Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Role of the Public Intellectual
A Narrative of American Social and Political Discourse
Name: Boudewijn van Werven Student number: 11350776
Email: boudewijn.vanwerven@student.uva.nl Place/Date: Amsterdam, January 8, 2019 Course: Master’s Thesis American Studies Supervisor: Dr. E.F. van de Bilt
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Abstract
In this thesis, I seek to position African American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates as a public intellectual. This thesis analyzes the position of Coates as the newly acclaimed African American public intellectual, and the way he situates himself in modern American society. This thesis is not simply a biography of Coates. Instead, it will be a narrative of the role of the public intellectual in the contemporary social and political discourse of American society. By engaging with themes such as the role of mythology, African American identity and the Civil War, the Obama era and the Post-Racial myth, and the role of identity politics in contemporary democracy, Coates, as a public intellectual and an anti-racist thinker, reveals a few of the problems that American society faces.
Keywords: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Public Intellectual, Edward Said, Barack Obama, the Post-Racial Era, Color-Blind Racism, Mark Lilla, Identity Politics.
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Table of Contents
1) Introduction ... 4
2) Cultural Myths and the Becoming of the Public Intellectual ... 11
2.1 Introduction ... 11
2.2 Mythology and the Civil War... 12
2.3 The Use of Myth and Narrative in American Society ... 18
2.4 The Myth of The Dream... 22
2.5 Conclusion ... 27
3) Speaking Truth to Power and the ‘Post-Racial’ Myth ... 30
3.1 Introduction ... 30
3.2 The Symbolical Promise of Obama ... 32
3.3 New Racism and Color-blindness ... 34
3.4 The ‘Post Racial’ Era and the Persistence of the Color Line ... 39
3.5 Conclusion ... 46
4) Problems of (White) Identity Politics in American Democracy ... 48
4.1 Introduction ... 48
4.2 Problems of Identity Liberalism ... 50
4.3 E Pluribus Unum and Citizenship in the Age of Obama ... 53
4.4 Citizenship and Empathy in Democracy ... 56
4.5 Neoliberalism, Education, and Citizenship ... 64
4.6 Conclusion ... 68
5) Conclusion ... 70
Bibliography ... 75
Primary Sources ... 75
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1) Introduction
“I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.”1 These words, by public intellectual and literary icon Toni Morrison, mark the crisis that has been present within the black community in the field of black intellectual and political leadership.2 According to Cornel West, this crisis was caused by the improvement of a portion of the black community, which caused new forms of class divisions. These class divisions “produced by black inclusion (and exclusion) from the economic boom and the consumerism and hedonism promoted by mass culture have resulted in new kinds of personal turmoil and existential meaninglessness in black America.”3 Public intellectuals such as Morrison and Michael Eric Dyson have put their faith into the hands of Coates, as “Baldwin’s Heir.”4 Nonetheless, it is a comparison and embrace that did not come about without arguments, as especially West is highly critical of the works of Coates.5
The debate sparked a re-thinking of what it meant to be a public intellectual, and how s/he should position himself or herself within society, the public, and the community. Philosopher Edward Said gave six lectures about the representation of the public intellectual.6 His main argument is that the “intellectual [should] represent emancipation and enlightenment, but never as abstractions or as bloodless and distant gods to be served.”7 In other words, the intellectual should represent his or her ideas independently from a leading authority.8 Instead, s/he must dwell on the ongoing experiences in society, for instance of “the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless.”9 Said also argues that the modern intellectual needs to be an amateur. He defines the amateur as “someone who considers that to be a thinking and concerned member of a society one is
1Toni Morrison quoted in Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (London:
Hamish Hamilton, 2017), back cover.
2Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 37–40. 3Ibid., 37.
4Michael Eric Dyson, “Between the World and Me: Baldwin’s Heir?” The Atlantic, July 23, 2015,
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/james-baldwin-tanehisi-coates/399413/.
5Ibid; Cornel West, “Ta-Nehisi Coates Is the Neoliberal Face of the Black Freedom Struggle,” The Guardian,
December 17, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/17/ta-nehisi-coates-neoliberal-black-struggle-cornel-west; Ejike Obineme, “Too Terrified to Enter an Arena of Ideas? The Debate over Cornel West’s Critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates,” Truthout, January 4, 2018, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/43100-too-terrified-to-enter-an-arena-of-ideas-the-debate-over-cornel-west-s-critique-of-ta-nehisi-coates.
6Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (London: Vintage, 1994). 7Ibid., 84.
8Ibid., 90. 9Ibid., 84.
5 entitled to raise moral issues at the heart of even the most technical and professionalized activity as it involves one’s country, its power, its mode of interacting with its citizens.”10 The aspect of amateurism intends that the intellectual is not driven by profit, but rather by the moral task of representing those who are unrepresented.11 The amateur intellectual in opposition to the professional counterpart does not operate with a reward incentive and the possibility of making a career, but is rather solely driven by a “committed engagement with ideas and values in the public sphere.”12 In contrast, the professional pretends to be in possession of a detached objectivity, made possible by the position of his or her profession.13 Consequently, s/he legitimizes opinion because s/he is a professional expert in the field. Said is critical of specialization either as a scholar or a professional as it imbues thought with canonical ideas and reduces the interest in independent ideas and values.14 The intellectual is, therefore, the individual who independently raises questions and challenges social practices.15
Yet, this definition of the amateur intellectual represents an ideal image of the intellectual, perhaps tinged by romanticism. Said creates an image of the intellectual as a lone wolf, an individual who rises above external social influences and elements such as a professional career or profit. His perspective is in danger of creating a heroic vision of the role of the public intellectual: an idea of the intellectual as someone who is perfect. In other words, the amateur public intellectual in the eyes of Said becomes the only thinker who is capable of critically engaging with society without being influenced by external factors. S/he is the only one who can reveal misunderstandings and problems within society as s/he must remain independent.
This idea partly contrasts with the image that Jean-Paul Sartre created of the intellectual writer. When he was given the Nobel Prize, Sartre refused to accept it because he argued that a writer needs to stay “independent of interests and influences.”16 Still, Sartre is more willing to acknowledge the ambivalence that surrounds the public intellectual. He argues that the intellectual always stays at the level of the bourgeois, as he is driven by
10Ibid., 61.
11Ibid.
12Ibid., Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures, 1. Vintage Books ed, The Reith Lectures
1993 (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 107.
13Ibid., 107. 14Ibid., 76. 15Ibid., 82.
