Black Pathology and the Closing of the Progressive Mind

[sheshe2]

How Jonathan Chait and other Obama-era liberals misunderstand the role of white supremacy in America's history and present
TA-NEHISI COATES

Among opinion writers, Jonathan Chait is outranked in my esteem only by Hendrik Hertzberg. This lovely takedown of Robert Johnson is a classic of the genre, one I studied incessantly when I was sharpening my own sword. The sharpening never ends. With that in mind, it is a pleasure to engage Chait in the discussion over President Obama, racism, culture, and personal responsibility. It's good to debate a writer of such clarity—even when that clarity has failed him.

On y va.

Chait argues that I've conflated Paul Ryan's view of black poverty with Barack Obama's. He is correct. I should have spent more time disentangling these two notions, and illuminating their common roots—the notion that black culture is part of the problem. I have tried to do this disentangling in the past. I am sorry I did not do it in this instance and will attempt to do so now.

​Arguing that poor black people are not "holding up their end of the bargain," or that they are in need of moral instruction is an old and dubious tradition in America. There is a conservative and a liberal rendition of this tradition. The conservative version eliminates white supremacy as a factor and leaves the question of the culture's origin ominously unanswered. This version can never be regarded seriously. Life is short. Black life is shorter.

snip

On y va.

The liberal version of the cultural argument points to "a tangle of pathologies" haunting black America born of oppression. This argument—which Barack Obama embraces—is more sincere, honest, and seductive. Chait helpfully summarizes:

The argument is that structural conditions shape culture, and culture, in turn, can take on a life of its own independent of the forces that created it. It would be bizarre to imagine that centuries of slavery, followed by systematic terrorism, segregation, discrimination, a legacy wealth gap, and so on did not leave a cultural residue that itself became an impediment to success.

The "structural conditions" Chait outlines above can be summed up under the phrase "white supremacy." I have spent the past two days searching for an era when black culture could be said to be "independent" of white supremacy. I have not found one. Certainly the antebellum period, when one third of all enslaved black people found themselves on the auction block, is not such an era. And surely we would not consider postbellum America, when freedpeople were regularly subjected to terrorism, to be such an era.

Read More: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/black-pathology-and-the-closing-of-the-progressive-mind/284523/

[JaneyVee]

1. Ta-Nehisi Coates is pure poetry. One of my fav writers and

One of America's best writers. Great article, as usual.

[sheshe2]

3. Thanks JaneyVee

a great read!

[Solly Mack]

2. Just finished reading.

Well worth it.

K&R

[sheshe2]

4. And~

Obama-era progressives view white supremacy as something awful that happened in the past. I view it as one of the central organizing forces in American life.

Thanks Solly Mack.

[Solly Mack]

6. That was one of my favorite lines in the article.

Can't just be something that happened in the past if it is still happening.

An action in the past can have an impact for years and years and years, but if that action continues, it's never in the past and the hits just keep coming. Heaped one upon the other. Never ending assaults.

[BlueCheese]

5. I read through most of it.

Interesting.

The immature side of me has to chuckle where the author quotes someone describing a basketball game in which the officials are clearly favoring one team, and describes the teams as "Team A" and "Team Duke".

[sheshe2]

7. Kick!

[Scuba]

8. Kick.

[cali]

9. Thanks for posting this. I'm a huge Coates fan.

He challenges me and I love that.

I try and keep up with his columns in The Atlantic.

This is a very, very good read.

[M0rpheus]

10. This is a great article but it's part of an ongoing conversation.

Presented in chronological order:

The Secret Lives of Inner-City Black Males - TA-NEHISI COATES
Paul Ryan's explanation for urban poverty isn't much different from Barack Obama's. Why did it make liberals so angry?

Barack Obama, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Poverty, and Culture
By Jonathan Chait

Black Pathology and the Closing of the Progressive Mind - TA-NEHISI COATES
How Jonathan Chait and other Obama-era liberals misunderstand the role of white supremacy in America's history and present

And now the response to the article in the OP (posted today)

Barack Obama vs. the Culture of Poverty
By Jonathan Chait


I think it's better in the context of the conversation.

[sheshe2]

15. Thanks MOrpheus.

I should have linked the articles to show the whole picture, because I have read them all. Thank you for adding them here. They do complete the story.

The newest, I will read now.

[ProSense]

11. A thing of beauty.

We certainly do not find such a period during the Roosevelt-Truman era, when this country erected a racist social safety, leaving the NAACP to quip that the New Deal was "like a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through." Nor do we find it during the 1940s, '50s and '60s, when African-Americans—as a matter of federal policy—were largely excluded from the legitimate housing market. Nor during the 1980s when we began the erection of a prison-industrial complex so vast that black males now comprise 8 percent of the world's entire incarcerated population.

And we do not find an era free of white supremacy in our times either, when the rising number of arrests for marijuana are mostly borne by African-Americans; when segregation drives a foreclosure crisis that helped expand the wealth gap; when big banks busy themselves baiting black people with "wealth-building seminars" and instead offering "ghetto loans" for "mud people"; when studies find that black low-wage applicants with no criminal record "fared no better than a white applicant just released from prison"; when, even after controlling for neighborhoods and crime rates, my son finds himself more likely to be stopped and frisked. Chait's theory of independent black cultural pathologies sounds reasonable. But it can't actually be demonstrated in the American record, and thus has no applicability.

<...>

And the president of the United States is not just an enactor of policy for today, he is the titular representative of his country's heritage and legacy. In regards to black people, America's heritage is kleptocracy—the stealing and selling of other people's children, the robbery of the fruits of black labor, the pillaging of black property, the taxing of black citizens for schools they can not attend, for pools in which they can not swim, for libraries that bar them, for universities that exclude them, for police who do not protect them, for the marking of whole communities as beyond the protection of the state and thus subject to the purview of outlaws and predators.

Loved it!

[sheshe2]

12. Thanks ProSense~

[Number23]

13. This was also posted in the AA forum

http://www.democraticunderground.com/11876020

Thanks!

[sheshe2]

16. I'm sorry that I missed that one, Number23.

Thanks for the link, it is a powerful article.

[steve2470]

14. k&r nt

[one_voice]

17. k&r

[Cha]

18. Kick for now, she.. looking forward to reading.. Thanks!

[Cha]

19. Just kicking for now.. mahalo, she~