To say that Ta-Nehisi Coates’ most recent book, The Message, has been “controversial” is, well, “banal”, although the uproar has most unfortunately been upstaged by the re-election of Donald Trump. It’s more than a bit silly to be lecturing poor Mr. Coates on his sins—though they are, I’m afraid, substantial in their own right—when the Chief of all Sinners (St. Paul, move over!) is once more installed in 1600 Pennsylvania, but, well, you have to take these things in order, and way back in October, in a piece I wrote defending Coates against a ludicrously unfair attack emanating from the New Yorker, denouncing Coates for daring to tell the truth about Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, now far worse than ever as a result of Israel’s bloody response to the horrible attacks by Hamas on Israeli citizens back on Oct. 7 2023. (Coates’ discussion of Israel and Palestine, “provoked”, one might say, by his ten-day visit to Israel in the summer of 2023, though published in October 2024, does not discuss either Hamas’ terrorist attack or the Israeli response.)
Sadly, the New Yorker was far from alone in denouncing what Mr. Coates had to say about Israel and Palestine and also far from alone in denouncing him unfairly. Part of Mr. Coates “crime”, as far as I could tell, was due to his own notoriety, famous as he was as a “truth speaker” from his essays in the Atlantic, most particularly The Case for Reparations. It was Mr. Coates’ fame as a moralist that made his crime so great, forcing many more people to take seriously the truth about Israeli tactics of oppression in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza than they had before, despite the best efforts of such previous truth-tellers as Peter Beinart, Joshua Leifer, and Daniel Larison. Now, of course, the Israelis have upped the ante to a previously unbelievable degree, thanks to their “response” to Hamas’ hideous crimes with crimes of their own, equally hideous and far more extensive, terrorizing not thousands but millions with their deliberate and indiscriminate ruthlessness.
So why does my headline accuse Mr. Coates, implicitly, of being “disingenuous”? Well because he is. Here is one passage that particularly grates, occurring when Coates, in Israel, sees that, while Israeli settlers, living illegally in the West Bank , are routinely allowed to have private water cisterns, while Palestinians are not:
On seeing these cisterns, it occurred to me that Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself. And more, it occurred to me that there was still one place on the planet—under American patronage—that resembled the world that my parents were born into.
Here’s the thing—or, rather, here’s the first thing: The miserable conditions that Palestinians endured in the West Bank at the time of Coates’ visit were not “still [the] one place on the planet—under American patronage—that resembled the world that my parents were born into.”1 In fact, the oppression endured by the Palestinians in the West Bank was, and is, far from unique. What about the oppression of the Muslims in China? The Chinese have instituted a policy of “Sinicization” of Islamic life in China, depriving it of its cultural heritage. For example, all of the mosques in China have been deprived of their domes and the entire structure given the appearance of traditional Chinese architecture, as illustrated by the “before and after” photos below of the transformation of the Grand Mosque in Shadian, which originally appeared in the 5/25/2024 edition of the Guardian. Shadian is a city located in Yunnan province in southwestern China. It was the site of the “Shadian Incident” in 1976, an uprising of Hui Muslims that was brutally repressed, resulting in the death of thousands of Hui Muslims, including about 300 children.
The Hui Muslims are one of several Muslim groups in China that are subject to fierce Sinicization, including, of course, the Uighurs (also spelled “Uyghurs”) in northwestern China, who are subject to a wide variety of vicious “re-education” projects. Beyond that, the Associated Press reported in 2020 that China is trying to discourage all of its minorities— amounting to about 9% of China’s population, about 100 million people—from reproducing themselves. (There are 55 officially recognized groups in China—along with many other non-recognized groups—according to Wikipedia.) Says the AP
The Chinese government is taking draconian measures to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other minorities as part of a sweeping campaign to curb its Muslim population, even as it encourages some of the country’s Han majority to have more children.
While individual women have spoken out before about forced birth control, the practice is far more widespread and systematic than previously known, according to an AP investigation based on government statistics, state documents and interviews with 30 ex-detainees, family members and a former detention camp instructor. The campaign over the past four years in the far west region of Xinjiang [where the Uighurs and other minority groups are located] Is leading to what some experts are calling a form of “demographic genocide.”
The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show. Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.
The population control measures are backed by mass detention both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply. Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps, the AP found, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines. Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.
In India, China’s neighbor, of course, a far larger Muslim population—about 200 million—has come under increasing harassment and oppression engineered by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party—a part, really of “global anti-globalism”—the obsessive growth of “tribalism” in virtually every major country around the world that seeks to increase power, tending to restrict the freedoms of everyone, “transcending” differences based on race or ethnicity.
This universal deprival of basic human rights by authoritarian/totalitarian governments is perhaps most dramatic in North Korea, but more than “prevalent” in China, which does not bother with even the appearance of free elections, along with Russia and, well, most of the rest of the world. According to “Freedom House”, in 2020 fully 75% of the world’s population lived in countries that suffered declines in the ability to exercise basic democratic freedoms. There is, of course, substantial oppression within many Muslim countries—Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, for example—with Muslim women in particular facing endless restrictions on their conduct that deprive them of basic freedoms. The notion that the West Bank in the Middle East is, in effect, the “worst” place on earth is nonsense. But the notion that, at the current time, Gaza is the worst place on earth—and very definitely with U.S. patronage as well—is quite, shall we say, “arguable”.
I also strongly disagree with the “second half” of Coates’ statement, claiming “that there was still one place on the planet—under American patronage—that resembled the world that my parents were born into.” Coates’ father was born in 1945, my birth year as well, which was (checks notes) 79 years ago! In other words, Coates had to go back in time more than 75 years ago before he could find a time when racial oppression in the U.S. was as bad as it is in the West Bank for Palestinians today. And even then he fails.