16Sarah Bakewell, De Existentialisten: Filosoferen over Vrijheid, Zijn en Cocktails, trans. Karl van Klaveren
6 “external” factors such as commercial interests and reputation.17 The intellectual is, therefore, always influenced by the demands of society.18 Interestingly, these demands can also be recognized in the career of Coates, and his path in becoming a public intellectual.
The definition of the public intellectual by Said functions as the framework within which the role of Coates will be analyzed, as there are similarities between the amateur intellectual and Coates. For instance, Coates, as a writer of The Atlantic, has positioned himself as a leading spokesman in the debate about race and racism. Dyson states that Coates “is an enormously gifted writer who, while feeding his hunger to eloquently tell the truth about race, has also fed a nation starving for that same truth.”19 Coates universalizes the sufferings of the African Americans in relation to the neoliberal system and capitalism.20 In his major works Between the World and Me and We Were Eight Years in Power, Coates exposes the institutionalization of racism in the context of neoliberalism and shows how race and racism still influence social and political discourse. Furthermore, his analysis of the eight years of Barack Obama’s administration shows him engaging with issues of political power.
Nonetheless, Coates was aggressively criticized, mostly by Cornel West, who argues that his “perception of white people is tribal and his conception of freedom is neoliberal.”21 In other words, West directs his critique at the neoliberalism that Coates, as a Saidian intellectual, is supposed to attack: according to West, Coates is explicit about the sufferings of his people, but too lenient towards the powerful “centrist” Obama, who “embraced the ostensible virtues of business supremacy and worked to modernize warfare against Black and Brown bodies internationally.”22 To a certain extent, Coates fits into West’s perspective about black intellectual leadership. For instance, Coates shows, in particular in Between the World and Me, “engagement with battles in the streets.”23 Furthermore, he is not affected by the “bureaucratization of the academy,” and he resembles Baldwin, for being “self-taught and self-styled,” as he dropped out of university because he saw the schooling system as the embodiment and institutionalization of racial myths.24 But West criticizes the comparison between Baldwin and Coates, as he points out that Baldwin encouraged social movements
17Jean-Paul Sartre, “A Plea for Intellectuals,” in Between Existentialism and Marxism (London: Verso, 2008),
236.
18Said, 1996, 75.
19Dyson, “Between the World and Me.”
20David Humphrey, “Removing the Veil: Coates, Neoliberalism, and the Color Line,” Philosophical Studies in
Education 48 (2017): 20–29; Said, 1994, 33.
21West, “Ta-Nehisi Coates Is the Neoliberal Face of the Black Freedom Struggle.”
22Obineme; See for more critique on Obama: West, “Ta-Nehisi Coates Is the Neoliberal Face.” 23West, Race Matters, 40; Coates, Between the World and Me (Melbourne: Text, 2015), 25–27. 24West, Race Matters, 41–43; Coates, Between the World and Me, 25–27.
7 and collective action, while Coates remains at a distance, not paying enough attention to the Black Lives Matter movement and political activists in Between the World and Me for instance. In a reaction, Coates defended himself by stating that his intention is “to clarify stuff for people that go to those marches, [to] clarify things that inspire people who go and think about policy.”25 It is precisely this approach which serves as a crucial trait for the public intellectual.
By going public with his views, Coates created the debate about his status. As one critic argues, by dealing with political and social topics, “Coates cannot simply choose to speak for himself as a private individual. His words have consequences, and he has, despite his attempts at abdication, been given the moral and political authority for formulating ideas that have a real material impact on the dominant culture.”26 This means that Coates has been thrown, almost automatically, into the position of the public intellectual because of the themes he discusses in his books and his articles.
Coates’s status as a public intellectual is remarkable in other ways as well. On the one hand, he never intended to become a public intellectual, while on the other hand, his intellectual intentions with Between the World and Me were clear as he stepped in the line of the black intellectual tradition and followed in the footsteps of his predecessor Baldwin.27 Moreover, Coates has negative things to say about public intellectuals, as he accuses them of formulating and expressing opinions without complete knowledge of the situation or a personal understanding of the experiences of the social groups they are discussing.28 Coates uses the example of growing up in a time in which white intellectuals were making “breathless pronouncements about their world, about my world, and about the world itself.”29 He argues that white intellectuals were not familiar with the lives of African Americans and their experiences.
Not only does Coates occasionally criticize the public intellectual, but he also eschewed the fame and status that came with his writings. The profit that he made with his writings was an excellent and necessary bonus, but he experienced how the distance between himself and his writing disappeared. In other words, he was now identified with his public
25Coates quoted in Concepión De Léon, “Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Making of a Public Intellectual,” The
Independent, October 5, 2017, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/ta-nehisi-coates-and-the-making-of-a-public-intellectual-a7984461.html.
26Obineme.
27Dyson, “Between the World and Me.” 28Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 160.
29Ibid., “What It Means to Be a Public Intellectual,” The Atlantic, January 8, 2014,
8 writings, and, even more, he became a writer about whom other people wrote. Coates, as a writer, became an object of attention. Through this attention, he was more and more pushed into the position of the public intellectual. This made him realize that The Atlantic, the magazine he was writing for, had a reputation. As a result, every argument he would write down was being seriously considered by others.30 Coates remarks: “How bizarre and confusing it was to look up one day and see that I, who’d begun in failure, who held no degrees or credentials, had become such a person.”31 In other words, Coates opposes the legitimacy his arguments obtain because he writes for a renowned journal. He sees, like Said, that the ideal role of the intellectual is in amateurism: he was unwilling to become a professional intellectual.
Occasionally, in his work, Coates discusses the status of public intellectual. For example, he writes in We Were Eight Years in Power, implicitly reacting to West: “I felt the expectation that if I was writing or talking about problems, I should also be able to identify an immediately actionable way out.”32 Coates argues that the role of the public intellectual is to raise questions and to point out injustices instead of only interpreting them and providing a message of redemption.33 He openly disdains public intellectuals for selling their opinions to broad audiences by telling them stories of redemption, instead of questioning radical malfunctions in American society.34
The position of Coates, as the declared new public intellectual, will be the leading theme of this thesis. It is a problematic role, which had been ascribed to him by other prominent public figures. The main argument is that, in the end, while Coates has become one of today’s foremost anti-racist thinkers, he remains a highly ambivalent public intellectual, operating in the mode of Said as well as Sartre. This ambivalence arises because Coates, for instance, never intended to become a public intellectual, but he was pushed into that role by the intentions of his work and by other public intellectuals. He positions himself as the amateur public intellectual: he is not a professional specialist and does not speak from within academic institutions. But he became an expert in describing African-American experience. He saw making a profit on the basis of his writings as a convenient ancillary but the profit he made has an impact on his position. He has become a black public intellectual by speaking truth to power in opposition to political leaders, such as Obama, and white public
30Ibid., We Were Eight Years in Power, 160–61. 31Ibid., 161.
