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Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. More Born in 1975, the product of two beautiful parents. Raised in West Baltimore -- not quite The Wire, but sometimes ill all the same. Studied at the Mecca for some years in the mid- 90s. Emerged with a purpose,[url=http://www.ugg-boots-sale.org]cheap uggs[/url], if not a degree. Slowly migrated up the East Coast with a baby and my beloved, until I reached the shores of Harlem. Wrote some stuff along the way. Library of CongressI'm thoroughly enjoying Tony Judt's Postwar. "Enjoying" is really too small of a word. The art that stick with me, the art I truly love, is the art, in which, I find a piece of myself. I think about Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence a lot, because it a courageous work of art--created by someone with the mental stamina to mount a conservative defense of the old order, by exploring all of that order's limitations. I hope to do something like that from time to time. I have opinions, and that's all well and good. But more interesting to me is the limits and implications of those opinions. I don't want to spend my time on earth performing,[url=http://www.ugg-boots-sale.org]ugg outlet[/url],[url=http://www.ugg-boots-sale.org]cheap uggs[/url],[url=http://www.ugg-boots-sale.org]cheap ugg[/url], yelling "Look At Me" or "Confirm My Humanity, Please" in various tongues. I have problems of my own.As does everyone. There are a great many of these problems in Judt's post-Hitler Europe and almost no satisfying answers. There are human beings taken into Germany, during the War, as slave laborers who do not wish to return, less they fall behind the Iron Curtain. There are "Germans" who've lived outside of Germany for centuries who are kicked out and forced to return to a home they scarcely regard as such. There is the incomplete attempts to bring justice to Europe after Hitler's death. One is almost tempted to say that the Nazis "got away with it." It puts my own frustration with Reconstruction in perspective. Post-war justice anywhere seems really trying. That it would be moreso in a country which shares certain foundational beliefs--like intelligence and morality are directly related to continental descent--makes sense. There are many lines in this book that strike me, but here is a quote from the Yugoslav dissident Milovan Dilas that will live with me for a long time. Dilas is discussing the partisan resistance against the Axis during World War II. Judt makes clear that fighting for, or against, the Nazis or Fascists can't--in and of itself--make one villainous or heroic. In Yugoslavia , the War quickly became fraternal. Dilas observes:For hours both armies clambered up rocky ravines to escape annihilation or to destroy a little group of their countrymen, often neighbors on some jutting peak six thousand feet high, in a starving, bleeding, captive land. It came to mind that this was what had become of all our theories and visions of the workers’ and peasants’ struggle against the bourgeoisie.’I think of our own Revolution and its hollow exultations toward freedom. I think of my own lineage and Bunchy Carter and Huey Newton. I think of August Wilson's Two Trains Running:Niggers killed Malcolm. Niggers killed Malcolm. When you want to talk about Malcolm, remember that first. Niggers killed Malcolm.I think we all see our "theories and visions" come to dust in the "starving, bleeding, captive land" which is everywhere, which is politics.There is a cutting moment in one of the debates between Bayard Rustin and Malcolm X. Rustin largely avoids sanctimonious defenses of America and moralizing around nonviolence. Instead he compliments Malcolm on his fierce denunciations of American racism, and hails him as an important voice articulating the anger of "the American Negro." But then he begins dissecting the Nation of Islam's nationalism and their desire for a separate black homeland. Who will govern this "homeland?" Will Rustin, Christian (and gay though he doesn't explicitly say it) be welcome there? Will Elijah Muhammad be its president? If you know anything about Elijah Muhammad, the idea of "Elijah, President of the Blacks" is chilling. The thought of any man--including my hero Malcolm X--assuming such a perch chills me. Rustin critique is cutting because instead of mocking and laughing at the NOI's nationalism, instead of dismissing it as crazy, he follows its logic to its logical, disagreeable conclusions.It seems that it is one thing to correctly name a ruling order as corrupt. It is all another to overthrow that order in some honorable fashion. And it is another still to replace that order with some honorable government. Only in past fifty years has this country even begun to consider grappling with that last task. That is not because America is uniquely evil,[url=http://www.ugg-boots-sale.org]cheap ugg[/url], so much as it is because America is the work of humans. One wishes we would dispense with the entire industry of "shining cities" and admit to this.Postwar is a rejection of the kind of moralizing tidiness which marked my own early education about Europe, World