Being-in-the-World and Coates by A. Shahid Stover

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#18, DEC/2015-FEB/2016

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between The World And Me, (Spiegel & Grau, 2015).

Even for radical autonomous intellectual brothers deliberately cultivating a peripheral relation to mainstream media for insurgent potentialities against sanctioned purveyors of imperialist structures of meaning, it has been impossible to ignore each wave of accolades surrounding Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me since its publication. Of course it doesn’t hurt Coates’ chances of renown by paying his literary dues at THE VILLAGE VOICE and THE ATLANTIC, though even a brief perusal of Coates’ work is enough to realize that he is not just another wannabe posing as a writer long enough to enjoy the spoils of punditry and ‘experthood’. Coates’ prose reveals a rare wholehearted engagement with writing as a singular and demanding mode of ‘being-in-the-world’.

Therefore, instead of holding Coates accountable for such media hype originating in the disinterested smell of collaborationists, reeking of stale cheese, wine and privilege emanating from within a ‘wonderbread’ cultural-nationalist discourse of ‘fixed’ parameters, yet open to a lively hyperbourgeois herd of liberal and conservative intelligentsia who valiantly adhere to an American exceptionalism, and as such, carefully cultivate the type of close ties to established power such principled ideological deference to Empire allows; lets delve into any theoretical implications drawn from Coates’ contributions as an emerging progressive Black fugitive literary voice within an often irrelevant and dated national public discourse surrounding ‘race’ and its relation to structural-inert global power. Indeed, what is it about this work, which is generating such unencumbered literary buzz at this crucial socio-historical juncture?

Between the World and Me arrives as long ignored emancipatory imperatives for social justice are reawakening and challenging the historical quiet and sovereign legitimacy of Empire, as the world again bears witness to an ascendant humanity in spontaneous rebellion sparked by neo-colonial police murder in places like Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland. As such, the objective violence against human ‘being’ inscribed in modernity by western imperialist power is Returning to source with greater and greater frequency as insurrection-in-itself.

The assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ exerts an exceptional antagonistic resonance against structural-inert global power, stimulating a dynamic and growing grassroots flow of social activist formations and broad based oppositional coalitions emerging around the tragic singularities of lived Black experience. Indeed, the Raw coloniality of lived Black experience discloses the Real of the human condition ‘overdetermined-from-without’ by western imperialist power. Not out of some chauvinistic ‘racial’ essentialism, which often functions as a nascent stage of dialectic awakening towards even more mature emancipatory implications of lived Black experience, but rather, because our ‘being-in-the-world’ is historically situated within the normative gaze of modernity as a social pathology and ontological ‘problem’, and thus constitutes an exceptional antagonism with inhospitable destabilizing consequences in relation to established power and imperial structures of meaning that sustain the status quo.

DuBois initiated the philosophical formulation of this exceptional antagonism in his seminal classic, The Souls of Black Folk, by way of a single question: “how does it feel to be a problem?” Between the World and Me is Coates’ sincere literary attempt to convey the historical magnitude and existential severity of this perpetual question of lived Black experience to his 14 year old son in the form of a letter. “I tell you now that the question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers itself.” This reformulation by Coates contains an epistemological impetus which permeates the scope of his writings.

Indeed, Coates’ reformulation “ultimately answers itself” as ‘the beautiful struggle’ of survival, self-discovery and somehow ultimately escaping the specificities of structural-inert racist dehumanization he faced while growing up in Baltimore. “Before I could discover, before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets”. Amidst discovery, flight, and survival, what’s missing is any enunciation or desire which might have been expressed as ‘before I could fight back’. Coates’ writings disclose a progressive Black fugitive literary engagement in movement away from an all too pervasive socio-historical oppression. Indeed, he is no imperial collaborationist like Stanley Crouch or John McWhorter, and in this there is much too respect. However, brothers and sisters seeking a more emancipatory engagement of intellectual endeavor against oppression should look elsewhere. That “clash with the streets” never elevates into a confrontation, intellectual or otherwise, with Empire. “But part of what I know is that there is the burden of living among Dreamers, and there is the extra burden of your country telling you the Dream is just, noble, and real, and you are crazy for seeing the corruption and smelling the sulfur. For their innocence, they nullify your anger, your fear, until you are coming and going, and you find yourself inveighing against yourself – ‘Black people are the only people who . . .’ – really inveighing against your own humanity and raging against the crime in your ghetto, because you are powerless before the great crime of history that brought the ghettos to be.”