The full passage from Coates’ The Message I quoted is as follows:
On seeing these cisterns, it occurred to me that Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself. And more, it occurred to me that there was still one place on the planet—under American patronage—that resembled the world that my parents were born into.
But here’s the thing: Coates’ father was born in Philadelphia and his mother in Baltimore. Neither were “born into” the “Jim Crow South” that Coates’ first sentence references. They did not attend segregated schools, nor did they drink from “colored” water fountains or use segregated bathrooms. They encountered extensive “informal” segregation, much of it implicitly sanctioned by law. It was perfectly legal, for example, for non-profit corporations—like country clubs, for example—which were granted many legal privileges on the supposed grounds that they served the “public interest”—to exclude blacks, along with Jews and Catholics and other “undesirables”. But by 1945 even these barriers were beginning to fall.
World War II produced a sea change in American attitudes towards race, a sea change that Coates—like other, more recent, more strident “woke” advocates of “critical race theory”—want to deny had/has any real substance.2 In 1948 then Rep. Hubert Humphrey gave a speech at the Democratic Convention demanding that his party “step out of the shadow of states’ rights and into the sunlight of human rights”. Infuriated southerners left the party and formed their own “States Rights Party”, hoping to prevent the election of then President Harry Truman, which they failed to do, despite carrying four states in the deep south.
A year after his election, in 1949, Truman desegregated the armed forces. Thurgood Marshall, special counsel to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, had already started winning a series of landmark decisions by the Supreme Court, culminating, of course, in Brown v. Board of Education, that triggered the great civil rights movement that led to the dismantling of both publicly and privately enforced segregation in America.
It is the “point”, of course, of Coates’ famous article, The Case for Reparations, that all this “progress” is “specious”, that the racial oppression and financial exploitation of American blacks continued uninterrupted for a full century and more after “emancipation”. To illustrate this oppression, Coates tells the story of Clyde Ross, a black man born into a sharecropper’s family in 1923 in Mississippi, later migrating to Chicago—finding only, according to Coates, covert rather than overt racial exploitation.
Naturally, life for a black sharecropper in Mississippi before World War II was brutal, but here’s the thing: it was brutal for white sharecroppers as well, and in the 1930s, while there were 3 million black sharecroppers in the American south, there were 5.5 million white sharecroppers, the people depicted in James Agee and Walker Evans’ famous book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,3 shown living lives of hardship and deprivation almost inconceivable today (in the United States). Mississippi, a desperately poor state, was ruled by and for the few, and the very few. Blacks were deprived of the ballot, but poor whites were too. There were, by my count, in 1932 about 1.4 million white adults in Mississippi. In the presidential election of that year, scarcely more than 10% (145,000) actually voted. Southern states like Mississippi famously relied on a variety of obstacles aimed at preventing the poor—black and white alike—from voting, including a poll tax (upheld as constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1937 in Breedlove v. Suttles, a unanimous decision joined by such “liberals” as Louis Brandeis and Hugo Black) and a literacy test, such as this one, used in Mississippi circa 1955.
Elections in southern states—and some not so southern states—were administered by local officials with essentially unlimited power to reject “unsuitable” folks—my very white and very middle-class grandmother was turned away from the polls in 1920 in Cleveland, Ohio by a bunch of male chauvinists on the grounds that she was “too pregnant” to vote. In the south itself, both black and white sharecroppers were smart enough to know that “their kind,” pregnant or no, would not be welcome at the voting booth and would suffer serious consequences if they tried to exercise their “right”.
Furthermore, despite the sort of financial chicanery and exploitation that blacks like Clyde Ross suffered, described in Coates’ account, this is not the full story. In fact, the “full story” is, quite shockingly, close to the exact opposite of Coates’ “nothing has changed” narrative. Consider the evidence presented in Race And Home Ownership From The Civil War To The Present, “Working Paper 16665” presented by the National Bureau Of Economic Research in 2011, written by William J. Collins and Robert A. Margo:
In 1870, the rate of owner occupancy for African-Americans in the sample was a scant 8 percent. In 2007, the most recent year in the series, the rate was 54 percent. Thus, over the approximately 140 years covered by our series, African-American households represented in the core sample4 increased their rate of owner-occupancy by 46 percentage points. Broadly speaking, the data reveal two periods of rising owner-occupancy for black households. During the first period, 1870 to 1910, the ownership rate increased by 16 percentage points, from 8 to 24. During the second period, 1940 to 1980, the black ownership rate increased by 37 percentage points [21% to 58%], and then declined slightly.
Thus, in the teeth of massive racial segregation and bigotry, both public and private, black home ownership rose from 21% of households in 1940 to 58% in 1980, more than doubling, during the same time period covered by Mr. Coates painful story describing the exploitation of Clyde Ross. The bilking of Mr. Ross, harsh as it undoubtedly was, was not the “whole story”. Far from it. While Mr. Ross was being cheated out of his home, millions of black Americans were gaining their own homes, the exact opposite of the story Mr. Coates wants us to believe. All of the stories about the many public and private barriers to black home ownership were true; but they weren’t the whole truth. The barriers didn’t prevent consistent growth in black home ownership for the forty years beginning in 1940, a result both of steady economic growth, black perseverance in the face of widespread discrimination, and, beginning in the 1960s, the elimination of legal barriers to black home ownership.