War II and its aftermath. Judt has the courage to look dead-eyed at ideology and all its limitations without lapsing into nostalgia or cynicism. The writer Jake Lamar once called this "ice-water vision." If I could cultivate any intellectual quality, outside of curiosity,[url=http://www.ugg-boots-sale.org]ugg outlet[/url], it would be Judt's "ice-water vision." I am often asked for solutions to many of the problems I raise. Almost as often I demur. That is because I am increasingly convinced that my particular great problems don't actually have solutions, that the ultimate answer is "Game Over: You Lose" or more specifically "Race War: Whites Win. Again." This is not an inducement to anarchy. If I I am not convinced that there is a "solution," I am even less convinced that the only reason to live one's life honorably is to contribute to a "solution." I will not determine my ultimate worth by the direction of people who I do not know. Whatever happens to my people, whom I hope rise, prosper and then promptly disappear into America, whatever happens to white supremacy, which I hope falls, perishes and then is ever etched as a warning to the world, these explorations and efforts were worth it because they belong to me. I was improved. I hope the world was too. But that was never really up to me.I did a reading at Wesleyan last week. Some nice folks took me out to lunch and dinner, and then dinner afterward, because I can't eat before a reading or talk. A few of the people there were from Wesleyan's African-American Studies department. At some point, I ended up in a conversation with Sarah Mahurin, who teaches a course on the black South, about the problem of teaching history to young people. A common response, she pointed out, was for a student to say "I couldn't have been a slave" or "I couldn't have been a slave-master" or "I would have been like Garrison" or "I would have been like Douglass." This wasn't new to me. Every conscious kid at Howard came in talking about how he would have been Nat Turner. Howard was there to teach him that he would have picked that cotton like everybody else. The Eddie Murphy skit above gets at this problem well. I closed the thread below because I thought it was going in a direction that I didn't like. Whenever we find ourselves confronted by a great injustice--such as the Holocaust or the slave society of America--we gravitate toward that which we find heroic, and condemn that which we find fiendish. Complications--like David Ben-Gurion endorsing negotiations with Hitler, or the Maroons cutting deals with the British--make us nervous. The instinct is to make our history into a crude utilitarian book of invincible morals.We see this outlook employed by smart people all the time. I wince whenever I hear people claim "If you don't know the past, you can't know where you're going." The fact is that that you should know the past, but, beyond some vague outlines, it can't tell you where you are going. Last week, I saw Benjamin Netanyahu claim that "history is a map" and I just got depressed. I don't know what "history" could have seen Lincoln's assassination or Barack Obama's election. We live in chaos here. History helps a little--but only a little. It does not exist for your services. It can not be your morality, your crystal ball nor your self-esteem.I have tried to push this in my writing about the Civil War. It is not enough to know that you are the descendant of slaves--you should also understand how easily you could have been the slave-master. You don't read George Fitzhugh to assure yourself that there is evil in the world. Auschwitz is all around us. Auschwitz is alive and well and living in your noble heart. The existence of evil is the premise. The discussion must proceed from there. I will be talking about the Holocaust and Israel for the next week. I am really digging Segev's book. I hope that we can do something more than keep score on who got history "right" and who got it "wrong." I hope that we can see some of ourselves in the people we discuss, because we are human, because we know how easy it is to overestimate our own ostensibly infallible morality. We can approach history denouncing the craziness of others, or we can approach it trying to understand how we might possibly have done the same thing. This is not false equivalence, it's texture and nuance. The beauty of a book like Battle Cry of Freedom is that McPherson makes an indisputable case that the Civil War was about slavery, and at the same time shows how humans--like you and me--could do nothing to prevent it. That is the gift of history. I understand that it is sometimes rage-inducing. But in the end it should be humbling.Perhaps I shouldn't speak this way about other people's history. I don't know what to say. It feels right. And it feels wrong to make absolutist pronouncements about people who are grappling with the opening act of existential evil.I'm reopening the thread below. The other day I mentioned that I'd picked up Tom Segev's The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust. As the subtitle indicates, it's basically a history of how Jews in Palestine (and later Israel) grappled with