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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. [...]
(the other being the west wing)
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?
In our model, the café is not the antidote of the office, but its annex, a well-lit atelier for the young urban professional. A string of new concept spaces that have sprung up in Paris in the last several years, appropriately named Anticafé, make this explicit. They are living room retreats for displaced but affluent workers. Their clientele is uniform, their connection to the neighborhood and its street life severed. The social model of the café is thrown out in favor of the bespoke refinement of the commodity served there. On our side of the Atlantic this social severing has gone even further, possibly to its logical limit. Recently, Starbucks launched an app that allows one to order and pay for a coffee before even setting foot in the establishment, allowing you to purchase “without speaking a word,” as tech reviews gleefully proclaimed. Now even the exceedingly minor friction of interacting with another human being at the register, already purely perfunctory, is erased, and the dream of instant and seamless connection with the commodity fulfilled. This is the logical expression of the neoliberal fantasy: frictionless consumption; human interaction reduced wherever possible, and when necessary then only for the sake of the transaction itself; the maximizing of an efficiency that optimizes the social while simultaneously recasting it as just is another form of business. You don’t have time for coffee. You have to get back to work.
[...] I believe the spirit of the people resides in the word—majuscule or not—as long as it is used wisely, considerately, and with care. If my reader fails to recognize themselves or to comprehend my usage in what follows, it will mean I have failed at some deeper level than any orthographic alteration could resolve.
i like this [sort of] admission of possible failure
[...] Creativity and opportunity were greater than ever, but the language of cultural criticism was changing too. It moved away from the centralized arbiters of taste and toward the open-source model of the social media platforms, driving sharply divisive debates that repeatedly flared up about the relations of power within sites of cultural production, the role of identity in cultural consumption, and the limits of understanding across human differences.
im being petty but this is not what open source means
We know that violence always threatens to hold our creativity hostage, but it is no less incumbent, for ourselves as much as for anyone else, not to allow the “oasis,” as Du Bois called black culture, to dry up, or, worse, turn into a mirage. I am convinced the urgency of this role has become more acute, not less, as the crisis of black life in this country persists. One reason for this is that the United States has increasingly become a technocratic oligarchy, the very image of “a dusty desert of dollars and smartness” that Du Bois warned against more than a century ago. This “way of life” has produced plutocratic fortunes unimaginable even a few decades ago; services, goods, and conveniences circulate with remarkable ease and efficiency. Yet the costs are plain to see: staggering levels of social anomie, political decay, and a frightening tolerance for inequality, injustice, and spectacular cruelty. As the poet Tongo Eisen-Martin drily observes, no matter what chaos is currently gripping the land,
somewhere in america
the prison bus is running on time