This density is what makes poetry a literature, which is to say it cannot exist without roots, without knowledge of earlier bodies of poetic expression. This is why when “Instapoetry” proudly declares itself a form of unknowing, it denies itself the power of the thing it claims to be. When the Instagram poet Charly Cox, for instance, writes of the history of poetry that “I didn’t know a thing,” but that it doesn’t matter because “I just knew how to feel,” the hollowness and, yes, the narcissism are distressingly naïve. Every poet from Sappho to Simone White has known that getting feeling into language isn’t the same thing as having feelings.

Hip-hop is an adolescent genre of music. Between the lines you can plainly see attempts to tackle critical issues: social inequality, sex, religion, mortality, boredom, fear. But, ungainly and awkward, it indulges in the most ridiculous immaturity. Still, the stupidity of adolescence is not without its rush, its exhilaration. Freshness has its place. The music of our youth is tinged with a special effervescence. It is imbued with meanings we can only barely articulate, colored with feelings couched in half-remembered conversations, in old friends and half-forgotten crushes, stored amid all the whirring dynamos of the unconscious. Maybe this is why on a personal level French hip-hop is so easy for me to forgive, even though it still has a kind of embarrassing stigma. French hip-hop? Really? Well, yes. I actually can’t listen to JoeyStarr shouting out, “Saint-Denis Funk Funky-Fresh!” without cracking a huge smile. Saint-Denis, c’est de la bombe bébé!

[...] To think about blackness as a kind of categorical imperative, a duty first to ourselves and therefore to all, to expand the reach of freedom from domination, to understand blackness as a way of being in the world that necessitates a political project, that orients our expression inevitably toward a confrontation with injustice. It is also to understand that Black Humanism, with black music at its core, is the foundation that has cracked open a hollow American democracy by force and continuous resistance, and that remembering and carrying on the burden of that struggle continues to be the only hope for making this country a place worth living in, a nation with something to offer other than the cold hand of business ruling over a glass-tower gentry, a pauperized and fearful suburban petty bourgeoisie, and underneath both the abyss of the carceral archipelago.

In this literature, “antiblackness” is a technical, not a subjective or impressionistic, term. It does not refer to prejudice or dislike, as might easily be supposed. Rather, it is used to capture the idea that an underlying racial antagonism can come to structure the social fabric of a given society. Race, in this description, operates like a function that overdetermines outcomes and relations between people regardless of any particular actor’s personal disposition or attitudes. It says that there are disparate and antagonistic sets of what Durkheim would call “social facts,” matters of objective analysis about the relative position of power, and more importantly even, of value, that inhere in populations that are racially marked and bounded. The racial fault line is therefore not a regrettable byproduct of behaviors that can be reformed or improved over time; it is not like a tumor that can be excised from the body politic. On the contrary, it is a necessary and even vital ingredient of the social order, a division that pulls two socially defined groups apart but simultaneously binds the larger edifice of society together like mortar in between bricks, holding them in place. Let us call this the “structural antagonism thesis.”

Analogy does not mean equivalence, however, and among the important notions that the word “analogy” conveys is that two things can be comparable on the basis of an underlying proportionality. For instance, two extreme events like the Jewish Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, though very different in countless important ways, still might be said to share the underlying similarity of intent and even to a certain extent scale (though not the technology of killing or its method). Analogy and metaphor are also constitutive of our cognitive processes: without them there is no possibility of producing theory, no production of thought. The question is not whether analogy should be allowed, but what constitutes a good analogy as opposed to a bad one: to what extent does an analogy work.

[...] But the real Vietnam that threatened this new breed of “whiz kids” (whose failures and educational pedigrees uncannily resemble those of Halberstam’s famous book on Kennedy’s “Best and Brightest” men) was not brewing in the (undeniably real) quagmire abroad, but in the neglected quagmire at home, one that was captured in the other signal television show of that era, David Simon’s The Wire (2002–2008).

These two shows represent the schizophrenic, split-screen personality of the governing elites in the United States at the dawn of the new century: on the one hand, a sunny republic governed with the best of intentions and yielding the best of all possible worlds as it checks religious fanaticism and regressive social views with perfectly timed quips and Lincolnian citations; on the other, the entrenched poverty of a gutted and deprived racial underclass mired in a violent web of drugs and deindustrialization overseen (quite literally in the show) by a hapless and hopeless police force given the cynical task of “managing” its casualties for periodic and parasitic gains by the nasty, brutish, and often short lives of the most ruthless operators patrolling its wastelands. Yet both shows were popular and aimed at the same demographic. This incoherence and paralysis—liberalism as optimism of the intellect and impotence of the will—white people making the world a better place and black people dying in a pointless inferno, finally became untenable under Obama. [...]