The Final Solution. But the history begins before that, in the 30s, when Hitler comes to power in Germany. Segev is an excellent historian—One Palestine Complete is top-notch—and really excels at giving you some sense of the nation-builders without lapsing into cheerleading or caricature.Segev is at his finest discussing The Havaara Agreement—a deal between Zionist and Nazi Germany to allow Jews to emigrate into what was, then, more a nation than a state. The dilemma is familiar to some of us: Should German Jews continue the fight against antisemitism in Europe or should they separate and give up trying to convince people who have long hated them? Segev quotes a columnist articulating the conflict as follows:The difference between the Exile and Zion is that the Exile. fighting for his life, wishes to overcome the evil Haman in his country...[The Exile] wants the Jews to remain in Germany despite all the troubles and persecutions and victims...Zion wants to uproot them. It washes its hands of a war with Haman, which in its eyes is but a Sisyphean task, its whole interest being only in legal and illegal immigration, despite all the anguish and sacrifice on the way to Zion.David Ben-Gurion goes on to say that there is war within the heart of every Jew—to assimilate or to separate. This characterization was rejected by Ben-Gurion's opponents, but the nationalist/integrationist line (for lack of better phrasing) is the essential dynamic in Havaara. Though it's only the 1930s, there are people in the future state of Israel who see the coming darkness. Ben-Gurion reads Mein Kampf and declares that "Hitler's policy put the entire Jewish people in danger." Ze'ev Jabotinsky claims that, "The Third Reich's policy toward the Jews calls for a war of extermination."Segev makes it clear that you should just as likely regard these wisdom in the context of Zionist interests. In Germany's blatant anti-Semitism, Israel's founders see a boon to their efforts to populate their nascent state. They obviously don't want to see German Jews exterminated. But they do see German bigotry as useful confirmation of what already believed—cold water to awaken one's brethren from the "assimilationist" dream. Thus in Haavara, interests dovetail: The Nazis get rid of their hated Jews. And the Zionist state gets more hands to cultivate the landStatecraft is never pretty. The responses to Haavara ran the gamut. Jabotinsky objects to dealing with Hitler, even as his Revisionists movement looks kindly upon the Italian fascist. (There was a similar phenomena in America which Ira Katznelson details in Fear Itself.) There are even those who admire Nazism, if it could be stripped of its Jew-hatred. "Were it not for Hitler's anti-Semitism, we would not oppose his ideology" claims Zvi Eliahu Cohen. "Hitler saved Germany." So much of this comes down to the cold, chilling calculus of trying to build a nation. From Ben-Gurion:If I knew that it was possible to save all the children in Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would chose the second—because we face not only the reckoning of those children, but the historical reckoning of the Jewish people.I came to this book to watch how one portion of a larger family dealt with the legacy of great crime committed against them. I haven't gotten that far. But what I am getting is something more than I expected. Segev's Israel is not an idea nor a symbol, but a collection of textured, conflicted human beings.**Fixed some of the labeling in this post to avoid historical conflation.Apparently a congressional stenographer snatched the mic in the gallery yesterday and went on something of a tear:“He [God] will not be mocked,” the stenographer, apparently named Molly, yelled into the microphone as she was dragged off by security. “The greatest deception here is that this is not one nation under God. It never was. It would not have been. The Constitution would not have been written by Freemasons. They go against God. You cannot serve two masters. Praise be to God. Praise be to Jesus.”As it just so happens, I've been going over Hofstadter's classic essay on paranoia in American politics. For me the most interesting portions of these kinds of books aren't the present but in the past. So often you see that things that look modern are really old. So it is with our theories of dark plots, dastardly machinations, and invisible grimoires. In 1797, the volume Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati and Reading Societies was published in Scotland (and later here in America). Its author, John Robinson, warned that unseen hands were militating toward "the express purpose of ROOTING OUT ALL THE RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS AND OVERTURNING ALL THE EXISTING GOVERNMENTS OF EUROPE." (His caps. Not mine.)There's a strong anti-liberal slant to a lot of this work. Abbé Barruel, in 1798, published Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du Jacobinisme in which he claimed that he could demonstrate that ...... in the French Revolution, #file_links[D:\keywords2.txt,1,S] even the most dreadful of crimes, was foreseen, contemplated, contrived, resolved upon, decreed; that