hillary Clinton tweeted her support. A subsequent police investigation revealed the truth: the three girls had in fact started a fight and attacked the white students. They invented a fake hate crime to avoid being punished. It took police weeks to discover what actually happened, in part because the white students were too afraid to contact the police themselves.
Meanwhile, at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, a Muslim woman claimed white men attacked her and ripped off her hijab. In Philadelphia, a black woman claimed that four white men had called her the n-word and “black bitch,” and threatened to shoot her to celebrate Trump’s victory. At the University of Minnesota, an Asian student said she was confronted by a white racist who demanded she “go back to Asia.”
It is not clear that any of this actually happened. Dozens of other supposed hate crimes turned out to be manufactured as well. The rate of fake hate crimes appeared to outpace the rate of real ones. Yet all of these stories received extensive and credulous coverage before they were unmasked.
The narrative was clear: buried in the heart of every white person is a vial of deadly poison called racism. There is no remedy for this. Whites are born with hate built in. White racism is the indelible legacy of sins that white people committed generations ago.
This is collective race guilt. Emphasizing it eases the conscience of a certain sort of white elite. It’s cathartic. It feels like an exercise in virtue, a small way to even the score. Powerful white elites secretly love to hear they’re naughty.
That’s why Ta-Nehisi Coates is their favorite intellectual.
Coates was born and raised in a tough part of West Baltimore known for crime and gangs. His father was a member of the Black Panther Party who had seven children by four women. The senior Coates also was the founder of Black Classic Press, a still-active publishing house focused on books aimed at black Americans.
Coates was an introverted boy who loved comic books. He failed eleventh-grade English but nevertheless was able to enroll in Howard University. He attended for five years but failed to graduate, in part because he failed classes on British and American literature.
Despite these setbacks, Coates launched a stuttering career in journalism. In the span of a few years, he was hired and fired by the Philadelphia Weekly, Village Voice, and Time. He made ends meet by working as a food deliveryman. In 2008 he landed a job with the Atlantic. His career took off.
To understand the Coates phenomenon, it’s important to understand his audience. Coates’s writings focus heavily on history, poverty, and crime, all from a black perspective. But his audience isn’t black readers, the poor, or historians. Coates’s most enthusiastic fans are affluent white professionals who live in coastal cities. Coates is the court theologian of the ruling class. That’s not really his fault. Coates is just making a living. It’s still embarrassing.
New York Times critic A. O. Scott called Coates’s writing “essential, like water or air,” suggesting the words aren’t merely eloquent, but sacred. “Don’t know if in U.S. commentary there is a more beautiful writer than Ta-Nehisi Coates,” Rachel Maddow once enthused. A New Yorker profile concluded that a “Coates byline promises something different: intelligent ideas expressed beautifully, sentences that hit you like body blows.” Author Jordan Michael Smith declared Coates “the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States.”
Coates’s breakout article was titled “This Is How We Lost to the White Man,” a 2008 piece assessing Bill Cosby’s effort to promote better parenting in the black community. The article displayed the two chief hallmarks of Coates’s future essays: tremendous length (it was nearly seven thousand words long) and a meandering structure that never quite gets to the point.
“This Is How We Lost to the White Man” won numerous awards. Since its publication, every new Coates doorstopper has been met with escalating levels of ecstasy in Washington, New York, and Martha’s Vineyard.
In 2014, Coates published what remains his most famous article, “The Case for Reparations.” Over the course of more than fifteen thousand words, Coates describes America exclusively through the lens of racial grievance. Every significant fact of American history, Coates concludes, is a consequence of white racism. In Coates’s telling, America was constructed with the labor of enslaved Africans. Racism was the basis of the country’s economy, and the driving force behind its political history. The New Deal, Coates writes, “rested on the foundation of Jim Crow.” The postwar housing boom was rooted in racist “redlining” policies. Decades later those policies are still the primary reason for wealth disparities in America. In a Coates essay, everything is about white racism.
Racism is omnipresent, Coates argues, and it is getting worse. To prove it, Coates cites a remark Barack Obama once made but probably didn’t mean, that his daughters shouldn’t benefit from affirmative action. To Coates, this is proof that racism was alive and well.
The solution is reparations. Despite the length of the essay, Coates never describes a mechanism for redistributing tax dollars to the descendants of slaves. Nor does he describe how much it might cost. He suggests the amount might be infinite.