32Ibid., 152. 33Ibid. 34Ibid., 160.
9 intellectuals, such as Mark Lilla and George Packer, but in this confrontation with power remained remarkably moderate and in his conversation with his white counterparts distanced himself from them. By distancing himself from white public intellectuals such as George Packer and Mark Lilla, Coates became a black public intellectual.
This thesis will not simply be a narrative of the persona of Coates, but also a narrative and analysis of modern American social and political discourse. The books of Coates Between the World and Me and We Were Eight Years in Power that serve as the primary sources for this thesis are supplemented with material from his other writings for The Atlantic. Between the World and Me is a strange work as it is a personal letter to his son, a warning about how to cope with his blackness and systematic racism, while at the same time it is a public document that discusses the racial past of America and a few of its white myths. It was his first major work that propelled him to the position of a public intellectual. We Were Eight Years in Power is a testimonial of the eight years of Obama, which consists of specific essays from The Atlantic. In particular, his essays “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War,” “Fear of a Black President” and “The First White President” will be of central importance in this thesis. The essay “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War” deals with the narrative of the Civil War, the creation of a national myth, and the exclusion of African Americans, while “Fear of a Black President” and “The First White President,” deal with the role of blackness and whiteness within social and political discourse and respectively Obama and Donald Trump. The decision to focus on these books and essays of Coates instead of his comic Black Panther is based on the fact that it is in these works that Coates explicitly positions himself as a public intellectual. Furthermore, these works are a direct and explicit account of his sufferings and experiences.
A close reading of these materials and related scholarly works will be used to discuss Coates’s perspective on white mythology and race relations in current-day American society and the role of intellectuals in the debates about these issues. The works of Coates and other scholars such as Lilla, West, Dyson and Chantal Mouffe are used to examine crucial themes such as the Dream, racism, identity politics, citizenship, and democracy. This will result in the contextualization of the works of Coates and his position as a public intellectual, a position he expressed doubts about but nevertheless embraced.
This thesis is divided into three chapters each covering a different theme, which show the ambivalent position of Coates as the public intellectual and provide a sharp analysis of the contemporary political and social struggles in American society. The first chapter will deal with Coates becoming a public intellectual due to his early essays and the publication of
10 Between the World and Me. It will argue how Coates was hesitant to become a public intellectual, but in the end, decided to go public with his personal letter to his son. Furthermore, it will discuss the engagement of Coates with cultural myths and the racial connotations thereof. One of the primary examples is the construction of the Civil War myth, which has been transformed into a white narrative excluding African Americans and other minorities from the national narrative: Coates has written an essay “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” that deals with the exclusion of blacks from the Civil War myth, and shows how mythology constructs a national identity. The second chapter will engage with the relationship of the public intellectual with power. This chapter will focus on the ambivalent intellectual relationship of Coates with Obama. It will deal with the debate about a post-racial era and the awareness that the United States remained divided on the bases of “race”: it will deal discuss the occurrence of ‘new racism’ and ‘color-blind racism.’35 Coates, at first a believer in the post-racial era in the United States, analyzed the important symbolism of the “first black president,” but through the years became more skeptical about the truth of the post-racial myth, as even during the presidency of Obama there seemed to be a “persistence of the color-line.”36 The last chapter will deal with the intellectual position of Coates in opposition to white intellectuals such as Lilla and Packer. Lilla called out Coates by his remarks about identity politics and the Democratic Party. For instance, Lilla was highly critical of the course of the Democratic Party; in his opinion the Democratic Party is losing ground due to its emphasis on identity politics.37 According to Coates, this critique signals the importance of whiteness in the United States, which is also a returning theme in the election of Trump, who, Coates argues, is the “first white President.”38 The relation between Coates and white intellectuals exposes a conflict about identity politics in which the role of whiteness raises questions about the critical situation of American democracy and neoliberalism, about a re-thinking of the definition of citizenship and the structure of the educational system.
35Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists : Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality
in America (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2017).
36Coates, “Fear of a Black President”; Kennedy, The Persistence of the Color Line (New York: Pantheon, 2011). 37Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 2017); Lilla,
“The End of Identity Liberalism,” The New York Times, November 18, 2016,
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html.
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2) Cultural Myths and the Becoming of the Public Intellectual
2.1 Introduction
You know you’re black, but in as much the same way that white people know they are white. Since everyone else around you looks like you, you just take it as the norm, the standard, unremarkable. Objectively, you know you’re in the minority, but that status hits home only when you walk out into the wider world and realize that, out there, you are really different.1
With these words, Coates reflects on the construction of African American identity, as a collective identity, in opposition to white Americans. The construction of black identity is inseparable from America as a nation, but it encounters resistance in the form of myths and narratives of American society.2 The construction of black identity not only reveals an essential link between the construction of identities and the creation of myths and narratives, but it also exposes the importance of history in particular and the role of history in the shaping of identity. In particular, Coates writes in his essay “The Case for Reparations” that the history and identity of America began in “black plunder and white democracy, two features that are not contradictory but complementary.”3 In this essay, Coates makes a crucial argument that the case for reparations for African Americans is such an issue not simply because the U.S. government might lack the resources to do so, but more because it has a greater and more intriguing meaning, i.e. it is a threat to “America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world.”4
The argument that Coates makes about mythology is also elaborated in Between the World and Me. It is an odd document because it is intended as a private letter to his son but was published publicly. In other words, he aims to prepare his son for his life as an African American, while at the same time he addresses and criticizes social discourse within America. The publishing of the book raises the question if Coates solely wrote this book because of personal fear for his son, or that he was trying to position himself as a public intellectual, who was concerned with recent cases of racism in American society. This
1Coates, “American Girl,” in We Were Eight Years in Power, 52. 2Ibid., 54.
3Ibid., “The Case for Reparations,” in We Were Eight Years in Power, 180. 4Ibid., 201.
12 question shows the ambivalence of Coates in relation to the public intellectual and the extent to which he intended to be a public intellectual or not.