everything was the consequence of the most profound villainy, and was prepared and produced by those who alone held the leading threads of conspiracies long before woven in the secret societies, and who know how to choose and to hasten the favorable moments of their schemes....The circumstances may have served as pretext and opportunity, but the grand cause of the Revolution, of its great crimes, its huge atrocities, was always independent and self-contained, and it consisted in plots long hatched and deeply meditated.What appeals to me about this writing—history aside—is the extremity of it. Its very similar to the style in Cannibals All, which I talked about a while back. Think about George Fitzhugh declaring, "If slavery be wrong, then the Bible cannot be true." Then dig the extreme rhetoric of Yale President Timothy Dwight warning of a broad Jacobin conspiracy to undermine the Union:All that the malice and atheism of the Dragon, the cruelty and rapacity of the Beast, and the fraud and deceit of the false Prophet can generate, or accomplish, swell the the list. No personal or national interest of man has been uninvaded; no impious sentiment or action has been spared...Shall we, my brethren, become partakers of these sins? Shall we introduce them into our government, our schools, our families? Shall our sons become the disciples of Voltaire, and the dragoons of Marat; or our daughters, the concubines of the Illuminati?Wow. The Illuminati. Now that brings back memories. There was always a certain contingent among the "conscious" crowd back at my alma mater (The real HU. Holler at me on the yard this Homecoming, fam.) that believed the end times were upon us. Who would bring about these end-times? An arcane alliance of Masons, Trilaterals, Boulé, and of course the Illuminati. The result would be a New World Order—barcodes stamped on our arms, computer chips implanted in our children, and all mankind reduced to slavery. The warnings were all around us. The Republican revolution of 1994. The scourge of HIV. The hidden meanings in certain English words. The coming of Y2k. I was crazy back then—but not that crazy. Still it's funny how I thought that these guys—and it was always guys—were something special and different, when in reality, they were just another splinter of the same American mind. The bible for them was Behold a Pale Horse. Later I found out it was also the bible for right-wing survivalists. I picked up Tony Judt's masterful Postwar this weekend and came across a fairly interesting discussion of how Germans thought about the Holocaust in the aftermath of the War. Judt is discussing Konrad Adenauer's attempt to broker Wiedergutmachung, or reparations, to Israel for the Holocaust. But getting everyday Germans to recognized their complicity in the great crimes proves difficult:In making this agreement Adenauer ran some domestic political risk: in December 1951, just 5 percent of West Germans surveyed admitted feeling ‘guilty’ towards Jews. A further 29 percent acknowledged that Germany owed some restitution to the Jewish people. The rest were divided between those (some two-fifths of respondents) who thought that only people ‘who really committed something’ were responsible and should pay, and those (21 percent) who thought ‘that the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich.’ When the restitution agreement was debated in the Bundestag on March 18th 1953, the Communists voted against, the Free Democrats abstained and both the Christian Social Union and Adenauer’s own CDU were divided, with many voting against any Wiedergutmachung (reparations). In order to get the agreement approved Adenauer depended on the votes of his Social Democratic opponents.The payment of Wiedergutmachung, which did happen stands in direct contrast to how the German people saw themselves:Any suggestion that Germany, and especially the German armed forces, had behaved in ways that precipitated or justified their suffering was angrily dismissed. The preferred self-image of Adenauer’s Germany was that of a victim thrice over: first at Hitler’s hands—the huge success of films like Die Letzte Brücke (The Last Bridge, 1954), about a female doctor resisting the Nazis, or Canaris (1955) helped popularize the notion that most good Germans had spent the war resisting Hitler; then at the hands of their enemies—the bombed-out cityscapes of post-war Germany encouraged the idea that on the home front as in the field, Germans had suffered terribly at the hands of their enemies; and finally thanks to the malicious ‘distortions’ of post-war propaganda, which—it was widely believed—deliberately exaggerated Germany’s ‘crimes’ while downplaying her losses.Parcel to that was the idea of a noble, apolitical Wehrmacht which had been corrupted by the Nazis:Germans did not so much forget as selectively remember. Throughout the fifties West German officialdom encouraged a comfortable view of the German past in which the Wehrmacht was heroic, while Nazis were in a minority and had been properly punished.To those of us who've studied the Civil War, this is a very, very familiar line. I'm not sure how Rommel fits in here, but my intellectual instincts