Clearly, Coates builds a formidable case for the necessity of an existence open to so much more than mere surviving on the run, only to discursively drown emancipatory potentialities within a deliberate ambiguity that conflates any distinction between survival and liberation, thus suppressing questions of freedom by offhandedly dismissing the constitutive role of human agency and emancipatory praxis. So, even though “it is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country”, Coates refuses to articulate an imperative of struggle against oppression relevant to the socio-ontological underground of modernity, whom he accurately refers to as “the essential below”, leaving us instead with a “struggle to understand” oppression as “our only advantage over this madness”. Word? . . . “only advantage”? The imperial mainstream rejoices as the underground of modernity continues to suffer in puzzled lament.

Aiding in this suppression of questions of freedom is a conceptual overreliance on “the body” littered throughout the book, thus promoting a continued reification of lived Black experience as ‘objecthood’ which began with systematic violence intent on reducing human ‘being’ to matter through chattel slavery. Coates fails to make the epistemological connection between “the premise that allows for these killing fields – the reduction of the black body”, and the reduction of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ to ‘the body’ in his own literary endeavors. At times, even Fanon employs a decolonizing phenomenological discourse that situates ‘the body’ within imperialist structures of meaning as an ‘opening’ towards questions of human subjectivity. However, when Coates clumsily appropriates this same vocabulary, it has the opposite effect of aligning his work with the normative gaze of modernity through a vulgar logical positivist reduction of “the spirit and soul” to “the body and brain”, thus inducing what Lewis R. Gordon conceptualizes as ‘epistemic closure’ .(1) Although this use by Coates of ‘the body’ works extremely well as a discursive maneuver within the confines of stressing the sheer “visceral experience” that situates Black subjectivity as human ‘being-in-the-world’ to his son, it doesn’t quite hold up under the weight of insurgent philosophical scrutiny. “And by what miracle is the materialist, who accuses idealists of indulging in metaphysics when they reduce matter to mind, absolved from the same charge when he reduces mind to matter? Experience does not decide in favor of his doctrine – nor, for that matter, does it decide in favor of the opposing one either. Experience is confined to displaying the close connection between the physiological and the psychological, and this connection is subject to a thousand different kinds of interpretation.” (2)

Although deciding to write in letter format is an obvious nod to Baldwin’s aesthetic influence, embracing such a popular literary device in an era discursively flooded with self-help jargon and therapeutic paradigms is probably not an uninformed market strategy ultimately catering to the needs of an imperial mainstream, rather than the socio-ontological underground of modernity. Still, unlike his contemporaries, Coates thrives in the epistolary genre, easily surpassing the blunt mendacity of Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation and Hill Harper’s trilogy of banality: Letters to a Young Brother, Letters to a Young Sister and Letters to an Incarcerated Brother, with a tremendous literary acumen that indeed merits substantive comparison to Baldwin for subjecting “our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much.” And yet, the same morally reprimanding harshness he wields against “the Believers” and “the Dreamers” throughout the book, effectively allows for his thoughts to become yet another mode of easily digestible non-conformism (3) for imperial hyperbourgeois appetites as emotional catharsis, precisely because his writings are permeated with historical indictment bereft of emancipatory imperative. Thus, leaving the “apparatus” blemished, but unchallenged.

Baldwin’s profound moralist suasion harnesses an uncanny capacity for awakening readers to a renewed sense of human agency arising from the unsettling truth that “there is simply no possibility of a real change in the Negro’s situation without the most radical and far-reaching changes in American political and social structure.” (4) Coates also summons the radical imagination with compelling force; “there is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy”. Consequently, any potentialities of emancipatory thought are suffocated by an Absurdist vacillation between somehow accepting “the chaos of history”, even when acknowledging lived Black experience as “the clearest evidence America is indeed the work of men”. Indeed, if “what matters is the system that makes your body breakable” then why naturalize western imperialist power as an “earthquake” that “cannot be subpoenaed” or compare the neo-colonial police officer who murdered his college friend Prince Jones to a “force of nature, the helpless agent of our world’s physical laws”? Such a comparison facilitates an abdication of human subjectivity based upon the realization of how Absurd it must then be to resist neo-colonial police violence as the very embodiment of “our world’s physical laws”. And yet, since Coates “could not retreat, as did so many, into the church and its mysteries”, what justifies his “retreat” into materialist determinism “and its mysteries”? Retreat, my brother, is still retreat.

As such, Baldwin’s penchant for “speaking of political freedom in spiritual terms” ,(5) is thoroughly mishandled by Coates’ ability to speak of socio-historical oppression in terms of physics, biology and “all the matter floating through the cosmos”. In this sense, Coates is temporarily betrayed by an atheist temperament that is actually refreshing when focused on the outright rejection of “magic in all its forms”, including a sound critique of the magical imperialist cult of good individual intentions that somehow influences the world unmediated by the constraints of structural-inert global power: “it does not matter that the ‘intentions’ of individual educators were noble. Forget about intentions. What any institution, or its agents, ‘intend’ for you is secondary. Our world is physical. Learn to play defense – ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body. Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream.”