Between the World and Me established the position of Coates as a public intellectual. On the one hand, it positioned him as an award-winning writer and it established his reputation through endorsement by intellectuals such as Toni Morrison. On the other hand, it situated Coates as a public intellectual because he set off to expose the cultural errors that were part of the leading myths of American society. He already started this work in his essays “The Case for Reparations” and “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War.” The book is the beginning of the public career of Coates and gave him the title ‘public intellectual,’ but he was overwhelmed by all this sudden attention. In essence, Between the World and Me embodied the ambivalent relation of Coates with the title of public intellectual, as he wanted to write a personal letter to his son, but he eventually went public with the book. He disliked the fame that came with the book, but he liked the recognition from black intellectuals such as Morrison.5 The ambivalence once more raises the question if Coates intended to become a public intellectual or that he was pushed into that role by the fame of the book.
This chapter will deal with the rise of Coates as a public intellectual. It will engage with the ideas of Coates concerning the role of the public intellectual. In a sense, Coates becomes a public thinker with a moral agenda by exposing the cultural myths in American social discourse and revealing how this discourse has racial connotations. He formulates an argument about mythology and narratives that are deemed to be essential for the American national identity but are repulsive in the eyes of African Americans, because they construct an unjust and non-inclusive society.
2.2 Mythology and the Civil War
One of the key examples in American history that has produced a variety of myths and narratives within social and political discourse is the Civil War. Coates presents in his essay “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” a representative image of how social groups are excluded from a national narrative.6 In the light of the contemporary monument controversy that is raging through the South-East of the United States, the essay of Coates delivers fruitful insights, as he deals with his struggle with the Civil War, and his position in
5Ibid., We Were Eight Years in Power, 221.
13 relation to monument sites such as Gettysburg.7 The current monument crisis revolves around the upholding or removal of Confederate monuments and has exposed a conflict between collective identities.8
The Civil War, as a historical event, produced a variety of narratives. For instance, there is the narrative of the Civil War as the war that marked the end of slavery in the United States. Additionally, it was also the first war in which African Americans could actively participate in the resistance against slavery, as they were able to enlist in the Union Army. This symbolized the opportunity to fight for their freedom, as one Corporal Thomas Long, of the 33rd United States Colored Troops, stated: “If we hadn’t become soldiers, all might have gone back as it was before… But now things can never go back, because we have shown our energy and our courage and our natural manhood.”9 This response shows that active participation gave African American men a form of agency.
The previous narrative represents stories that are essential to the African American community, but the narrative of the Civil War that eventually became the mainstream narrative that helped construct the American identity was a narrative of white Americans.10 In effect, the variety of narratives was poured into a myth leaving out crucial elements that were vital to black Americans. In other words, the myth of the Civil War is a construction of white Americans, producing an ‘American design.’ In particular, Coates states: “The belief that the Civil War wasn’t for us, [African Americans], was the result of the country’s long search for a narrative that could reconcile white people with each other.”11 Coates argues that African Americans have been excluded from the national narrative intentionally.
Currently, voices have risen in America that attack the white view of the Civil War. Historians now argue “that one group of Americans attempted to raise a country wholly premised on property in Negroes, and that another group of Americans, including many Negroes, stopped them.”12 It is this part that has been excluded from the narrative, transforming it into a more simplified and useful version. This results in the construction of the Civil War myth, which means that “[i]n popular mind, [the] demonstrable truth has been evaded in favor of a more comforting story of tragedy, failed compromise, and individual gallantry. For that more ennobling narrative, as far so much of American history, the fact of
7Ibid., 80.
8Boudewijn van Werven, “The Replacement of Statues to Democratic Museums: Revisiting Identity Politics and
the Modern Antagonism” (University of Amsterdam, 2018), 11.
9Thomas Long quoted in Coates, “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” 79. 10Coates, “Why Do So Few Blacks Study The Civil War?” 73.
11Ibid. 12Ibid.
14 black people is a problem.”13 The reconstruction of the Civil War myth by Coates shows essential elements of the role of mythology in society and collective identities.
On the one hand, Coates outlines the image of the myth as a crucial element in the construction of a national identity, a national identity that excludes African Americans from the national narrative. On the other hand, he shows how essential information is ignored to create a simplified version of the narrative and transform it into a myth. Coates not only criticizes the ignoring of the role of African Americans within the history of the United States, but he also underlines that feelings of gallantry have replaced the feelings of trauma. The white mythology that occurs from this distortion of facts plays a vital role in current society.
Coates takes up the task of the public intellectual to question the moral issues that arise from the mainstream social discourse within American society by criticizing the myth of the Civil War. He exposes the influences of a leading narrative on American culture and on modes of citizen interaction. Coates questions the established culture and the persistence of race and racism therein. In other words, he reveals how cultural myths play an important role in the moral issues of American society.14
For instance, the examples of the monument crisis in American society mainly revolve around the Confederate monuments that are still apparent within the public space in American cities. The monument controversy is evidence of the persistence of the color line in the social realm. Specifically, the dispute exposes a conflict between black and white identities.15 The examples of monuments that are being removed or have caused a fierce debate are numerous, e.g., statues of Confederate officers such as Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, and Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis and Nashville, but also the Liberty Place monument in New Orleans.16 The monuments, an sich, are presentations of a society that represent racist ideals. Therefore, the monuments raise the question:
13Ibid.
14Said, 1996, 82. 15van Werven, 12.
16For all the examples see: Amber Ferguson, “Controversial Confederate Statue Removed in New Orleans,”
Washington Post, accessed October 10, 2017, http://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/controversial-confederate-statue-removed-in-new-orleans/2017/04/24/aeb9e534-2957-11e7-9081-f5405f56d3e4_video.html; Becca Andrews, “Holy Crap, This Is the Worst Confederate Statue We’ve Ever Seen,” Mother Jones (blog), June 23, 2015, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/06/worst-confederate-statue-ever-nashville-nathan-bedford-forrest/; Cari Wade Gervin, “Nathan Bedford Forrest Statue Will Stay in Memphis — For Now,” Nashville Scene, October 13, 2017, //www.nashvillescene.com/news/pith-in-the-wind/article/20979209/nathan-bedford-forrest-statue-will-stay-in-memphis-for-now; Jeff Adelson, “New Orleans’ Battle of Liberty Place Monument Can Come Down, Judge Says,” The Advocate, accessed October 10, 2017,
http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/politics/article_db2818ac-045e-11e7-b65d-1311ddf0e635.html; Nicole Chavez and Emanuella Grinberg CNN, “New Orleans Begins Controversial Removal of Confederate
15
Do we, as a society, have a duty to the past to continue to give pride of sacred place to monuments to our (…) own ‘Lost Cause’ of the Confederates States of America in spite of altogether persuasive arguments not only that this cause was racist at its core, but also that some of the specific monuments (…) leave nothing to the imagination in terms of their racism?17
The question raised by Sanford Levinson, an American legal scholar, is highly relevant as it reveals the importance of race in the (post-) racial era of modern American society.