“We may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans,” Coates concludes. “Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed.”
This vagueness is frustrating, but it might be the only genuinely brilliant part of the essay. Coates knows there will never be monetary reparations for slavery. He doesn’t want or need them. If he did, he’d work up a number. What he wants is a moral victory.
This desire dovetails with what his overwhelmingly white readership wants. Elites feel like good people when they read Ta-Nehisi Coates. It’s exactly the kind of book you’d like to be seen bringing to the beach. What they don’t want is to change their lives in any meaningful way. Coates doesn’t ask them to. Admit you’re bad, Coates says. Gladly, they reply. Nothing changes except how elites feel about themselves. Coates is their confessor. His books are their penance.
Coates’s piece on reparations set a single-day traffic record on the Atlantic’s website; the paper copy sold out at many stores. The praise from organs of elite opinion was virtually unanimous. The Washington Post described Coates’s writing as “unstinting, yet lyrical.” The New Yorker called the essay “breathtaking.” Damon Linker at the Week called it “the most compelling and exhaustive case for reparations that I have ever encountered,” marked by Coates’s “potent mixture of intelligence and passion.” Carlos Lozada at the Washington Post described the piece as a “work of deep reporting and seething understatement [that] made Coates a literary star.” FiveThirtyEight’s Christie Aschwanden called it “mind-blowing.” The Baltimore Sun’s news section called it a “ground-breaking and exhaustively researched essay.” The Huffington Post’s Tom McKenna called it “the finest, most thorough piece of journalism I’ve seen in years.”
After the praise came the honors. Coates won a Polk Award. He was invited to lecture at the American Library in Paris, where he was given a fellowship and asked to lecture on the history of comic books. He was named to Politico’s list of the fifty most impressive people in the world. His essay, Politico said, “stands as a powerful example of how a single author can refuse to let an issue disappear.” Coates was later invited to speak about reparations at the University of Michigan, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, American University, Roosevelt University, and Grinnell.
But the peak was still to come. In 2015, Coates released his memoir, Between the World and Me. While Coates’s articles tended to drag, the book was notably short. At thirty-seven thousand words, it could be consumed in a few hours. The book read like an extended meandering essay. It’s possible his editors were too awestruck or terrified to say anything about it.
The book is a mix of autobiography and reflections on the pain of being a “black body” in America. The narrative form is a letter from Coates to his son, a concept borrowed from essayist James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. It doesn’t go well, partly because Coates is a leaden writer. But the main problem is that he doesn’t have a lot to write about. The book is intended as a searing take on white racism in America. But the truth as it emerges over thirty-seven thousand words is that Coates doesn’t seem to have experienced much racism.
Coates highlights two incidents in his life that he believes crystallize the distorting effects of white bigotry. In the first, a friend of his from college is shot and killed by a police officer. Coates opens the story this way:
I picked up The Washington Post and saw that the PG County police had killed again. I could not help but think that this could have been me, and holding you—a month old by then—I knew that such loss would not be mine alone. [. . .] Then on the third day a photo appeared with the story, and I glimpsed at and then focused on the portrait, and I saw him there. [. . .] His face was lean, brown, and beautiful, and across that face, I saw the open, easy smile of Prince Carmen Jones.
The shooting of his friend provokes several pages of reflection about how “people who believe they are white” have erected power structures dedicated to the oppression and destruction of “black bodies.” Then, after six pages, Coates drops a stunner: the cop who killed his friend wasn’t white. He didn’t even believe he was white. He was black.
“Here is what I knew at the outset: The officer who killed Prince Jones was black,” Coates writes. So how is his death evidence of white racism? Coates doesn’t say.
Coates later reveals that he didn’t know his slain friend particularly well. They weren’t actually friends. Yet the killing of an acquaintance by a black cop made Coates feel so oppressed by white racism that when the twin towers fell on 9/11, he immediately framed the tragedy in racial terms:
I could see no difference between the officer who killed Prince Jones and the police who died, or the firefighters who died. They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were the menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could—with no justification—shatter my body.
