So, Ta-Nehisi Coates, with a new and very well received book, and, probably more to the point, appearing on The Daily Show, is the flavor of the month, it would seem. I had read some of his things in the Atlantic and was as impressed with his writing ability as everyone else but the recent explosion in his fame has left me rather puzzled. I have not read his book, though I might well read it.
Like some others who read Greg Epstein's
praise for Coates on the basis of his atheism at Salon, I'm rather astonished that it took Coates writing in his book and in the Atlantic so very recently to open the eyes of so many white people to the issues he covers. Especially those white folk who study and work at a major intellectual institution such as Harvard, like Epstein. Didn't they ever read other black writers of whom there have been scores and hundreds talking about these issues, some with the same insights Coates writes about decades ago, some more than a century ago? Many of those writers were available to me living in a rural backwater in the north years before Epstein was born, I read some of them when I was in high school more than a half a century ago. Since Epstein is an ordained Rabbi* as well as an atheist chaplain at Harvard, who studied at major universities, I wonder how he could have apparently missed the entire range of Black liberation theology and the earlier writings of such ubiquitously known figures as The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. and the myriad of other black writers who have addressed the same issues that Coates writes about, leaving it to him to primarily give the same ideas an update in his own writing style. It isn't that Coates is a more insightful writer than those older and previous writers, he's merely a younger one with a more currently fashionable framing.
What he says about black lives mattering was being said in the late 19th century and through the 20th century by black writers such as Ida B. Wells and Walter Francis White, it was exposed all during the anti-lynching campaign, even to a wider audience. And black writers have never stopped writing about that and against the many murders of people for being black, certainly including summary executions by the police of entirely innocent people as well as people who were murdered by the police for things white people would have done without any police action being taken. What Coates says about that is far less profound than what James Cone has said about it during the same period and far less useful in both providing strategies of coping and of making improvements. As I noted the other day, some of Coates' statements are far more likely to lead to an impotent despair than they are real progress in real lives. Black lives are lives in reality, not merely things to be thought about by intellectuals and the causal readers of Atlantic articles and books. They mattered before the recent coverage of police shootings and the gun-lynchings of thugs like George Zimmerman who are let off by the police and the system caught the attention of the current white would-be-intelligentsia.
What Coates says about the issue of reparations, as well, has been talked about and discussed in massive detail beginning in the period of Reconstruction and onward to today. It's telling that in
his much talked about and important article he begins by citing The Bible, Deuteronomy 15:12-15, which provides a Biblical case that God demands that compensation be paid to slaves who have been held in the far less absolute form of bondage that is allowed under Mosaic Law, which was paid in some cases by people who gave up holding slaves under the influence of The Bible and who took the commandment to pay compensation seriously. I read his article and don't recall seeing any comparable argument made for compensation on the basis of materialism or atheism.
I am finding it harder to take Coates as more than a very talented writer who has worked on what other, previous writers have said and presenting their thoughts and insights while ignoring that those ideas can't be generated or given any kind of moral or political force by his general framing of atheism. Which was done in the past too, it was what the Marxists here in the United States did for the entire period of the Soviet Union, supporting atheist, Communist regimes there and in other countries, conveniently ignoring that their overarching atheism was impotent to even mount a critique of capitalism with all of its baggage of racism, exploitation of workers, inequality and injustice while the religion they despised could give an absolute reason those were wrong. They also did so here, in the West, while ignoring that everything they slammed the governments here for allowing or addressing ineffectively in the period when baby steps of progress were being made was happening universally in the Soviet Union, in China, in the occupied countries in Eastern Europe and in smaller, some of them even more brutal atheist paradises such as North Korea and Pol Pot's Cambodia. I do remember even some of the most ardent voices on the left, some of whom were otherwise admirable, defending Pol Pot in the early part of his insanely homicidal regime. The Chinese government which was held up as some kind of paragon by the lunatics of Progressive Labor, who were influential in the destruction of an effective left in the late 60s and early 70s, never have had much trouble getting along with the worst of their type.
Marx didn't, as far as I can recall reading, ever address the impossibility of finding rights in materialism, workers rights, included. He presented things as if his imaginary forces of history were actual material objects, the movements of which could be charted to determine their eventual destination. Where he, somehow, expected they would rest in the best of all possible worlds. In the meantime, the Soviet Union, China and other industrial atheist paradises were founded on generalized slavery, the workers being maintained for greater efficiency of production, not because they were the possessors of rights granted them by their Creator, who didn't figure into their system. And in China, today, we see that materialism is a fungible ideology, as its "Communism" has been transformed into a Victorian capitalism on uppers. It has no higher ideal than the creation and concentration of money.
But Coates is a writer of the post-Marxist popular atheist period, an atheism that is more compatible with the American establishment. His career as a writer is interesting for that reason as well as for his very real talent.
The extent to which Coates turns into a media phenomenon is likely a good gauge for the phenomenon that a religious writer will be taken less seriously by the mainstream media, that being determined by the extent to which they are a religious and a liberal at the same time. It is certainly de rigeur to be an atheist in large parts of the intelligentsia, a token appearance of a religious figure, here and there, allowable as convenient. I have wondered at the tolerance of religious expression among minority figures in such venues as a marker of the more general condescension of the white media for minorities and their cultures. Such minority voices appearing in the media restricted to addressing issues of minority interest. I wonder if the extent to which anti-religion will give those such as Neil Degrasse Tyson wider access for addressing other issues will develop into a trend in the way that anti-leftism and criticism of black people by black conservatives has flourished in the media. There would seem to be a full employment policy for such commentators as far more informed voices are banned from being heard except in the rarest of instances. The same can be said of religious conservatives, religious liberals being another class disappeared by the media.
Atheism fully deserves the kind of critique that is popular among the scribbling classes when religion is the topic and its not going to get one even as its contradictions and hypocrisies flourish and its mythology promoted in the media. Liberalism needs for atheism to get a full critique because of its basic incompatibility with the foundations and goals of genuine liberalism.
I would love to ask Coates where in materialism, in science, in atheism and atheist exposition of human minds and lives he finds anything to make a moral obligation to respect the rights he writes about, from the obligation to pay reparations for the work of black slaves and those held in de facto slavery during the post-emancipation period up to and including the rights of full equality. I can tell him where those reside in Christianity, he, himself points to one of the main ones in citing Deuteronomy. If he read the great Black Liberation theologians and the Latin American and Asian Liberation theologians, he would find more than I could tell him. And those rest on the bedrock of The Bible, which rests on a belief in the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob and the belief that all people are made in the image of God and are equally endowed by God with inalienable rights. He won't find anything comparable in atheism.
* It is bizarre that someone who entirely rejects God and the entire basis of The Law can be considered Jewish while someone who converts to Christianity from Judaism, who believes in the same God and the Jewish tradition apparently isn't to be considered as Jewish anymore. I have yet to read an explanation of that and would welcome one that makes sense of the matter.