The monument controversy encloses the racial tensions within American society, in the sense that they present the mythology of the Civil War. For instance, Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, is a crucial example of the remembrance of the ‘Lost Cause’ myth with the monuments of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson.18 The street is not simply a public space that commemorates Civil War heroes. Instead, it is “an exclusive symbol of Southern white history and culture.”19 This standpoint became all too apparent when the debate started to add a statue of the African American tennis champion and civil rights activist Arthur Ashe. This case exposed the underlying friction in Richmond, which involved “race relations, identity, and power.”20
Nevertheless, the debate was not merely a struggle between white Americans, on one side, and black Americans, on the other side. On the one hand, there were white opponents of the Ashe statue, who argued that the avenue was a white symbol that embodied the Southern heritage. On the other hand, some African Americans opposed the Ashe statue, because they did not want to be part of the “white” avenue. In other words, they despised the white symbolism of Monument Avenue. But there was also a third group who sought a compromise by creating a multiracial street, which would have made the public space identifiable to both white and black Americans.21
Monuments,” CNN, April 26, 2017,
http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/24/us/new-orleans-confederate-statues/index.html; Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “The Fight Over Virginia’s Confederate Monuments,” The New Yorker, November 27, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/04/the-fight-over-virginias-confederate-monuments.
17Sanford Levinson, Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1998), 32.
18Jonathan I. Leib, “Separate Times, Shared Spaces: Arthur Ashe, Monument Avenue and the Politics of
Richmond, Virginia’s Symbolic Landscape,” Cultural Geographies 9, no. 3 (2002): 286.
19Ibid., 291. 20Ibid., 286. 21Ibid., 307.
16 The case of Monument Avenue in 1995 reveals a direct struggle between white and black identities directly exposing the racial tensions within the public space. More recent examples show the same characteristics. For example, the clash between white supremacists and left-wing activists in Charlottesville, Virginia, was also sparked by the monument of Robert E. Lee. Another example is the statue of Forrest in Memphis and Nashville. According to the mayor of Nashville, Megan Barry, the statue should be removed to the museum because it should not commemorate and celebrate Southern heritage in the public space.22 Furthermore, the statues of Lee and Forrest unveil another crucial point, i.e., the relation between the zeitgeist, the monument, and the public space. In other words, most monuments of Civil War ‘heroes’ were placed during the Jim Crow Era. It is for this reason that most statues are interpreted and seen as a presentation of white privilege and are deemed offensive.23
Consequently, the examples of controversies surrounding Civil War monuments underline the case that Coates makes about the Civil War. By way of explanation, Coates states:
In [the] revisions of history lay the roots of the noble Lost Cause- the belief that the South didn’t lose, so much as it was simply overwhelmed by superior numbers; that General Robert E. Lee was a contemporary King Arthur; that slavery, to be sure a benevolent institution, was never central to the South’s true designs. Historical lies aside, the Lost Cause presented to the North an attractive compromise.24
In other words, the myth of the Lost Cause has found its way into popular media and has a foothold in the public beliefs of Americans.25 The problematic part of this is that the myth has formed a wedge between the collective identities of white and black Americans, as most African Americans do not engage with the mythology of the Civil War and are, therefore, excluded from the national narrative. Furthermore, these myths and narratives are still engaged with racial discourse, meaning that the ‘post-racial’ era still seems a long way to go. Coates explicitly attacks the social and cultural discourse of American society. He substantiates his social critique by combining personal experiences with scholarly arguments. Coates discusses how the comfortable narrative finds its way into the historiography. Battle
22Andrews.
23van Werven, 11; Gervin.
24Coates, “Why Do So Few Blacks Study The Civil War?” 74. 25Ibid., 75.
17 Cry of Freedom, for instance, discusses the tragedy of the war and how it developed essential Western ideals, such as democracy and egalitarianism. This massive book about the Civil War made Coates interested in the topic as he missed something. He missed the role of African Americans during the war and how they “consecrated” the Western ideals of the founders.26 Coates perceives that the problem is that the Civil War is mainly remembered and referred to from a white perspective. He traveled to Civil War battlefields and always felt as he was “dressed in another man’s clothes.”27
The central attention to history and the use of historians by Coates reveals the ambivalent intellectual position of Coates, but also a tension between the role of the public intellectual and the academic scholar. The professional scholar is perhaps easily influenced by the whiteness of the curriculum of the American school and college system, while the public intellectual is independent and, as a result, able to write down his thoughts and act against the comfortable narrative.28 Coates points out a different perspective than the white academic scholars and uses their narratives as an example to form an argument about the myth of contemporary American society. Yet at the same time he relies on these professional accounts to make his point. This reveals the ambivalent position of Coates as a public intellectual. Moreover, Coates may engage in mythmaking as well. In essence, Coates creates a counter-myth by using history and historians. He uses historians to learn more about the inferior position of black Americans in the United States in order to create the counter-myth. In addition, he learns from historians how the comfortable narrative found its way into the historiography of America and mainstream presentations like the documentary of Ken Burns.29 As a result, Coates exposes how the comfortable narrative found solid ground in the public memory and academic history.30 He makes the claim that “we cannot escape our history,” but history can be used to expose the cultural myths of American society. 31 In other words, history resonates in our own time by the creations of narratives and myths, which are crucial in the construction of collective identities.
26Ibid., 75–77.
27Ibid., 77.
28Ibid, Between the World and Me, 26.
29Ibid., “Why Do So Few Blacks Study The Civil War?” 76 30Ibid., 75.
18
2.3 The Use of Myth and Narrative in American Society
In Between the World and Me, Coates attempts to write “something original and new,” “something that black people would recognize as original and old” and “something classical and radical.”32 The personal message that Coates gives to his son transcends the private sphere by making a direct indictment of the leading culture that Coates perceives in American society. It is the personal story of Coates about America, a story that is characterized by tragedy and violence.33
In the book, Coates delivers a crucial message to his son, after his son saw on television that the murderer of Michael Brown was acquitted, as he writes: “you have not yet grappled with your own myths and narratives and discovered the plunder everywhere around us.”34 Not only does Coates argue that his son must develop his own identity, but he also has to deal with the oppression of myths and narratives that attack his blackness. In other words, his son must struggle against the collectivity of white myths and narratives that are present in American society. Coates rises to the position of a public intellectual, as he exposes racial misconduct in American society. In doing so, Coates formulates a counter-myth that is intended to question the morality of American society, and act against the status quo.35 In essence, it shows the ambivalent position of Coates as a public intellectual, as he intends to expose racial myths through the creation of a different myth. Specifically, he uses the occasion of writing a private letter to his son to formulate a myth for African Americans that covers the story about being black in America.