“Figure 1”, reproduced from the Collins-Margo paper, shows the increases in both black and white home ownership from 1870 to 2007, showing the gap between the two shrinking to 19 percentage points in 1980 but increasing to 23 percentage points by 2007, a gap that has, more or less, persisted to the present day. There is ample confirmation of the findings of the Collins-Margo paper, although other studies used differing data bases, which provide differing (though similar) percentages for the number of black households owning their own homes at given points in time. The overall pattern of black homeownership is consistent across studies, showing steadily increasing home ownership among blacks from 1940 until about 1980, followed first by “stasis” and then increases followed by sharp declines thanks to the “boom and bust” economics the U.S. (and the world) have experienced since the 1990s. In a 2007 paper, African Americans and Homeownership: Separate and Unequal, 1940 to 2006, prepared by Wilhelmina A. Leigh and Danielle Huff for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, employing data developed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, showed household homeownership by blacks at 22.8% in 1940, rising to 43.4% in 1980, and then sagging slightly before rising once more to 45.4% in 2000. Another source, Racial Disparities in Homeownership Rates, from the National Association of Realtors showed black homeownership declining to 44.2% by 2010 in the midst of the Great Recession, sinking further thereafter and, despite a slight recovery, standing no higher than 43.4% in 2020. Percentages for other racial/ethnic groups in 2020 were as follows: whites, 72.1%; Asian-Americans, 61.7%; Hispanics, 51.1%.
A more recent study, Changes in the Distribution of Black and White Wealth since the US Civil War, appearing in the Fall 2023 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, by Ellora Derenoncourt, Chi Hyun Kim, Moritz Kuhn, and Moritz Schularick demonstrate a pattern similar to that shown by the studies focusing exclusively on black homeownership. For example, the study concludes that the share of the total wealth of the United States owned by black Americans amounted to less than 1% of the total immediately following the Civil War, reaching 1% in 1890, rising slightly until about 1910 before falling back to 1% in 1910, then rising above 2.5% from 1930 to 1980, and approaching 3% in the housing boom that occurred in the early 2000s, before falling back to 2.5% by 2020, even though black Americans constitute close to 14% of the whole U.S. population. (See figure 1 of the study.) It should be pointed out that In 1870, the American Gross National Product (GNP) was approximately $7.8 billion, or about $150 billion adjusted for inflation. By 2020, the GNP had grown to around $21.45 trillion.
A great deal of black “wealth” is tied up in home ownership, a big reason why the black share of overall American wealth declined so sharply as a result of the Great Recession. The data given by the 2023 study show an interesting pattern for home ownership for blacks and whites since 1860. Home ownership for whites declined from about 55% to about 45% from 1860 to 1940, before rising to well over 60% by 2020. Black home ownership rose from almost 0% in 1860 to about 22% in 1900, remaining virtually static until 1940, after which it rose steadily to about 45% in 1980, and then showing a series of small increases and decreases until 2020, several percentage points below the heights reached in the early 2000s housing boom.
Again, what we see is a contradiction to the argument presented by Coates (remember him?) of constant exploitation and oppression. I’m not saying that the story Coates tells of Clyde Ross economic exploitation wasn’t true. I’m saying that it wasn’t “typical”. It’s what “everyone” with a story to tell does; they search for evidence that “confirms” their prior expectations, which they then treat as inconvertible evidence for their argument. And, all too often, in the search for “punch”—they take the outlier for the mean, as statisticians would say. Consciously or unconsciously, they seek an “outrageous” story, on the “naïve” assumption that the more outrageous a story is, the more “true” and “representative” it is, when in fact the more outrageous a story is, the less likely it is to be representative, even if it is “true”—and the more outrageous a story is, the less likely it is to be true as well.
In a recent story in the New York Times, How Easy Rawlins Built a Real Estate Empire, One Crime Novel at a Time, Conor Dougherty interviews Walter Moseley, creator of the famous “Easy Rawlins” mystery series. The character of Easy Rawlings is based largely on Moseley’s father, Leroy Moseley, a black man who moved from Houston to Los Angeles in the late 1940s, bought a house for $9,500 and, with his Jewish wife, ended up owning three apartment buildings, which housed a total of 30 tenants. Who was more “typical”, Clyde Ross or Leroy Moseley?
Perhaps neither, but the simple fact is, from 1940 to 1980, beginning at a time of red-lining and restrictive covenants, block-busting and brutal prejudice, continuing through the 1960s and beyond when the legal barriers to black home ownership were overturned and many government programs directed at boosting black home ownership—the creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example—black home ownership in America essentially doubled. Coates’ morality story simply isn’t true.
Coates wants us to believe that not only housing discrimination, but deliberate exploitation of blacks, apparently motivated by racism, continues into the present day. In his famous “reparations” article in the Atlantic, he tells us that
In 2010, Jacob S. Rugh, then a doctoral candidate at Princeton, and the sociologist Douglas S. Massey published a study of the recent foreclosure crisis. Among its drivers, they found an old foe: segregation. Black home buyers—even after controlling for factors like creditworthiness—were still more likely than white home buyers to be steered toward subprime loans. Decades of racist housing policies by the American government, along with decades of racist housing practices by American businesses, had conspired to concentrate African Americans in the same neighborhoods. As in North Lawndale half a century earlier, these neighborhoods were filled with people who had been cut off from mainstream financial institutions. When subprime lenders went looking for prey, they found black people waiting like ducks in a pen.