Perhaps it’s worth reminding ourselves that when he was murdered, Fred Hampton was encouraging poor whites to analogize their position to that of poor blacks. At the time of his assassination, Malcolm X was embracing and actively seeking to incorporate a cross-racial coalition into his new organization. Ella Baker actively encouraged the deepening of organizational ties and activist links across different communities by emphasizing common struggle and common oppression. What evidence do we have, on the other hand, that the power behind the status quo is quaking at the thought of black folk gathering in isolation to mourn the end of the world?

If the challenge is more narrowly intellectual and what is needed are correctives to white Marxist hubris, Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism (1983) already exists. Black feminist thought offers its own counter-narratives. Of course, Wilderson doesn’t have to agree with Robinson or the Combahee River Collective. But isn’t it a problem that they aren’t cited even once in his books? Are we to jettison our entire tradition? Were all those who came before us so hopelessly naïve? Are we going to cast aside Vincent Harding’s There Is a River and read nothing but Fanon, Lacan, and Heidegger? Is Bantu philosophy overdetermined by social death even if its worldview was constructed in the absence of the white gaze? Afropessimism has yet to tackle these questions, to take its opponent’s counter-arguments and positions seriously.

At the same time, I want to seize on the opening Coates has provided to suggest a different emphasis, one which ultimately comes down to thinking about reparations for racial injustice as a moral rather than a material debt, and one that must be repaid politically, not compensated for economically.

I should make a few things clear here. First, Ta-Nehisi Coates does think America owes a moral debt to African Americans; it’s just that he believes one way of discharging that debt is through material compensation. I agree that compensation is owed, and, like Coates, I am not impressed by the usual objections, many of which Coates anticipates and counters in his own essay. Typically these involve throwing up one’s arms over the practical conundrums of determining who is owed what, how much, how to be accounted after so many years, etc. What about people of mixed race? What about recent immigrants? What about all the white Americans who fought with the Union and bled and died to defeat the Confederacy? These are difficult (some would say intractable) hurdles for a theory of reparations to overcome; but while I think Coates is right that at least some of them are spurious, they do not form the basis for why I think such a conception of reparations is flawed.

Ultimately, I think we ought to reject a program for material reparations in America for two reasons. The first is that no amount of monetary compensation can rectify a debt that consists in the broken promise of a social contract; this contract is a moral good, and therefore its abrogation a moral debt.

Let me be clear: Coates is not wrong to address the wealth gap. Far too few Americans understand the way black poverty has been systematically contoured and shaped by white power, by whites refusing black populations access to the levers of upward mobility that they then endlessly complain blacks fail to take advantage of. Yet Coates’s overarching emphasis on material loss can make it seem as though our affective reaction should primarily be motivated by material inequality. Coates writes that “no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap.” The wealth gap is obviously a significant metric for blacks today, but I would argue it is not nearly as significant as the black incarceration rate, as the death rate of blacks at the hands of police, as the number of failing schools in black school districts. The “Colored Only” sign says to a black person that they have been robbed of much more than what could or should be in their wallet.

GIL SCOTT-HERON HAS a beautiful song I wish Ta-Nehisi Coates and all of us would listen to again. It’s called “Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?” The title is also the refrain, but the force of the rhetorical question lies in its pithy yoking of materialism and slave capitalism to a logic that transcends the material. This is also the crux of my dissent: What can reparations mean when the damage cannot be accounted for in the only system of accounting that a society recognizes? Part of the work here is thinking about the value of human life differently. This becomes obvious when commentators—including Coates—get caught up trying to tabulate the extraordinary value of slaves held in bondage (don’t forget to convert to today’s dollars!). It shouldn’t be hard to see that doing so yields to a mentality that is itself at the root of slavery as an institution: human beings cannot and should not be quantified, monetized, valued in dollar amounts. There can be no refund check for slavery. But that doesn’t mean the question of injury evaporates, so let us ask a harder question: Who will pay reparations on my soul?