"Any fair consideration of the depth and width of enslavement tempts insanity.
First conjure the crime—the generational destruction of human bodies—and all of its related offenses—domestic terrorism, poll taxes, mass incarceration.
But then try to imagine being an individual born among the remnants of that crime, among the wronged, among the plundered, and feeling the gravity of that crime all around and seeing it in the sideways glances of the perpetrators of that crime and overhearing it in their whispers and watching these people, at best, denying their power to address the crime and, at worst, denying that any crime had occurred at all, even as their entire lives revolve around the fact of a robbery so large that it is written in our very names.
This is not a thought experiment.
America is literally unimaginable without plundered labor shackled to plundered land, without the organizing principle of whiteness as citizenship, without the culture crafted by the plundered, and without that culture itself being plundered.
To consider all of this, to empathize on any human level with the lynched and the raped, and then to watch all of the beneficiaries just going on with their heedless lives, could fill you with the most awful rage.
I feel it myself, for example, walking through Washington, D.C., or Brooklyn, where gentrification has blown through like a storm.
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.
To speak the word gentrification is to immediately lie. And I know, even in my anger, even as I write this, that I am no better.
White people are, in some profound way, trapped; it took generations to make them white, and it will take more to unmake them.
And in my gut, in the human part of me, I feel how hard that really must be. What people anywhere on this earth has ever, out of a strong moral feeling, ceded power? Can I say that I—we—are any different?"
It galls me that Coates, like James Baldwin before him, is vexed with the clueless questions from white interviewers, including Stephen Colbert, about why can't he be more optimistic? He answered Colbert, if you need optimism, see your pastor.
Even the review in the Atlantic, where he is a staff writer, called the book light on solutions.
Uh, yeah, when the author's conclusion is that racism is not a tumor that can be exercised, but rather a core value of the American nation, I think it's a little naive to expect the author to solve that problem for you. But, hey, thanks for asking!
Telling Time: Ta-Nehisi Coates On The History That Continues To Haunt America
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Ta-Nehisi Coates' Articles In "The Atlantic"
Jamelle Bouie Reviews Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Eight Years In Power"
After The Hopes And Dreams Of King And Obama, The Hard Truth Of Ta-Nehisi Coates
Telling Time: Ta-Nehisi Coates On The History That Continues To Haunt America
1A
Ta-Nehisi Coates' Articles In "The Atlantic"
Jamelle Bouie Reviews Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Eight Years In Power"
After The Hopes And Dreams Of King And Obama, The Hard Truth Of Ta-Nehisi Coates
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