Again, this tale of woe isn’t quite “complete.” The Rugh and Massey paper, Racial Segregation and American Foreclosure Crisis reflects (in my opinion) a long-standing “liberal” academic bias that ceaselessly seeks to portray American blacks as the unending victim of white racism, which doesn’t quite “explain” why home ownership among blacks increased dramatically until 1980—particularly, why black homeownership increased faster that white homeownership between approximately 1960 and 1980. Rugh and Massey tell us that blacks live disproportionately in black neighborhoods:
By definition, segregation creates minority-dominant neighborhoods, which, given the legacy of redlining and institutional discrimination, continue to be underserved by mainstream financial institutions (Renuart 2004; Ross and Yinger 2002). Moreover, the financial institutions that do exist in minority areas are likely to be predatory—for example, pawn shops, payday lenders, and check cashing services that charge high fees and usurious rates of interest—so that minority group members are accustomed to exploitation and frequently unaware that better services are available elsewhere (Immergluck and Wiles 1999).
Except that, in the case of the homeowning “boom and bust” circa 2000-2008, black people were, of course, not getting mortgages from “pawn shops, payday lenders, and check cashing services that charge high fees and usurious rates of interest.” They were getting them from “mainstream financial institutions”. Furthermore, the infamous “subprime” mortgages were not, as commonly assumed by liberals, a device to cheat the poor. They were carefully designed to increase mortgage availability for low-income individuals (largely by exempting them from the need to make a downpayment) while at the same time protecting the interests of the lenders as well, despite “conservative” claims that subprimes were specifically designed to rip off the banks and other respectable folks in order to give mortgages to unreliable people who didn’t “deserve” one.
It was the indiscriminate use of subprimes—on the more than dubious assumption that, in a world of ever-increasing housing prices, houses would essentially “pay for themselves,” supposedly doubling in value every six or seven years—that led inevitably to collapse. In the bust that everyone should have seen coming, but no one did, the “insanely” profitable financial leverage machines that the Wall Street big boys had constructed to make themselves obscenely rich reversed direction, turning huge paper profits into huge real losses. It was often irresponsibility erected as an end in itself, but the motivation was greed rather than racism.
According to a 2020 study by the Urban Institute, Less Than Equal: Racial Disparities in Wealth Accumulation, all three major racial/ethnic groups—white, black, and Hispanic—suffered heavy losses in home equity: for whites, a 24% decline; for blacks, 28%; and for Hispanics, 49%. Blacks were being “targeted”, but advertisers are always “targeting” specific groups—targeting young men, for example, by advertising on “sportstalk” shows. (For who else would watch them?) There is no doubt that many financial institutions engaged in predatory practices in the lead-up to the Great Recession and thereafter, and deliberately preyed on unsophisticated customers in particular, but they did so on an “equal opportunity” basis. Because that is where the money is. Why rip off “only” 30-40% of the “financially unsophisticated” population when you can get them all? Who leaves money on the table?
But the Great Recession did contribute significantly to the increase in inequality because the upper income groups (predominantly white and Asian, of course) had the majority of their wealth invested in financial instruments, which first bottomed out and then, in a few years, boomed, as they continue to do. Blacks and Hispanics, on the other hand, were far too likely to be left behind.
In his story of Clyde Ross, Coates adds that even the upwardly striving blacks who did manage to acquire their own homes continued to suffer, because the white power structure deliberately though legally quarantined blacks into segregated neighborhoods, which were, of course, predominately low-income, against thanks to white racial prejudice, and hence high crime as well, leaving the children of stable and “unstable” families like prey to the corruption of the streets.
This is also true. Northern cities in the 1950s and 60s “bought” racial peace—they (largely) appeased white racism—by using any number of devices to confine blacks to certain areas. A supposedly common saying among blacks (which I never heard a black person say) is that “In the south, they don’t care how close you get, as long as you don’t get too high. In the north, they don’t care how high you get, as long as you don’t get too close.” But the explanation for high crime rates in black neighborhoods is not as simple as Coates implies.
In the 19th century, both Asians and Hispanics encountered high levels of prejudice and discrimination. Both the Asian family structure was immensely strong (much stronger than in the West) and the Hispanic, though not nearly as strong as the Asian, had not suffered the degradation endured by black Africans and their descendants, a topic that will be discussed in more detail later in this post. Furthermore, the Catholic Church provided a more organized structure of religious belief—for good or ill—than black evangelicalism. And the simple fact is, comparisons of violent crime among the major racial/ethnic groups tells a painful story.
According to data compiled by “Copilot”, relying on data taken from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, the “murder offender” rates per 100,000 for 2023 for the major racial ethnic groups are as follows: white: 3.2; black, 21.8; Hispanic, 5.1; Asian, 1.4. In other words, blacks were almost 7 times as likely as whites to commit homicide, over 5 times as likely as Hispanics, and about 15 times as likely as Asians to commit homicide. It is well known that homicide is the leading cause of death among young black men. It should also be acknowledged that a leading cause, if not the leading cause of death among young black men is other young black men. Data for violent crimes other than homicide show a similar pattern. The notion that is somehow “wrong” to talk about black on black crime because it can encourage racism is a painfully rank form of hypocrisy. And, indeed, Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about it quite a bit, because he experienced it firsthand.
The uniquely high levels of violent crime that commonly occur in low-income black communities—most of them urban, of course—constitute a massive burden on those communities, a burden shared by no other racial/ethnic group in the United States, a burden that is largely not the “fault” of the predatory capitalists of Mr. Coates’ narrative.
