“I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagues me after James Baldwin died,” wrote the late Toni Morrison. “Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.”
These words appeared as a blurb in support of Coates’ landmark 2015 monograph Between the World and Me. The book, much like Baldwin’s best-known works, contains deep examinations of white supremacy and race in America. Coates’ latest book, The Message, extends his insights on race, class, and political power structures beyond the United States. The Message sees Coates travel not only to the American South, but also to Dakar, Senegal, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
While reading The Message and considering the connections between Coates and Baldwin, something stood out to me about Coates’ writing that never did before. Coates, whose background is in journalism and who first achieved renowned for his work with The Atlantic, makes and supports his points the way one would expect a journalist to. Coates’ prose is rife with statistics, quotes, and airtight evidence. Baldwin, on the other hand, approached his subjects more artistically. His unrivaled ability to expound elegantly and incisively on racial matters using merely his lived experience, personal philosophy, and knowledge of history still inspires me more than any author has.
After noticing this difference, I began to wonder if its existence was simply due to the respective eras each author lived in. Before and during the civil rights movement, when Baldwin published the bulk of his work, one of the most common weapons brandished against American racism was simply professing one’s humanity. The presence and power of “I Am a Man” signage during the movement tells this tale. Baldwin himself was no stranger to appealing to our common humanity in defiance of racism, following closely in the footsteps of the previous century’s abolitionist writers.
Is it possible that in Coates’ day, which is our own, such a strategy is no longer possible? Perhaps the rigidly analytical approach is required in an age where “redpilled” individuals view bigotry and intolerance as forms of enlightenment instead of unmistakable marks of ignorance.
The Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder said in 2003 that Black people had exhausted the “moral currency” they used to great effect in the civil rights movement. He argued that moral appeals were no longer sufficient as the public is no longer as likely to view Black Americans as victims of a racist, crooked system. If Coates agrees, it’s possible that his journalistic, ironclad approach to combating white supremacy was honed more out of necessity than preference.
Not only is the question of whether Coates’ strategy was crafted to meet this new challenge up for debate, but so is the question of whether there’s actually anything new about this challenge. I sometimes see contemporary white supremacy as being carried less by tradition and more by an arrogant, pervasive pseudointellectualism found just as readily in popular podcasts as in the halls of Congress. And sometimes I simply see these podcasters and oligarchs as successors to the scientific racists, minstrel performers, and segregationists of yesteryear who themselves had multiple spurious justifications for their hate.
In short, I’m not quite sure if the enemy has evolved, but it’s likely for the best that the fight against it has.
Featured image/photo by Sandra Seitamaa on Unsplash.