The ultimate strength of Coates’ writing is that he creatively delves into our ‘problematic’ lived Black experience with enough tacit progressive literary poise, as to have actually touched a nerve amongst the imperial mainstream by sustaining a misguided dualism that posits survival and liberation as concrete opposites. Sound prose draws the reader into a movingly truthful narrative conveying intimate emotional intricacies of ongoing oppression against human ‘being’, while painstakingly preserving a non-confrontational discursive trajectory with regards to Empire. With all the historical evidence of structural-inert oppression at Coates’s disposal throughout the book, this is seriously no small feat. Why else would Toni Morrison state in good conscience that Coates fills “the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died”? Has anyone since Baldwin displaced emancipatory critique of structural-inert global power with such trenchant affective integrity? How else could Baldwin, when confronted with the insurgent intellectual endeavors of DuBois ,(6) Wright, Fanon and Cesaire at the 1956 Pan-African Writers Conference in Paris, France no less, actually suggest that it has “never been in our interest” to overthrow the “machinery of the oppressor”? (7) Word? … “never”?

Much like Baldwin, Coates is often mistakenly painted as a ‘Black radical’ by neo-conservative eunuchs who enjoy their ‘wonderbread’ cultural nationalist American exceptionalism untainted by historical truth. Framing the intensely welcome response to Coates’ work as a new wave of ‘radical chic’ is insincere, and clearly a proven strategic rhetorical maneuver meant not only to deter social discourse about ‘race’ from gaining any emancipatory traction, but also meant to siphon the intellectual legitimacy of any burgeoning radical aspirations of solidarity among youth of all socio-cultural backgrounds who are justifiably dissatisfied with the status quo. Indeed, yet another generation is beginning to discover the difference between ‘protest-as-ritual event’ and ‘protest-as-resistance’ in places like the streets of Coates’ own Baltimore.

The sublime experience of postmodern lumpenproletariat brothers and sisters in Baltimore actualizing an insurgent unity by exercising human agency in refusing to yield to the tyranny of neo-colonial police agents, throwing rocks and boulders at the consistent perpetrators of objective violence against the ascendant humanity of Black community, offers a stark contrast to the narrative of stifling “fear” Coates projects onto his own hometown. Such is the implicated condition of our temporality as human ‘being’ that history rarely fails to overwhelm the pen.

Coates if you scared, say you scared. “And I am afraid”. Fair enough. However, such ruthless interrogation of “the subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing – myself” obviously failed to alleviate his own “fear”, thus prompting Coates to project this “fear” upon the Black community he grew up around. “But I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age, the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly and dangerously afraid. I had seen this fear all my young life, though I had not always recognized it as such.” This questionable projection of paralyzing “fear” upon Black community is indistinguishable from the normative gaze of modernity that demeans our socio-ontological potentialities and historical capacity for human agency in upheaval against western imperialist power.

And yet, might have Coates misread dread as fear? Surely, he already admitted about fear that “I had not always recognized it as such”. Still, even if we cede the point to Coates that indeed fear consumed “all of them”: might what is fear today, become dread tomorrow? For although fear ensues as an outward emotionally direct correspondence to the unknown; dread arises as an emotional mediation of interiority confronting the unknown through reflexive interrogation of potentialities for human agency. Fear is the awareness of Sandra Bland being pulled over for a minor traffic violation, that this routine stop might be the death of her. Dread is the recognition by Sandra Bland, that whether she is polite or rude, whether she cooperates or resists, she might die either way, but must still inevitably decide her course of action in the face of such comprehensive ambiguity.

No Black community is unfamiliar with the objective violence, economic subjugation, and miseducation of soul that exact such an effective ‘overdetermination-from-without’ upon human ‘being’. As such, the Raw coloniality of globalized structural-inert power is not an unknown factor, for it situates lived Black experience, its tension is palpable, its hunger is tangible, its suffocation of human subjectivity is rote, and it is the very condition of possibility for the historical triumph of modernity. The normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum enforces a coercive anonymity upon the ascendant humanity of Black community. Hence, consciousness of our lived potentialities towards asserting Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ in the face of such coercive anonymity is experienced as dread. Dread is the conscious apprehension of existential freedom facing the inevitability of socio-historical persecution. “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage.” Dread accompanies our ‘presence-to-self’ attempting to overcome the reign of ‘double consciousness’, pitting an intimate reflexive awareness of human ‘being’ against the normative gaze of established power that overdetermines lived Black experience into ‘objecthood’, precisely because the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ against a globalized structural-inert oppression makes us even more vulnerable to gratuitous “disembodiment”.