It is certain the ills suffered by low-income blacks, both in big-city ghettoes and the rural south will not be solved by “reparations”, because reparations, scarcely disguised as the “War on Poverty”, have been tried, and practiced aggressively for decades, never more so than today. There are, of course, in addition many affirmative action programs, targeting black people explicitly. Since the 1960s, the U.S. has, at both the state and federal level, targeted hundreds of billions of dollars towards low-income individuals—disproportionately black, of course—with distinctly marginal results. The Department of Housing and Urban Development itself was created in 1965, with a budget of $7.5 billion (unadjusted for inflation). Sixty years later, the department’s budget is $75 billion. Excuse me, but what are we getting for our money? The percentage of black homeownership rose steadily during the years to steady economic growth of the U. S. economy—most of the time without the direct assistance of the U.S. government. And, of course, HUD has been only one of many anti-poverty programs that had their inception under President Johnson. However much they suffered during the Reagan-Bush years, they received steady increases during the Clinton, Obama, and Biden years.5 Anti-poverty programs have, in fact, significantly lowered poverty levels in the U.S., something that both liberals and conservatives continue to deny, the liberals because they want to expand them, and conservatives because they want to end them. Yet no how hard the liberals try to expand them—and in many liberal states there has been massive expansion—when it comes to closing the gap between blacks and whites, “nothing works”.
It’s notorious that the more liberal a state is—and this is true of California and New York in particular—the greater the gap between rich and poor, and the greater the prevalence of homelessness. In particular, the greedy rich (disproportionately white, of course) use such concerns as “the environment”, “liveability” or “charm” (really “exclusivity”) to prevent development,6 thus driving up the value of the properties they own, at the expense of newcomers, regardless of race. Liberals talk endlessly about “getting people back into the cities” but in practice they seek to prohibit anything but single-family homes, complaining endlessly of “noise” and “congestion”, as if one could have a city without either, and making it impossible for anyone except the wealthy to live in the (largely) blue state areas where new jobs are being created.
Because wealthy liberals and young “socialists” burned by the Great Recession generally envy and resent the “true rich”, like real estate developers, they seek to force private housing initiatives to agree to so many “social justice” requirements that any new developments are guaranteed to be unprofitable, and thus are never pursued, which is fine with the “socialists”, because they hate the profit motive and don’t want to see developers actually succeed in bringing housing prices down, because they don’t want capitalism to “work”—even though capitalism is the only economic system that will work. Liberals much prefer expensive public sector housing programs, which they then delay indefinitely through endless environmental appeals, ensuring that nothing actually gets built, while bureaucrats, lawyers, consultants, diversity “experts” et al. live handsomely, and housing prices stay high.7 Average home values in New York and California are $490,000 and $787,000 versus $348,000 and $402,000 in Texas and Florida. And the two red states have no income tax. Is it any wonder that liberalism is in disrepute?
Coates’ call for reparations came at a particularly “fraught” time in the history of contemporary liberalism. The advent of the Obama administration had filled many liberals—the “paleoliberals” in particular—with extravagant hopes for a “new New Deal”, which were largely dashed by the Obama administration—first by its timidity on the issue of universal health care (though, in my mind, “even” the Affordable Care Act was much too liberal for the taste of the American electorate) and secondly by its persistently solicitous attitude towards Wall Street. Beyond the ACA, perhaps the most extensive “social justice” commitment by the Obama administration was education reform, which for the Obama administration was largely an expansion on the “No Child Left Behind Act” (NCLB) conceived and enacted by the Bush administration.
The Obama administration continued the attitude of the Clinton administration of coolness towards the teachers unions, regarding them as both participants in and defenders of a culture of bureaucratic mediocracy. The Obama people also continued the Bush administration’s attempt to hold teachers and principals accountable for student performance via the provisions of NCLB. By Obama’s second term, however, opposition to the increasingly onerous testing demands of NCLB, which Obama’s people continue to push for, had reached a “tipping point”. All through the 2000s, an idealistic program, “Teach for America” had worked to recruit and place graduates of America’s most prestigious colleges as teachers in low-income schools. But in the latter years of the Obama administration, it became fashionable for graduates of the Ivies and similar schools across the country to not participate in Teach for America: Teach for America was “shit liberalism” (my term) that took what should have been good union jobs from “experienced black teachers.” The fact that relatively few public school K-12 teachers in the U.S. are black (6.1% in 2020-2021) was something the virtue-signaling youth were unlikely to know, and the teachers unions, who hated NCLB in the first place, were no doubt happy to encourage their ignorance.
But regardless of the impurity of the motives of NCLB’s enemies (which were probably stronger on the right than the left), NCLB was ultimately destroyed by its simple failure to achieve its goals: student scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, about which I wrote under contract with the National Center for Educational Statistics for 19 years, showed little change during either the Bush or Obama administrations, despite massive increases in educational spending at the federal, state, and local levels.
Few people noticed the failure of NCLB; many noticed that, despite the election of the first black president in American history, the position of blacks in America had not significantly improved. Liberal America was ready for a new idea, an attack on the problem from a completely different direction, a sweeping solution, a game changer, that would (implausibly, in my skeptical opinion) solve the problem in one fell swoop.
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 guaranteed that there would be no attempt at reparations at the federal level. However, Coates’ call for reparations proved to be only the opening gun in a barrage of “new ideas” (all of them terrible, again in my skeptical opinion) that would simply “demand” immediate equality of outcomes and label all temporizing as conclusive proof of racism.
Coates was almost a bystander in spectacular rise of the tendentious “reasoning” of what came to be known as “critical race theory”, though his frequent insistence that “nothing has changed” tracks the arguments of authors like Derrick Bell and Cheryl Harris. Yet, obviously, as the discussion of black homeownership that I have provided demonstrates, a lot has changed. Why hasn’t there been more, and how can there be more?