The myth of the Civil War can be seen as an example of what Robert Young called “white mythology.” This means that it is a representation of Western American civilization, which creates an illusionary image of history in which all other forms of civilizations are subordinate.36 In the case of the Civil War, the narrative that became common ground has become the master narrative, which intentionally left out the participation of African Americans within Western civilization. In essence, the Civil War myth is a “story for white people – acted out by white people, on white people’s terms – in which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props.”37 The Civil War is not only a story that portrays the rebirth of
32Ibid., We Were Eight Years in Power, 220.
33Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2005), 108. 34Coates, Between the World and Me, 21.
35Said, 1996, 22.
36Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, 2nd ed (London ; New York: Routledge,
2004), 51.
19 the United States, but also the beginning of “modern black America.”38 The questioning of the Civil War monuments and the remarks of Coates expose the “Western culture’s awareness that it is no longer the unquestioned and dominant centre of the world.”39
The historical narrative that is created by historical events not only plays a role in the creation of social and cultural identities but also in the construction of a political myth. In other words, it not only provides people with a sense of urgency and belonging to where they come from, but it creates an image that provides political significance. The difference is that the myth “in order to nourish a determination to act, has to put a drama on the stage, or, rather, it has to be received as a drama. Political myths are stories that make their moral explicit in order to prompt political action.”40 It is essential for the political myth to have a form of significance. In other words, the political myth has “to be significant for someone and under certain conditions.”41 The narrative, in opposition to the myth, only provides meaning and no significance. It functions as a reference point that shapes the experiences of the past collectively.42 This means that the political myth, which is extracted from the historical narrative, provides a dramatic constitution of the narrative. The political myth “answer[s] the need for meaning for a symbolic mediation of reality.”43 Furthermore, it must create a clear image that delivers significance, which contains “a determination to act, and this determination can affect the specifically political conditions of a given society.”44
The message of Coates to his son becomes even more striking because the son has to deal with his own myths, by creating his own narrative that provides him with the meaning of his existence. Eventually, he must turn this narrative into a myth that provides him with significance. In order to do so, he has to step away from the narratives and myths of America, as these narratives result in a white mythology of the Civil War and the United States.45
Coates was becoming more and more a public figure because of his message. He took the responsibility, as a public intellectual, to expose the narratives and myths of American society. For example, Coates revealed a crucial and persistent myth within American society, which he called ‘The Dream.’ This exposure shows the tools of the public intellectual to bring to light the narratives and myths of society. The Dream portrays the power structures
38Ibid., 82.
39Chiara Bottici, A Philosophy of Political Myth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 208. 40Ibid., 216.
41Ibid.
42Ron Eyerman, “The Past in the Present: Culture and the Transmission of Memory,” Acta Sociologica 47, no. 2
(June 1, 2004): 162, https://doi.org/10.1177/0001699304043853.
43Bottici, 224. 44Ibid.
20 between white and black Americans. In other words, it reveals a certain type of social hegemony. Coates tries to promulgate this to encourage the development of new ideas and to change the status quo. This is an important trait of the public intellectual, as Said saw him/her as the “disturber of the status quo.”46 Coates reveals the subordinate position of black Americans in order to unsettle the current social hegemony by formulating his vision of American society in the Dream.
The unification of narratives has resulted in the creation of a master narrative that has found a presentation in the Civil War monuments. It is at this stage that a ‘we’ is remembered and a ‘they’ are excluded.47 In other words, Coates explicitly tells his son that he, as an African American, is excluded from the ‘American identity.’ He cannot identify with the whiteness of the national narrative. Coates questions the idea of a national identity in the United States in order to encourage collective action. He fulfills the task of the intellectual by insisting that the essence of African Americans is not something pre-given, but that African Americans are capable of constructing, and should construct, their own narrative.48 This means that African Americans should not define themselves through white narratives but should found their own narratives.
For instance, in order for African Americans to grapple with their own founding story, Coates argues that they have to make the Civil War and its monuments their own, by becoming “custodians” of the Civil War.49 He remarks:
During my trips to battlefields, the near-total absence of African American visitors has been striking. Confronted with the realization that the Civil War is the genesis of modern America, in general, and of modern black America, in particular, we cannot just implore the Park Service and the custodians of history to do more outreach- we have to become custodians ourselves.50
African Americans, according to Coates, have to do so, because the Civil War currently has become a compromise to the comfortable narrative, i.e., the comprise results in a narrative that portrays the Civil War as “a significant battle in the long war against bondage and for government by the people.”51 This compromise is a reminder to the times in which “our own
46Said, 1996, x.
47Van Werven, 23; See Also: Eyerman, 163. 48Said, 1996, 33.
49Coates, “Why Do So Few Blacks Study The Civil War?” 82. 50Ibid.
21 forefathers once explicitly rejected the republic to which they’d pledged themselves, and dreamed up another country, with slavery not merely as a bug, but as its very premise.”52 The bitter conclusion that Coates draws is that the narrative makes people understand that they live “in a country that will never apologize for slavery, but will not stop apologizing for the Civil War.”53 Furthermore, Coates states:
The Lost Cause was spread, not merely by academics and Hollywood executives, but by the descendants of Confederate soldiers. Now the country’s battlefields are marked with the enduring evidence of their tireless efforts. But we have stories too, ones that do not hinge on erasing other people, or coloring over disrepute. For the Civil War to become Our War, it will not be enough to, yet again, organize opposition to the latest raising of the Confederate flag. The Civil War confers on us the most terrible burden of all—the burden of moving from protest to production, the burden of summoning our own departed hands, so that they, too, may leave a mark.54
There are several essential remarks in this passage of Coates. Not only does he reflect on resistance against the Confederate symbols, but he also expresses the aim to make the Civil War a narrative for black Americans. It is a plea to overthrow the status quo of white mythology and to question and reform racial myths in American society. He sees it as his task to encourage African Americans to embrace their stories, including the Civil War.55 In conclusion, Coates by questioning the Civil War and myths in American society becomes a public intellectual who fits into the tradition that is known for questioning “national symbols” and “nobly unassailable ideas.”56 He, as a black American, tries to question and change the white status quo of American society, which means that he takes the opportunity to represent the African American community and to resist white hegemony.57 It is already at this stage that Coates is positioning himself in the intellectual field, as a representative for black Americans. Coates no longer wrote simply from a personal incentive, as Between the World and Me was intended to be a personal letter to his son, but he intentionally went public with the book in order to propagate his ideas among a wider public and fellow intellectuals. It is evidence of the ambivalent position of Coates, as he initially wanted to write a personal 52Ibid. 53Ibid. 54Ibid., 82. 55Ibid. 56Said, 1996, 37. 57Ibid., 39.