By this point in the book, you begin to wonder if there’s something psychologically wrong with Coates. A few pages later, he confirms it by describing his second life-changing brush with white racism: somebody was once rude to his son on an escalator. In his words:
A white woman pushed you and said, “Come on!” Many things now happened at once. [. . .] There was my sense that this woman was pulling rank. I knew, for instance, that she would not have pushed a black child out on my part of Flatbush, because she would be afraid there and would sense, if not know, that there would be a penalty for such an action.
Coates understands at once that this moment is not really about an unpleasant exchange he once had with a white woman on an escalator. It’s about the rotten core of America itself. It’s about the degradation of black bodies: “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.”
This is nutty. It’s also dumb. But more than anything, it’s hostile. Coates despises white people. He doesn’t hide it.
Throughout the book, he describes whiteness as a pathology. As a group, he says whites are united only by the desire to “plunder” African Americans.
“White America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. 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.
At one point in the memoir, Coates seems to get so carried away in anger that he loses control and suggests that whites are subhuman cannibals who commit atrocities simply by existing:
There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when the people who believe themselves to be white renounce this demon religion and begin to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of such a day. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America.
It goes on like this. In the final two paragraphs, the book takes an abrupt turn and blames white people for environmental degradation and global warming. Whites, whom Coates has decided to call “Dreamers,” have destroyed not simply races of people, but the natural landscape itself. Wrecking things is what they do. As Coates puts it:
The Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of Earth itself.
Between the World and Me is an unusually bad book: poorly written, intellectually flabby, relentlessly shallow and bigoted. No honest reader with an IQ over 100 could be impressed by it. One presumes that the moment America wakes up from its current fever, Coates’s memoir will be forgotten immediately, an embarrassing relic from an embarrassing time.
It’s a measure how thoroughly the diversity cult has corroded the aesthetic standards of our elites that the book was greeted with almost unanimous praise, which is to say, lying. Publishers Weekly described it as “compelling, indeed stunning . . . rare in its power to make you want to slow down and read every word. This is a book that will be hailed as a classic of our time.”
Between the World and Me won the National Book Award, as well as the NAACP Image Award. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. It was listed as among the finest books of 2015 by the New York Times Book Review, O: The Oprah Magazine, Washington Post, People, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, New York, Newsday, and Publishers Weekly. It was a number-one New York Times bestseller.
In the fall of 2015, Coates was given a $625,000 MacArthur Fellowship, not that he needed the money by that point. In early 2018, Harlem’s iconic Apollo Theater adapted his book into a multimedia performance, with excerpted monologues and projected video, all set to a score by jazz pianist Jason Moran.
One of the book’s many fans was black separatist Gavin Long. In 2016, Long assassinated three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. On his personal “MAN-datory Reading List,” Long listed Between the World and Me at number two. It was a rare second-place finish for Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Between the World and Me remains Coates’s most famous work, but his star has hardly dimmed since then. His every literary endeavor is now national news. In 2016, Coates became the writer for the Marvel comic book Black Panther, about a black superhero.
In 2018, he began writing a Captain America series as well.
When not writing comic books, Coates has continued to write magazine articles. Following Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, he wrote an essay titled “The First White President,” attributing Trump’s victory, not surprisingly, to white supremacy.
“Trump, more than any other politician, understood the valence of the bloody heirloom and the great power in not being a nigger,” Coates writes in the piece. Coates restates this point, his only point, repeatedly and floridly: “To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.”
And so, having shattered a supernatural amulet, the first white president was born.
“Certainly not every Trump voter is a white supremacist, just as not every white person in the Jim Crow South was a white supremacist,” Coates concedes, generously. “But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.”
In fact, Trump outperformed Mitt Romney with black and Hispanic voters. Coates does not address this. His enthralled white readers didn’t ask him to. Coates told them exactly what they wanted to hear. They were grateful for that.
It’s revealing that the one group of reviewers persistently resistant to Coates’s brilliance is black intellectuals. In general, they haven’t been impressed by his books.
They feel no need to be.
Jason Hill, a DePaul University philosophy professor, published an open-letter response to Between the World and Me. The book, Hill concluded, “reads primarily like an American horror story and, I’m sorry to say, a declaration of war against my adopted country.”
Hill, a gay Jamaican immigrant who came to the United States as an adult, says he found a very different country than the one Coates describes. In America, he writes, he could escape “the blight of Jamaican homophobia” and “find peace and true love and be left alone to pursue my dream.”