In spite of, and maybe even because of the way Coates interprets his father’s radical past, Coates is not himself an insurgent thinker laying siege to imperialist structures of meaning in an intellectual melee for the highest stakes. “Dad believed in revolution, but the truth is, he was always eminently suited to the world as it was. . . . He thought his country was rotten, but he was a better fit than he knew.” (8) Coates chooses to understand his father’s intellectual pursuits as at odds with “revolution”, instead of realizing the depth of revolutionary continuity disclosed by such insurgent intellectual endeavor as emancipatory praxis. However, for someone whose own immediate and extended family were among that countless, forgotten and precious humanity on the receiving end of a pervasive counterinsurgent blowback by western imperialist power against the Black Panther Party, that’s his call to make.

As such, Coates constitutes his fugitive intellectual engagement as a contemporary moral sentinel, befittingly atheist enough for such an impossible yet inevitable task, trenchantly admonishing anyone who “would rather live white than live free” that their “forgetting is a habit, yet another component of the Dream. They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs.” Such literary efforts, no matter how limited in scope, are a welcome assistance to, though they can never substitute for, a more insurgent trajectory against the normative gaze of established power. Indeed, Coates is that rare brother who can intellectually regulate on neo-conservative eunuchs like David Brooks and Andrew Sullivan on their own home turf, and more importantly, in a way that weakens them in front of their own constituency – the imperial mainstream.

Coates’ Black progressive dissent is urgent, studied and vibrant. And yet, the range of his theoretical limitations betrays a discursive reliance on an epistemological arrangement that veils the constant and varied reconfigurations of western imperialist power as unintelligible and chaotic, unavoidably mystifying the competent, deliberate and extremely efficient social, economic and historical ordering of the world according to the racist dehumanizing precepts of Empire and coloniality.

(1)“Epistemic closure is a moment of presumably complete knowledge of a phenomenon. Such presumed knowledge closes off efforts at further inquiry.” Lewis R. Gordon, What Fanon Said, (Fordam University Press, 2015) p.49.

(2)Sartre continues pulling no punches - “The principles of materialism seem philosophically false, how could matter give rise to the idea of matter? . . . It seems as though its first step is to deny the existence of God and transcendent finality; second, to reduce the action of mind to that of matter; third, to eliminate subjectivity by reducing the world, and man in it, to a system of objects linked together by universal relationships. I conclude in good faith that it is a metaphysical doctrine and that materialists are metaphysicians. … Materialism is a metaphysics hiding positivism; but it is a self-destructive metaphysics, for by undermining metaphysics out of principle, it deprives its own statements of any foundation. . . . The materialist . . . leaves behind him science and subjectivity and the human and substitutes himself for God, Whom he denies, in order to contemplate the spectacle of the universe. . . . ‘The materialist conception of the world means simply the conception of nature as it is, without anything foreign added.’ What is involved in this surprising text is the elimination of human subjectivity, ‘that addition foreign to nature.’ The materialist thinks that by denying subjectivity he has made it disappear. But the trick is easy to expose. In order to eliminate subjectivity, the materialist declares that he is an object, that is, the subject matter of science. But once he has eliminated subjectivity in favor of the object, instead of seeing himself as a thing among things, buffeted about by the physical universe, he makes of himself an objective beholder and claims to contemplate nature as it is, in the absolute. There is a play on words objectivity, which sometimes means the passive quality of the object beheld and, at other times, the absolute value of a beholder stripped of subjective weaknesses. Thus having transcended all subjectivity and identified himself with pure objective truth, the materialist travels about in a world of objects inhabited by human objects. . . . Materialism makes a certainty of what appears to us to be a rash induction, or, if you prefer, a postulate.” – Jean-Paul Sartre, “Materialism and Revolution,” Literary and Philosophical Essays, (Collier Books, 1955) p.199-202.

(3)“They had much to be rebellious about, but found it extremely difficult to be “revolutionary” against the bourgeois Establishment. Theirs was a revolt in terms of aesthetics, sex, interracialism, life-styles, the cult of the material medica of narcotic elixirs, the movement of “beat” spirituality, etc. all of which were the ingredients of non-conformism, American style.” – Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution, (William Morrow & Company, 1968) p.174.

(4)James Baldwin, “Down at the Cross”, Collected Essays, (Library of America, 1962, 1998) p.335.

(5)Baldwin, p.337.

(6)Though actually barred from attending, DuBois addressed the conference through a letter read on his behalf.

(7)Baldwin, “Princes and Powers”, p.148.

(8)Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle, (Spiegel & Grau, 2009) p.81-2.