22 indictment, but later engaged with the public debate and transcended the personal angle of his message.
2.4 The Myth of The Dream
One of the contemporary and leading myths in American society that Coates explicitly refers to in Between the World and Me is ‘the Dream.’ At first sight, the Dream looks like an analogy of the American Dream; only it is more cynical and pessimistic. The exposure of the Dream by Coates is an attempt to reveal a new narrative about the American Dream. In other words, he attempts to rewrite the old myth of the American Dream and turns it into a darker variant. In this attempt, the Dream itself is a composition of “complex ideals, perceptions, values, and political concepts, as well as myths, omissions, falsehoods, and deceptions, which together comprise a devastatingly destructive delusion about America.”58 For instance, it includes the core belief of Americans in their democracy. In other words, Americans “deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have.”59 This idolizing of the ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people,’ was not intended for all people, in the sense that African Americans and women were excluded from this myth that was created by Abraham Lincoln. Nonetheless, Americans did not betray the value of a government of the people, only “the means by which ‘the people’ acquired their names.”60
Another example of a core belief that is crucial to the persistence of the color line in American society is the belief in the reality of ‘race.’ The “modern invention” of race was founded upon the myth of naturalism.61 This means that race is often perceived as something that is “natural and inalterable.”62 Coates makes a crucial distinction between race and racism, as he argues that “race is the child of racism, not the father.”63 Normally, the basic idea is that the thinking in different human races causes people to act racially towards other people. Coates turns this around, which means that “racism precedes the ideation of race.”64 He makes the point that acts of violence form the basis for the creation of the concept of race.
58Jill Gordon, “Black Bodies Matter: A Reading of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me,” Graduate
Faculty Philosophy Journal, June 30, 2017, 204, https://doi.org/10.5840/gfpj20173819.
59Coates, Between the World and Me, 6. 60Ibid.
61Ibid.,7; Gordon, 206. 62Gordon, 206.
63Coates, Between the World and Me, 7. 64Gordon, 206.
23 Therefore, “white supremacy is an ideation sustained through control of the Black body in ways both brutal and institutional.”65
The Dream can be seen as the political myth of the dreamers, in the sense that it consists of their beliefs and constructions of the world, which are radically different from those of African Americans. It creates a discrepancy and struggle between white and black Americans. The Dream is a crucial example of a political myth in modern American society and is evidence that the post-racial society has hardly been realized. In the perspective of Coates, the Dream consists of myths and narratives but also political characteristics (aspects that will be discussed in the next chapter on Obama and neoliberalism). According to David Humphrey, the Dream “is a category of thinking that is hegemonic; a category of thinking that transcends race, yet at the same time operates within the frame of a racial contract.”66 The Dream is founded upon the “ongoing subordination of the dark other.”67 Charles W. Mills first initiated the idea of a racial contract in his work The Racial Contract. Mills argues that the tradition of the social contract lies at the basis of the Western political theory; only it is not simply a “contract between everybody, but between just the people who count, the people who really are people.”68 It is precisely in line with this tradition that Coates argues that Americans have never defined the meaning of the people, as the credo of “we the people,” can best be read as “we the white people.”69 The relation between neoliberalism and the Dream is that “[t]he objectification of the self in neoliberalism perpetuates a prescriptive and pernicious culture of silence upon the bodies of those on the margins.”70 This means that neoliberalism functions as a system that upholds the inequities between races, by re-inscribing “white mythologies of White supremacy and by extension Black subjugation.”71
Therefore, the formulation of the Dream, as the neoliberal upkeep of a racist society, lacks an incitement to direct action, at least for whites. It is intended to expose the institutionalization of white myths, such as the Civil War myth, which “is the lie of innocence.”72 The lie itself is the Dream. It is the construction of a comfortable narrative that forgets about the horrors against African Americans.73 The conception of the Dream
65Ibid., 207.
66Humphrey, 21. 67Ibid.
68Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 3. 69Ibid.
70Humphrey, 21. 71Ibid., 22.
72Coates, Between the World and Me, 102. 73Ibid.
24 presupposes a system that is based upon racial tribalism and is insurmountable.74 Coates provides a pessimistic view of American society with a reason. He explicitly exposes the reader to the systemic violence that has been done to black bodies in the United States. But he also points out that no argument can persuade white Americans to change this brutality. Coates sees it as his task to wake the American people and to make them aware of the historical brutality against black bodies.75 In essence, Coates intends to expose the corrupt and violent system, which entangles American society, by revealing the construction of American society through mythologies of inclusion and exclusion.
The Dream “includes the subjugation of Black bodies needed to ensure white superiority.”76 One of the instruments of the Dreamers to do so is violence against blacks. One the crucial argument that Coates makes aims to solve this violence against the black body, mainly male bodies.77 He does not explicitly differentiate between male and female bodies, but his address to his son reveals that his message is mainly focused on the aggression against black male bodies. One of the reasons for this was the dramatic impact of the death of Prince Carmen Jones, a friend of Coates who was shot by a police officer.
Furthermore, the examples that Coates uses, such as Trayvon Martin and Prince Jones, expose the critical message he has for the black male body.78 The message that Coates passes on from father to son is that it does not matter whether black bodies can transcend the economic backwardness, as they “remain shackled to a danger stricken planet.”79 The message becomes more powerful by making an explicit comparison between his son and Martin, as Coates states: “there is no real distance between you and Trayvon Martin.”80 In other words, Coates teaches his son that he as a black male is essentially vulnerable to violence, “no matter location, no matter social circumstance.”81 Coates underexposes the dangers of the black female body, by only briefly mentioning the vulnerability of sexual and physical violence. The lesson to his son about the female experience is left mysterious as he writes: “The women around you must be responsible for their bodies in a way that you will never know.”82 Hence, Coates exposes the power relations that are present in the construction
74West, “Ta-Nehisi Coates Is the Neoliberal Face.” 75Gordon, 215.