“Your beliefs threaten to alienate your son from his country and afflict him with a sense of moral inefficacy and impotence,” Hill added. “This could squash his chance of being an engine of change in the course of history.”
Yet even as an immigrant to America, Hill understood perfectly well Coates’s appeal to elites: “Your accusations have made for interesting dinner talk among the cognoscenti and literati in liberal bourgeois enclaves, where some believe moral masochism and symbolic self-flagellation are signs of virtue,” he wrote.
Cedric Johnson, a professor of African American studies at the University of Illinois, made a similar argument, perceiving that Coates’s focus on racial conflict in fact served to entrench the powerful.
“Race-first politics are often the means for advancing discrete, bourgeois class interests,” Johnson wrote for the left-wing Jacobin magazine. “From the antebellum anti-slavery struggles to the postwar southern desegregation campaigns to contemporary battles against austerity, interracialism and popular social struggle have been central to improving the civic and material circumstances of African Americans.”
Equally damning was the critique of Princeton professor Cornel West. West accused Coates of being “the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle,” responsible for “fetishizing white supremacy.” Rather than engage with West’s criticism, Coates quit Twitter.
Thomas Chatterton Williams, a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, was even tougher on Coates, accusing him of sharing the same assumptions of white supremacists. Both, he writes, “eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice.”
Maybe the hardest criticism came from Columbia University professor John McWhorter, who is black. “My issue with the Coates phenomenon is that I find it racist,” McWhorter said. White critics are “letting pass as genius something they never would if it was not a black person doing it.”
This is a deep point, and one wonders if Coates has considered it himself. Why would a racist nation bother to pretend Between the World and Me is a smart book?
Or maybe the fact that critics feverishly maintained the pretense proves Coates’s point: only a racist country would so disingenuously praise a mediocre black writer. Either way, there’s no question that irresponsible rhetoric like Coates’s, and the equally irresponsible response it received from elites, was inflaming racial tension in America. Yelling about imaginary racism was making people hate one another.
At Berkeley in the fall of 2017, a group of students disrupted a midterm exam in a class on American labor issues. They claimed the professor was unsuited to teach the class, not because he lacked credentials, but because he was a white man. When other students asked to be allowed to take the test anyway, they were ordered to remain silent. They were too white to talk.
“White people, shut up!” one protester shouted.
“You [white people] fucking take so much space. You talk so much already,” said another. Complaining about being attacked on the basis of your race was itself racist.
In July 2016, a black man assassinated five police officers and injured nine others in Dallas. The city’s police chief, who was black, left no doubt about motive: “The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”
Here’s what Hillary Clinton tweeted the next day: “White Americans need to do a better job of listening when African Americans talk about the seen and unseen barriers you face every day.”
At the funeral for the slain officers, Barack Obama took the opportunity to lecture the officers’ family members about the racism of America’s police departments: “We also know that centuries of racial discrimination, of slavery, and subjugation, and Jim Crow; they didn’t simply vanish with the law against segregation . . . we know that bias remains,” he said to children who had just lost their fathers in the attack. “No institution is entirely immune, and that includes our police departments. We know this.
“When all this takes place,” Obama continued, “more than fifty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid.”
Listening to Obama, it was easy to forget that the killer was a black man, and that the cops he murdered had been protecting a Black Lives Matter protest.
When Democratic political consultants looked at the exit polling data from the 2016 election, trying to figure out what happened, many were shocked by the high number of white Democrats who’d voted for Donald Trump. Various experts tried to explain the trend. Was it sexism? Russian propaganda? Hillary’s failure to campaign in the upper Midwest? Almost nobody suggested the obvious: if voters think you hate them for how they were born, they won’t vote for you.
This lesson didn’t penetrate. Days after Trump’s inauguration, Democrats held elections for a new DNC chair. One of the candidates was Sally Boynton Brown, the executive director of the Democratic Party of Idaho. Brown said that if elected, she would make it her mission “to shut other white people down.” She promised to seek advice from “people of color . . . because you have the answers.” With those answers, Brown pledged to “school the other white people.”
Keith Ellison isn’t white, but he agrees with Brown. The Minnesota congressman was also running for DNC chair, and he has similar views on race. Ellison once proposed the formation of a black ethno-state, on land taken from the United States and funded by reparations paid by white people. At the time, Ellison described the Constitution as the “best evidence of a white racist conspiracy to subjugate other peoples.” Ellison got the endorsement of Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Harry Reid.