I have discussed these issues in a number of lengthy posts, including Coleman Hughes and “The End of Race Politics”: Necessary but not Sufficient, discussing the strengths and weaknesses of Hughes’ recent book The End of Race Politics Arguments for a Colorblind America, along with earlier pieces like CRT v. Anti-CRT: Wait, Wait! You’re BOTH Right! Occasionally. (2022), along with A Limo at Risk, Part I: A skeptical view of American education reform, 1983-2017 (2017). I differ from both Coates’ argument that “nothing has changed” and that simple (simple, but massive) handouts to every American black (or at least every low-income black) is the only solution *andU Hughes’ neoliberal/neocon emphasis on “high standards” and charter schools and/or private schools.
My basic argument is that a very large number of black children grow up in environments where the whole middle-class notion of “delayed gratification”, expressed largely as desiring the approval of “society”—particularly such authority figures as teachers, the police, ministers and other religious figures (though thoroughly Protestant, it was always clear to me that I should be particularly respectful of nuns, priests, rabbis, etc.)—is absent. Instead, children are “taught” that other people are to feared, avoided, or dominated—that no one trusts anyone because no one is worthy of trust. In The Message, as he did in his earlier work, Coates describes the world of the Baltimore ghetto that he experienced as a child:
When I was a boy, back in Baltimore, it was never enough for some kid who wanted to steal your football, your Diamondback dirt bike, or your Sixers Starter jacket to just do it. A justification was needed: “Shorty, lemme see that football,” “Somebody stole my lil cousin bike just like that one,” “Ay yo, that look like my Starter.” Debating the expansive use of the verb “see,” investigating the veracity of an alleged younger cousin, or producing a receipt misses the point. The point, even at such a young age, was the suppression of the network of neurons that houses the soft, humane parts of us.
Coates made it out, of course, perhaps through his native intelligence, his love of language, and his middle-class parents (his mother was a teacher and his demanding father a largely self-educated radical, founder of the Black Classic Press). Others did not have the advantages that Coates’ describes in his autobiography, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood. Instead, they grew up in a world that did approximate, with painful accuracy, Thomas Hobbes’ famous, inaccurate description of a supposed “State of Nature” (really, state of religious civil war raging in the British Isles during Hobbes’ lifetime), a war of all against all, a world where life really was “nasty, brutish, and short”, a world where cruelty was wisdom, formal learning an absurd and ridiculous con, and sensual pleasure, the only real good, the reward of power. This world was the result, not of “nature”, but of slavery.
Human beings, in my opinion, have been shaped by several million years of evolution to be “entirely” social animals, incapable, except in exceptional cases, of surviving alone, and even then only with at least a few accoutrements of civilization, most notably perhaps the ability to start a fire. The need for society begets the need for the approval of society, if for nothing else than to gain trust—though it is often “wise” not to trust too much.8
Slavery destroys trust. The African slavers who enslaved their African “brothers” stripped them from the social groups that defined and protected them and placed them in a society where there could be no trust, only obedience, and obedience based on fear—the rule of unreason. European slavers naturally repeated, and even “improved” on the process, carefully ensuring that, to the extent possible, slaves from one language group were kept apart from one another, as a means of preventing cooperation and common purpose. Enslaved Africans could only communicate using a language that was not their own, speaking to people whose ways and customs they could not know.
People like Ruth Bader Ginzberg and Andrew Sullivan say “We made it. Why can’t they?” Perhaps because “they” had ancestors who were products of non-literate cultures—and thus fragile cultural institutions that could not endure transplanting to any new cultural environment, much less one as brutal as the toxic experiences endured by the slaves of the American south. Jews in Europe, though they suffered enormous, and often fatal, oppression at the hands of “Christians” for close to two thousand years, almost always lived in largely self-governing communities, communities that cultivated a legendary respect for learning—learning focused entirely, of course, on the Hebrew bible, known to the Jews themselves as the “Tanakh”, along with its endless embroideries/commentaries that constitute the Talmud. When the European Enlightenment finally began to lower the walls that excluded Jews from participating in the larger European civilization and opened up the learned professions to them, the Jews flourished as they never had before.
After the Civil War, American blacks were freed from actual slavery, but they faced “informal” oppression at least as severe as that of the Jews, without any tradition of self government, with a fractured and indeed often non-existent family structure. Throughout the centuries of slavery, “marriages” were ones of convenience—the slaveowners’ convenience. The more attractive a woman was, the more likely she would be subject to sexual exploitation. Children were the property, not of their parents but of their “masters”. Whatever cultural traditions the slaves obtained from Africa had known in their time of relative freedom was lost on the Middle Passage. The only traditions their children knew were the traditions of slavery. In slavery’s aftermath, blacks did not live in self-governing communities. Rather, they were almost always in the employ of racist whites, either as servants or sharecroppers. Almost all blacks were routinely denied access to any formal education. Servants typically received no money wages. They ate leftovers and scraps, wore hand-me down clothes, and lived in basements or outbuildings. Sharecroppers were likely to spend most of their life in debt, almost entirely dependent on the good will of the landowners whose property they farmed. The only real cultural center American blacks enjoyed in the south was a highly emotional and largely verbal evangelical Christianity, passionate but often rigid, fundamentalist, and blinkered, with little room for intellectual development, a Christianity that was often left behind when blacks began escaping the south in the wake of the two world wars.
As a despised minority, almost destitute of any financial resources or opportunity, it is hardly surprising that bourgeois virtues did not flourish among black Americans, including the notion of bourgeois marriage. Black conservatives like Thomas Sowell want to believe that it was welfare that “destroyed” the black family, but according to the endlessly derided by never refuted study by Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma,9 the out of wedlock birth rate for American blacks in 1940 was already 25%, compared to 2% or 3% for whites. Since then, the rates of out of wedlock births for both blacks and whites have soared, thanks largely to the sexual revolution, which has transformed, and continues to transform, sexual behavior around the world in a manner without precedent in human history. In 2022, percentages of out of wedlock births for the major racial/ethnic groups were as follows: black, 69.3; white, 27.1; Hispanic, 53.2; and Asian, 12.3.