76Ibid., 207.
77West, “Ta-Nehisi Coates Is the Neoliberal Face.”
78See for the example of Prince Carmen Jones: Coates, Between the World and Me, 77.
79Derik Smith, “Ceding the Future,” African American Review 49, no. 3 (October 5, 2016): 187,
https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2016.0031.
80Coates, Between the World and Me, 25. 81Smith, 187.
25 and upkeep of certain myths.83 His message to his son is: “In America it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.”84
The death of Prince Carmen can be seen as an important motivation for Coates to go public with Between the World and Me, as the police officer who shot his friend was not punished. For Coates, this was evidence that America “is ruled by majoritarian pigs,” and that this majority was white.85 It motivated Coates to write this book, as he was afraid that his son and other black males would suffer the same fate. Furthermore, he uses his writing to deal with his fear and rage.86 The publishing of the book is evidence that Coates wants Americans to know this ‘truth’: the ‘truth’ about the death of his friend and the violence against black men. His work expresses Coates’s determination to vent his emotions and to expose the racial misconducts of American society. The incentive for Coates to go public with his book was not necessarily to become a public intellectual, but, with his son in mind, to reveal the misconducts against black men in American society. The message, however, automatically pushed him into the position of a public intellectual. He wrote Between the World and Me for not just his son but also his fellow black Americans, as he hoped to write something that they “could recognize as original and old.”87 The effort to raise his son’s awareness about certain issues confronting black men made him try to raise awareness about the problems of of black men more generally.88
The determination of Coates to raise awareness and to expose cultural myths is evidence of him becoming the public intellectual as defined by Said. In essence, Coates questions the origins of racism and argues that racism is more than simply a form of hate against people of a different group.89 He uses the personal message to his son to portray the difference between being black or white in America. He defines this difference by stating that “[t]o be black in America was to be plundered. To be white was to benefit from, and at times directly, execute, this plunder.”90 It is the task of the intellectual to criticize such persistent forms of injustices and racism and to pinpoint and reveal the establishment of cultural myths. Moreover, Coates uses the personal story to generalize the sufferings of his “own people” and
New Yorker, July 15, 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/ta-nehisi-coates-and-a- generation-waking-up.
83Gordon, 212.
84Coates, Between the World and Me, 103. 85Ibid., 79.
86Ibid., 83.
87Ibid., We Were Eight Years in Power, 220. 88Gordon, 212.
89Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” 132. 90Ibid., We Were Eight Years in Power, 211.
26 embody the “historical experience [of African Americans] in [an] aesthetic work.”91 The personal message to his son automatically transcends the private sphere as it clear that Coates attempts to create broad attention to the sufferings of African Americans. As a result, Coates irreversibly becomes a spokesman of the black community and moves to the realm of the public intellectual.92
The new position that came with Between the World and Me was profitable for Coates, as his book became a bestseller and won awards. 93 In comparison, Sartre would have despised the influence of awards on a writer/intellectual as he/she has to be independent of such external interest and influences.94 In this sense, Coates fits the ambivalence that Sartre perceived in the nature of the intellectual, as someone who would always be influenced by external factors, such as profit and fame.95 Nevertheless, Coates had trouble with the recognition that came with his fame. On the one hand, he wanted to stay anonymous, in order for his ideas to be legitimized by their strengths instead of his reputation. On the other hand, he wanted to receive respect from co-writers, such as Morrison.96 This shows the ambivalent position of Coates in relation to the title of public intellectual: he did not want fame, but sought and received the respect of other intellectuals. Coates received both with Between the World and Me and he was slowly pushed into the role of the public intellectual by the laudatory commentary of, among others, Morrison.97
The message that Coates tries to convey in Between the World and Me relies heavily on two famous black public intellectuals, namely James Baldwin and Richard Wright. On the one hand, the title of the book refers to a poem by Wright; on the other hand, the design of the book shows similarities to The Fire Next Time by Baldwin with his message to his nephew.98 Coates, in line with Baldwin, prepares his son to live in a country that is “dedicated to black impossibility.”99 He provides his son with a message that makes him aware of the dangers and injustices against African Americans. He continues the task that Baldwin started in The Fire Next Time, which is to continue to expose the actual “national”
91Said, 1996, 44.
92Ibid.
93Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 221. 94Said, 1996, 76.
95Sartre, 236.
96Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 221. 97Ibid.
98Jonathan Holloway and Stephen J. Whitfield, “Two Takes on Ta-Nehisi Coates,” Patterns of Prejudice 50, no.
3 (May 26, 2016): 303, 306, https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2016.1195546.
27 character of America.100 Moreover, he expresses the dangers of believing in the myth of the American Dream.101 The book also seems to build on the tradition of The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois, as Coates positions himself in the line of Du Bois and Wright by placing the shared collective experience of African American against the backdrop of a shared feeling of violence.102 This skeptical message leaves no hope for transcending racial differences. In the end it creates an individualistic responsibility that assumes public features, as he tells his son: “But you are a Black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed you must be responsible for the worst actions of other Black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you.”103 The influence of black intellectuals, such as Baldwin, Wright and Du Bois, characterizes the book as a work that exposes injustices “amid assaults against black life, and amid renewed determination by activists to create new American ideals.”104 The pessimistic message directly parallels Wright’s Native Son, as Coates constructs a critique of American society, in particular, the culture of poverty, as he tells the story of those who “are powerless and disembodied and who ultimately fall victim to the culture of poverty.”105
It is clear that Coates engages in a tradition of writers that takes on the intellectual task of criticizing the political and social discourse of society and of representing the subordinate.106 Following Baldwin, Coates intended to create a work that would move the thoughts of people and leave a mark in this world.
2.5 Conclusion
Coates reveals that myths and narratives play a crucial role in the creation of collective identities and have political connotations. The Dream is a reformulation of the American Dream. It is a pessimistic formulation of a myth that corrupts the minds of white Americans and maintains a racial system. The effort to expose cultural myths turns Coates into a public
100Ibid.
101Michelle Alexander, “Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘Between the World and Me,’” The New York Times, August 17,
2015, sec. Sunday Book Review, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/books/review/ta-nehisi-coates-between-the-world-and-me.html.
102Gordon, 211.
103Coates, Between the World and Me, 71.
104Dana A. Williams, “Everybody’s Protest Narrative: Between the World and Me and the Limits of Genre,”
African American Review 49, no. 3 (October 5, 2016): 182, https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2016.0030.
105Ibid.