Supporting people like Keith Ellison is the price the establishment pays for leaving the economic status quo untouched. If you can convince voters that white supremacy in the heartland is the real problem, it’s possible they may ignore that you and your family live in a rarified white enclave and are far richer now than you were ten years ago.
This is why the loudest voices against white racism live in the whitest places. A 2014 study by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found New York State’s public schools the most segregated in America, and “the leader in segregating its Latinos.” Remarkably, black students in New York are more likely to attend segregated schools than those who live in the South.
The division becomes more profound in New York City. Fully 73 percent of the city’s charters qualify as “apartheid schools,” meaning they’re less than 1 percent white; 90 percent were “intensely segregated,” at less than 10 percent white.
The city’s schools become more segregated every year. In 1989, when the establishment still supported integration, a typical black student in New York would have attended a public school that was 21 percent white. By 2010, the mix had dropped to 17 percent white.
Why is this happening? One reason is that rich New Yorkers would rather not have their children go to school with minorities. Comedian Samantha Bee may be one of these. Bee expresses all the fashionable racial views you’d expect given her politics and income level. “It’s pretty clear who ruined America,” Bee once said. “White people.”
Bee doesn’t mean it. She lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which is two-thirds white, far higher than the city’s average. Her children attended a 64 percent white school with an overwhelmingly affluent student body. When, in an effort to increase diversity, city officials tried to relocate the school to across the street from a housing project, Bee and her husband objected. Diversity is fine. But moving the school would have lowered property values. Our elites may despise white people, but they want to make certain their kids go to school with them.
How did Bee and her neighbors respond to the proposed increase in diversity? With rage and defiance. “We were sad to learn that [there aren’t a lot of African Americans who live on the Upper West Side],” one local parent told a reporter. “But we chose to move to this place because we put the quality of the education at a higher value.” In other words, we live here because it isn’t very diverse.
Something similar happened recently in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn. The city proposed moving kids from the mostly white school in the neighborhood to a mostly black school nearby. Parents opposed it.
Who are these bigots? The richest people in Brooklyn. The neighborhood supported Hillary Clinton with more than 90 percent of the vote in the 2016 election.
In nearby Park Slope, Brooklyn, which is almost as affluent as DUMBO, another forced integration drama played out in almost exactly the same way. One parent complained to the New York Times that she felt the city was conducting an “experiment” on her children by placing them in a heavily black school.
You may recall that working-class parents in South Boston made strikingly similar remarks in the 1970s, when a federal judge bused their children into black neighborhoods for school. They thought their kids were being subjected to reckless social experiments, too. Parents in Little Rock said the same thing when President Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to integrate Central High School. The establishment denounced them all as racist.
If you want to know what people really care about, take a look at where they live, especially if they could live anywhere. Hillary and Bill Clinton are worth tens of millions of dollars and have free Secret Service protection for life. They could live safely in Harlem or East New York. Instead they bought a place in Chappaqua, which is less than 2 percent black.
Barack and Michelle Obama are also rich and surrounded by bodyguards. Their kids went to Sidwell Friends, so school zoning is irrelevant to them. Yet when they left the White House they still moved to the whitest neighborhood in Washington. Fewer than 4 percent of their neighbors are black, in a town that was known for generations as Chocolate City.
Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York is a tireless advocate for diversity, but not in his own neighborhood. Although he lives in Brooklyn, where one in three residents is African American, his own zip code is one of the whitest in New York. It’s less than 5 percent black.
Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, doesn’t really live on an Indian reservation. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Harvard, as well as an enormous number of white people. Her zip code is less than 6 percent black.
Even Representative Maxine Waters of Los Angeles, an open black nationalist, doesn’t choose to live around the people she represents. Waters doesn’t live within the bounds of her own district. She lives in a six-thousand-square-foot, $4.3 million spread in Hancock Park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles. How did Waters afford a house that expensive after forty years of working in government? I asked once. She didn’t answer, but did call me a racist.
But what’s more interesting are the demographics of the neighborhood where Waters lives. The district she represents in Congress has the second-highest percentage of African American residents in the state. The neighborhood where Waters bought her mansion is just 6 percent black—or, as she might put it if she didn’t live there, it’s 1950s-level segregated.