Until the 1960s, the New Deal welfare system largely reflected middle-class values—excluding mothers of children born out of wedlock (along with their children, of course) from “welfare”. Public housing was reserved for those who “behaved” themselves. Federal, state, and local governments could be as censorious as any private landlord, expelling “troublemakers” from access to public housing at their discretion. This would change in the sixties, as so many things did. The pressure of the integrationist movement that grew among white liberals in the U.S. following World War II caused them to ultimately drop the application of their own middle-class standards. Saying to blacks “We’re not excluding you because you’re black; we’re excluding you because you’re not middle-class” seemed no more than simple hypocrisy.
When blacks realized that the “deadly” racism of the past was over—that it was “safe” to openly express one’s hatred for whites rather than always accepting their unwittingly condescending and paternalistic “good will” with a straight face—a realization epitomized by the career, and popularity, of Malcolm X—the stage was set for the bloody race riots of the sixties, followed by a long-standing upsurge in black street crime that has declined but not abated to this day and producing the “street culture” that Coates himself described in the quotation given earlier.
Unsurprisingly, Coates does not welcome the “culture” argument, essentially repeating the counter argument that blaming the victim is wrong because it is wrong to blame the victim:
One thread of thinking in the African American community holds that these depressing numbers [regarding the situation of blacks in America] partially stem from cultural pathologies that can be altered through individual grit and exceptionally good behavior. (In 2011, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, responding to violence among young black males, put the blame on the family: “Too many men making too many babies they don’t want to take care of, and then we end up dealing with your children.” Nutter turned to those presumably fatherless babies: “Pull your pants up and buy a belt, because no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.”) The thread is as old as black politics itself. It is also wrong. The kind of trenchant racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable. The essence of American racism is disrespect. And in the wake of the grim numbers, we see the grim inheritance.
I’m afraid I find this “argument” facile and unconvincing. I’ve already argued the contrary, that the uniquely high rates of violent crime in low income black communities, the frequent lack of a stable family structure, the sense of deep disconnect from the larger American society, a society that cannot be understood, cannot be trusted, and cannot be mastered, are the major contributing factors to the continuing failure to achieve a fully integrated society in the U.S.
I don’t believe that simple appeals to “shape up or ship out” are the solution, but many of those “presumably absent” fathers that Coates speaks of really are absent. What would life have been for Coates if he had no father, if his mother’s boyfriend was a drug dealer rather than a self-made publisher with a home library of black authors? Coates entire career is quite literally an homage to his father, as he tells us over and over again. Claiming that all ills of black America can be laid on the conscience of white “disrespect” is absurd. Is it a coincidence that, according to 2023 Census data, Hispanic household income ($65,540) is higher than blacks ($56,880), and whites ($84,630) higher than Hispanics, and Asians ($112,200) higher than whites? Or is this a “pattern” similar to that we see in percentages of marriages and rates of violent crime for the four groups?
At the same time, even the disparity in incomes demonstrates the falsity of Coates’ charge that “nothing has changed”. According to the U.S. State Department, in a 2023 report issued before the horrendous Israeli invasion of Gaza, unemployment there among the Palestinians was 45% (12% in the West Bank). Surely today it approaches 100%. In addition, in 2023 “The average daily wage in the West Bank is $37, and the equivalent is $15 in Gaza, compared to $79 in Israel [for Palestinians].” Unemployment rates in the U.S. for the fourth quarter of 2024 were 5.8% for blacks, 3.5% for whites, 3.6% for Asians, 6% for Hispanics. Though black Americans are behind other U.S. groups economically, comparing them to Palestinians in terms of “oppression” is serious overkill. In fact, it approaches “ridiculous”.
There is really a very simple “test” to determine if blacks are oppressed in America. If black Americans were really oppressed, they would try to leave. But there is no evidence (that I could find) that blacks are trying to leave the U.S. in appreciable numbers. Instead, they are coming here. According to Pew Research, about 10% of the black American population—some 4.6 million—consists of immigrants to this country. The largest number come from Jamaica, Haiti, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. Why do they come? Well, for many reasons I’m sure, but the black average household income of $56,880 might be one reason, for it compares favorably with such countries as Germany ($54,800), Israel ($54,650 ), Canada ($54,040), the United Kingdom ($47,700), and France ($45,180), not to mention, well, Haiti ($1,760) and Nigeria ($1,880). (I couldn’t find data for Jamaica or Ethiopia.)
It is time—it is past time, really—for black intellectuals like Coates to realize that they have, in effect, lost their chains. It is time to stop dredging up examples of overt racism from the increasingly distant past as grounds for excoriating whites in the present. One of the primary reasons for the government sanctioned—government sanctioned and engineered—segregationist housing patterns the industrial Midwest was to prevent “miscegenation”—a now almost forgotten word used for the ultimate sin of “race-mixing”—the ultimate sin committed repeatedly by Thomas Jefferson and millions of other southern white men.
Back in the 1950s, the “last stand” of open advocates of segregation—the “clinching argument” of the “honest racist”— was “Would you like your sister to marry one?” For many young people today, I would think, that question would be received with bewilderment: “Well, yeah, sure, if she wants to. What’s your point?” Coates himself describes, in the “Africa” portion of The Message, first his confusion, and then amusement, to discover that “real” Africans consider many black celebrities in the U.S. to be, well, not “black” at all!
