The Hot Furnace of Racial Fear
Ta-Nehisi Coates
“Between the World and Me” (2015)
Race, a sort-of “grouping concept” still much in play throughout society and cultures worldwide, appears to have no genetic basis in DNA. There may be something at a higher level—such as “phenotypes”—that perhaps account for accumulations of physical traits, those that have developed over the millennia between individuals in geographically contiguous areas—a sort of molecular bias, if you will, resulting in physically shared features. But we now know that all humans have the same blood, the same organs, the same cells and skin and neurons as everyone else. It has been a little stirring, in fact, to discover that we homo sapiens are closer even to Neanderthal than any of us had reason to suspect.
We do not accept any of this hard science as a fact, but rather as a working hypothesis. And we do “know this,” not because of universal truths spoken by God, not because of the Bible or the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita—or Francis Galton—but because of Gregor Mendel and his revelatory little pea pods and the progress of research. We know it because of years of rigorous applications of method to the problems of science.
So “race” is not real in one sense. But then why is it so irrevocably real in another? For this we turn to Ta-Nehisi Coates, a man who has A LOT to say about justice and race in “Between the World and Me” (2015)—his National Book Award winner and powerful paean to injustice.
The smallish (152 pp.) volume comes in the form of a letter to Coates’ teenage son—which it is, but is also quite fundamentally something more: a furious polemic against the very notion of race itself—an exposition on the idea that race is not actually or physically real, but a myth—a “Dream” as he calls it—a variation of the mythology that the ruling class must have about itself.
Race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of the hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. The belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white. — Coates, p.7
In Toni Morrison’s words, Coates’ book has at long last filled the intellectual void that James Baldwin left behind. I cannot disagree, but that’s not why I read it. I felt I had to read the thing because its arrival had been so critical to our divided national culture in these crazy, hateful and hurtful times. Coates’ contribution figures mightily in Black Lives Matter. He combines a powerful voice with a seismic gift for passionate sermonizing and fire-breathing rhetoric. It helps, in the process, that he creates for us an empathy. He surveys the violence and fear that permeate black life, not only at “the bottom”—the hot furnace of fear that fires principally from the gang and ghetto life—but also percolates throughout the entirety of the culture.
Coates himself was raised in a tough neighborhood in Baltimore. He took his talent for writing to Howard University (“the Mecca” he calls it), and dared to become a writer. He was lucky enough to marry a woman who had the ability to find professional employment and help support him as he learned his craft in their home in Brooklyn. But the success is all his: in his writing he has come as far as anyone short of Malcolm X to establish a humanist critique of the racist society in which we live.
From time to time, Coates uses the term “black people”, but he never uses the phrase “white people”—at least not that I recall. In this book, the pointer is always to some variation on words such as these: people who believe themselves to be white. It is a phrase, we discover near the end of the book, that he has borrowed from Baldwin. In making that phrase his own, though, and in his determinedly repetitive use of it, Coates draws attention to his own theory of the mythology of whiteness—”The Dream,” as he calls it—the belief of superiority among all the owners of this myth.
So why is it that we, as a society, always seem to “move on” after particularly distressing events? Why is racism, a truly horrible thing, always something that we accuse other people of? Well, I think Coates’ “Dream” analogy might be part of the answer.
White America is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, 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. — Coates, p.42
The Destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detaining, beating, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible. [ . . . ] Racism is a visceral experience. It dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. — Coates, p.9-10
The police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from the policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects—are the product of democratic will. And to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled the people who think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream. — Coates, p.78-79
My experience in this world has been that the people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration. And the word racist, to them, conjures, if not a tobacco-spitting oaf, then something just as fantastic—an orc, troll, or gorgon. “I’m not a racist,” an entertainer once insisted after being filmed repeatedly yelling at a heckler: “He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger!” Considering segregationist senator Strom Thurmond, Richard Nixon concluded, “Strom is no racist.” There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally. — Coates, p.97
The lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream. Historians conjured the Dream. Hollywood fortified the Dream. The Dream was gilded by novels and adventure stories. I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as “just some good old boys, never meanin’ no harm”—a mantra for the Dreamers if ever there was one. — Coates, p.102-103
I have not spent my time studying the problem of “race”—”race” itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem. You see this from time to time when some dullard—usually believing himself white—proposed that the way forward is a grand orgy of black and white, ending only when we are all beige and thus the same “race.” But a great number of “black” people already are beige. And the history of civilization is littered with dead “races” (Frankish, Italian, German, Irish) later abandoned because they no longer serve their purpose—the organization of people beneath, and beyond, the umbrella of rights. — Coates, p.115
I came to see the streets and the schools as the arms of the same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both. Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. Fail in the school and you would be suspended and sent back to those same streets, where they would take your body. And I began to see these two arms in relation—those who failed in the schools justified their destruction in the streets. The society could say, “He should have stayed in school” and then wash its hands of him. — Coates, p.33
“Make the race proud,” the elders used to say. But by then I knew that I wasn’t so much bound to a biological “race” as to a group of people, and these people were not black because of any uniform color or any uniform physical feature. They were bound because they suffered under the weight of the Dream, and they were bound by all the beautiful things, all the language and mannerisms, all the food and music, all the literature and philosophy, all the common language that they fashioned like diamonds under the weight of the Dream. — Coates, p.119
Coates is a voice and firebrand to be considered. Given his stated tenets—he is openly atheist, which he claims frees him from the strictures of religious (Muslim or Christian) compromise; he presents his case against the police and prison system solely from the Afro-American viewpoint; he focuses on American slavery as the economic foundation of our troubles—by the end of the book we understand why his outlook remains so stubbornly bleak.
But his book is not without hope. His style is personal and readable. Amazing, considering it is not even meant for those of us who “believe we are white.” A good bit of it recounts his journey of realization into the “Black Dream”—a parallel mythology comprised of a panoply of African poets, kings and queens, and the false unity of a great African diaspora as professed by the radical black thinkers of the early- and mid-twentieth century—all of them ideas of which he was rudely disabused by the seriously dry and empirical history professors at Howard.
Coates is 41 years old. At this point in his life, he has experienced a lot, and written (and debated and lectured) on all these subjects far and wide—of reparations, even. I find him invigorating and controversial. But you have the feeling that it is not revolution, but really a kind of evolution he is hoping for, even when he is (typically) disconsolate. He seems to want to go beyond “race”. He has hope, but it is conveyed to his son here as something not to expect anytime soon.
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