Washington, D.C., is one of America’s wealthiest cities, and one of its most progressive. Fully 91 percent of the city voted for Hillary Clinton, the highest percentage of any city in America. But political homogeneity hasn’t produced diverse neighborhoods. According to statistician Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, Washington is America’s sixth-most-segregated city. The most segregated city, Chicago, gave Clinton 84 percent of its votes in 2016.
Elites choose to live in cocoons white enough to burn your retinas, even as they mock the middle of the country as the land of mayonnaise and Wonder Bread and Klan rallies. For all their professed enthusiasm for America’s melting pot, they don’t mix and don’t want to.
Meanwhile the identity politics they espouse makes the country easier to govern, even as it makes it much harder to live in. Identity politics is based on the premise that every American is a member of a subgroup, usually a racial category. The point of achieving political power is to divert resources to your group. Another word for this is tribalism.
This is the most divisive possible way to run a country. Because they are not about ideas, and instead based on inborn characteristics, tribalism and identity politics are inherently unreasonable. There’s no winning arguments, or even having them. There is only victory or defeat for the group. Your gain is my loss, by definition. It’s zero-sum.
Right now, the fault line is between whites and nonwhites. But as America grows more racially diverse, rifts will inevitably open between more groups. In a tribal system, every group finds itself at war with every other group. It’s the perfect perversion of the American ideal: “Out of many, one” becomes “Out of one, many.” This is the unhappy, blood-soaked story of countless civilizations around the world. It never ends well.
But it does make for effective electoral politics, and that’s the point. There’s no faster way to mobilize voters than to stoke their racial fears, while promising to deliver for their particular tribe. It’s irresistible. At the moment, the coalition of identity groups has held together because it is united in single purpose against white male power. But rapid demographic change makes this unsustainable. When the traditional scapegoat becomes insufficient, various factions will turn on one another. Chaos will ensue.
America got a glimpse of what this might look like within hours of Donald Trump’s inauguration. Horrified by what had just happened, a group of politically minded scientists began planning a protest against the incoming administration. “Scientists have battled the political and ideological forces against concepts such as evolution and climate change for years,” explained Stanford biology professor Elizabeth Hadly. “We have patiently articulated the physical and biological laws governing the universe.”
Despite the patient articulation, Donald Trump didn’t seem to be listening. At times the new president appeared skeptical of global warming orthodoxy. There were reports that he planned to cut funding for scientific research.
Organizers decided to respond with what they called the March for Science, a series of protests staged in more than six hundred cities on Earth Day, with the primary march in Washington, D.C. The point was to show that educated people support science, as they always have. From Galileo, to the Scopes trial, to the modern debate over climate, elites have championed the scientific method and evidence-based decision making in the face of sometimes violent opposition. City dwellers trust facts. Rural people don’t. Everybody in Northwest D.C. knows this. “I believe in science!” Hillary Clinton boasted as she accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination. The crowd went wild.
Excitement about the science march ran high on Facebook. The New York Times and Washington Post ran approving previews. Protesters readied their signs: “Science is not a liberal conspiracy”; “Defiance for science”; “Science is resistance.” Bill Nye, a children’s show host known as “the Science Guy,” signed on as an honorary chair.
It looked like a promising start, but it wasn’t long before the March for Science ran into trouble, all of it internal. The main problem was the leadership of the event. It was insufficiently diverse: too white, and too male. Strictly speaking, this shouldn’t have been relevant; the race of researchers doesn’t affect the outcome of scientific experiments, their ability to achieve scientific insight, or for that matter, their ability to advocate on behalf of science research and funding. But in the racially aware context of 2017, a purported lack of diversity was a huge problem.
After much debate, march organizers decided to establish a connection between the hard sciences, which they were ostensibly defending, and broader issues of concern to activists. “Colonization, racism, immigration, native rights, sexism, ableism, queer-, trans-, intersex-phobia and economic justice are scientific issues,” organizers declared on Twitter ahead of the march.
Intersex-phobia, a scientific issue? Indeed, insisted organizers. “At the March for Science,” their website read, “we are committed to centralizing, highlighting, standing in solidarity with, and acting as accomplices with black, Latinx, Asian and Pacific Islander, indigenous, non-Christian, women, people with disabilities, poor, gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans, non-binary, agender, and intersex scientists and science advocates.”