On that count [seeking to resolve the “culture shock” of the encounter between Afro-American and African] we settled for humor, joking about how most Africans, who have never lived under the one-drop rule, see African Americans. The lines were blurry. LeBron James was Black. Beyoncé was mixed, despite having two Black parents by the American definition. Her husband, Jay-Z, was Black because he was a “rapper” and not a “singer.” Likewise, Steph Curry—two Black parents notwithstanding—would be mixed, but he played basketball, and so was Black. His wife, though—she was mixed.
And what of me. “You’re mixed, Ta-Nehisi,” Khanata replied, laughing. “Look, I understand what Black is in America. I get that you’re Black there, but here you are mixed. That’s how we see most Black Americans.”
I don’t know what it says about me that I just sipped my beer and laughed. Maybe it was seeing my own gospel—the social construction of race—so dispassionately preached back at me. Maybe it was thinking back to my Black American friends and all our jokes about DNA tests and who is 100 percent African (none of us) and who is not. And then the humor faded.
The truly “funny” part to me is that Coates doesn’t want to acknowledge just how the “one-drop” rule has in fact “dissolved.” In the old days, Beyoncé would be considered “black”, even though, to my mind and eyes, it is a serious stretch—and, more likely, a marketing tool—to consider her even “mixed”. Who cares? And the same with Steph Curry, even though he is darker (and even though he plays basketball). His relatively light skin and middle-class affect (and success) push him into the “mixed” class, which is really a euphemism for “supra-racial”—the large category where race is not a meaningful issue.10
There is no question that “European” features (and hair) are preferred by society, and, as Coates himself discusses at length, also preferred by blacks themselves, both in the United States and Africa. But this is true in Asia as well. Seoul is the cosmetology capital of Asia, where women (and men) go to acquire “western” eyes and noses and other features—a tribute to the power that western nations obtained thanks to “modern” technology, all based to the quantitative (as opposed to the qualitative) approach to understanding of the world that developed, for many unrelated reasons and contingent factors, in the west alone, allowing the formation, for the first time in history, of a society that was not eternally bound to the will of landowners, aka “rural idiocy”, to employ Marx’s incisive term. It took a long time for western science and capitalism to benefit the great majority of humankind rather than exploiting them, but that day has finally come—to the extent, I would say, that even racism (though not xenophobia) has substantially declined and will, I believe, continue to do so. Mr. Coates would be wise to take note of this fact.
1. I am confident that the phrase “under American patronage” is not intended by Coates to be “restrictive”—that is to say, his meaning is not “the West Bank is the only place in the world where the U.S. is supporting oppression comparable to that experienced by my parents” but rather “the West Bank is the only place in the world suffering from oppression comparable to that experienced by my parents, and, even worse, the U.S. is supporting it!”
2. “CRT” and its close cousin, “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (“DEI”) both seem to be suffering (justly) from the burden of their own excess, though it’s painful in the extreme that the “lesson” has to be applied via outrage over the disgusting growth of “anti-Zionism” (read “antisemitism”) on American campuses, the “elite” ones in particular. The notion that one can be both “pro-Palestine” and “pro-Israel”—the infamous “two-state solution” equally despised by Hamas and Netanyahu—is very likely to be pushed aside. For decades, colleges and universities have uncritically catered to self-righteous left-wing bullying over “colonialism” and other manufactured crimes. If “colonialism” is so bad, why isn’t the United States singled out as the very worst offender, and why haven’t all “righteous” college students who aren’t Amerindians go back where they came from instead of exploiting someone else’s land?
3. Agee and Evans originally undertook the project under the aegis of Fortune, then a very high end magazine directed at executives. The sufferings of black sharecroppers were probably considered “too much” for even the most enlightened big shot.
4. The “core sample” is defined by Collins and Margo as households headed by a “male, in the labor force, not currently enrolled in school, and between the ages of 25 and 64.” See the paper for a full explanation of the choice of this sample.
5. HUD appropriations unadjusted for inflation for the “decade years” following the department’s creation are as follows: 1975, $22 billion; 1985, $9.8 billion; 1995, $19.3 billion; 2005, $35.2 billion; 2015, $46.6 billion.
6. In Washington, DC, where I live, buildings are effectively restricted to a height of no more than 10 stories, supposedly because Congress didn’t want private buildings to overshadow the U.S. Capitol. Whatever the “original” reason, the “real” reason is that the height restriction drives up the values of existing properties.
7. The same “obsessions”—suspicion and resentment of the private sector and a decided preference for expensive, dysfunctional public programs—have exacerbated the destructive impact of the recent “Santa Ana” fires in California.
8. Language, the quintessential human characteristic, is product of millennia of evolutionary selection. The human vocal apparatus—mouth, teeth, tongue, throat, nasal passages, lungs, etc.—have all been uniquely shaped by evolutionary pressures originating long before the emergence of “modern” humans. The notion that other animals can be taught to speak as we do is as ill-founded as the notion that we humans could be taught to fly by flapping our arms. The gift of human language is remarkably double-edged, allowing for both the advancement of the welfare of the group, even at the occasional expense of the individual, and the advancement of an individual even at the expense of the group.
9. I discussed Myrdal’s study in some detail in the course of my long post, CRT v. Anti-CRT: Wait, Wait! You’re BOTH Right! Occasionally..
10. It is “interesting” that Coates’ African friends use “black” explicitly as a “construct”: If Steph Curry did not “act black”, by playing basketball, he would be somehow “mixed” despite having two black parents, presumably because when he isn’t playing basketball he “acts white”, speaking in standard English, using “white” grammar and pronunciation.