Even the group’s diversity statement was a political battlefield; it was updated multiple times after critics complained that it didn’t mention the disabled or have sufficient language promoting inclusion.
It was never clear what “centralizing” intersex Pacific Islanders had to with science. Working scientists, including nonwhite ones, were perplexed as well. Sylvester James Gates, an African American physicist who served on Barack Obama’s presidential science council, was one of them. Gates worried that “such a politically charged event might send a message to the public that scientists are driven by ideology more than by evidence.”
Gates had reason for concern. Organizers added “immigration bans” to the list of “scientific” issues the march planned to address. Days before the event, the group cited the Trump administration’s bombing of Islamic State positions in Afghanistan as an “example of how science is weaponized against marginalized people.”
In the end, the whole event was poisoned by the toxin of interest group politics. Legitimate scientists dropped out or decided not to go. As one put it, the March for Science had been “hijacked by the kind of political partisanship it should instead be concerned about.”
At the same time, the organizers were criticized for not being sufficiently committed to identity politics. Jacquelyn Gill, an ecologist and University of Maine professor, quit the organizing committee over what she called a “toxic, dysfunctional environment and hostility to diversity and inclusion.” No matter how quickly the march’s organizers ran from legitimate science, it wasn’t fast enough.
In Memphis, the march finally split along racial lines. A primarily white leadership led one demonstration, activists of color led the other. Even science couldn’t withstand the pressures of identity politics.
There was a moment when tribalism in American politics wasn’t inevitable. In the summer of 2004, Barack Obama was a candidate for the U.S. Senate from Illinois. In August he gave the keynote address at the Democratic convention in Boston. It was probably the last time a prominent Democrat will ever endorse the traditional goals of the civil rights movement before a national television audience.
“There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America,” Obama said to the cheering stadium. “We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”
Before the decade was out, race baiter Al Sharpton would be a regular in the White House. Obama invited Sharpton more than seventy times to seek his advice on domestic policy.
Nobody in Barack Obama’s world even pretends there is still one America. There are now as many Americas as there are hyphenated identities. The 2016 Democratic platform includes the acronym “LGBT” nineteen times and “African” or “black” fifteen times. “Mexican,” “Latino,” or “Hispanic” together appear seven times, as does “transgender.” The word “Muslim” appears six times, “Asian” five. “Pacific Islanders” receives six mentions, while “Native Americans” and “Indians” get thirty-eight. And so on.
Another hyphenated category, “white-Americans,” made it into the Democratic platform, but only as the subject of hostility. There are four references to white people in the platform. The first describes it as “unacceptable” that whites earn more on average than African Americans and Latinos. The next points out that it’s also “unacceptable” that African American arrest rates are higher than those for whites. Interestingly, Asians make more than whites, and also have lower incarceration rates, yet those stats go unmentioned.
The third reference laments the fact that African Americans and Latinos lost their jobs faster than whites during the last recession. In the fourth and final reference to whites, the platform complains that Donald Trump “plays coy” with white supremacists.
The last charge says a lot about the fantasy life of our elites. There aren’t many open white supremacists left in America. In a nation with almost 200 million white people, the various factions of the Ku Klux Klan have fewer than ten thousand members between them. Other racist groups are even smaller. None of these people have much power.
This could change, but it won’t change because of Donald Trump. White identity politics will be a response to a world in which identity politics is the only game there is. In a country where virtually every nonwhite group reaps advantages from being racially conscious and politically organized, how long before someone asks the obvious question: why can’t white people organize and agitate along racial lines, too?
People have asked the question before, of course, but so far they’ve been self-discrediting: haters, morons, and charlatans. What happens when someone calm and articulate does it?
It will be a simple argument to make. Soon whites will be a minority in America. They’ve got enemies, as the establishment often demonstrates, as well as interests to protect. Is there some rational reason, someone will ask, why they should be the only group in America not allowed to think of themselves as a group?
At this rate, that will happen. How could it not? When it does, when white people become another interest group fighting for the spoils, America as we’ve known it will be over.
The economy may continue to hum along. We’ll still have elections and fire departments and stop signs, many of the trappings of the country you remember. But the sense that we’re all in this together, united by citizenship in a common endeavor of some kind, as Americans? That will end forever.