say that he'd be a natural hero for this kind of sentiment. The idea of blaming some crazed, maniacal monster for the evils of actual men is another familiar theme. Here at home, it's very hard to accept white supremacy as a structure erected by actual people, as a choice, as an interest, as opposed to a momentary bout of insanity.Early in his book The Seventh Million, Israeli historian Tom Segev visits with the author, and Holocaust survivor, Yehiel De-Nur. Segev quotes De-Nur coming to the realization that ultimately the Holocaust was not the work of God, but the work of man and thus, in some profound way, condemns us all—"Wherever there is humankind, there is Auschwitz...Because it was not Satan that made Auschwitz but you and I."Accepting that the structures of evil are not mystical, but are the work of actual humans who parent children is terrifying. It is terrifying to understand that you could be under the chain or you could be holding it, that evil is common and can't be passed off to some amorphous evil in the hazy past, or condemned to the fringes of the present. Joshua Roberts/ReutersOn Sunday, a group of conservative radicals held a protest in Washington. Eventually they walked to the White House. One of these radicals felt it was a good idea to wave the flag of slavery, treason, and terrorism in front of the home of America's first black president. Lone idiots are often drawn to protest action. The behavior of such idiots, while alarming, should not necessarily be taken as an indicator of the aims and thrust of the protest. On the contrary, it is not so much the behavior of the lone idiot that matters—but the tenor of the crowd around him.If, for instance, you witness a march against military action in Syria and see a Nazi flag among the protestors this should disturb you. But you would be heartened to see the protesters snatch the lone idiot in their midst, eject him from their party with great vigor, and give him some blows for good measure. The flag would still disturb you, but perhaps you might be able to see it as a fringe action, and not the heart of the protest itself.It is the wisdom of the crowd that matters. The wisdom that marked Sunday's crowd was the idea that the president "bows down to Allah" and needs to "put the Qu'ran down." The wisdom that marked Sunday's crowd was the notion that Obama was not the president of "the people" but the president of "his people." The wisdom of Sunday's crowd held that the police, doing their job, looked "like something out of Kenya." It's not so much that a man would fly a Confederate flag, as Jeff Goldberg notes, in front of the home of a black family. It's that a crowd would allow him the comfort of doing it.I was in a crowd once. It's been almost 20 years. But I remember most is how emphatically we were drilled, that day, on the politics of respectability. Our wisdom was conservative—too conservative for my tastes, frankly. But I obeyed the edict of the day which held that had any black man who came to the Million Man March and so much as stole candy bar would doom us all. That was our wisdom. It's a good memory. But I fear that it is no match for the wisdom of Sunday's crowd. The blue period is upon us.MORE: I don't know if I am effectively communicating what is wrong with that picture and why it is deeply infuriating. If a patriot can stand in front of the White House brandishing the Confederate flag, then the word "patriot" has no meaning. The Nazi flag is offensive because it is a marker of centuries of bigotry elevated to industrialized murder.But the Confederate flag does not merely carry the stain of slavery, of "useful killing," but the stain of attempting to end the Union itself. You cannot possibly wave that flag and honestly claim any sincere understanding of your country. It is not possible. I gave a talk earlier today which will be familiar to most of you. I try not to talk much in public. But I'm doing a lot more lately. I don't know what that means. I have this fear of becoming a dude more known for running his mouth than banging it out. (Which is why I left Twitter.) Anyway give this a listen while you do the dishes or while you're screwing around with the new SimCity. Or whatever else the kids are doing these days. Here's to forever banging it out. There are many good critiques of my own critiques of Obamacare. Here is one, from David White, that stuck with me over the weekend. He is responding to my question, "Why is the radical approach—a health care expansion for the most vulnerable, or no health care expansion at all—ultimately wrong?"White writes:I wouldn't say it's "ultimately wrong," but it's not the choice I'd make. The flip side of your morality question is "is it moral to deny a health care expansion for poor black people in NY and IL because poor black people in Mississippi won't benefit?" How much longer would we have to fight, how many poor NYers would die while we're trying to convince some Mississippi segregationist legislator to extend healthcare there? Is it wrong to help those NYers now, and set up the framework by which those Mississippians will be helped in the future when that fight is won?My concern is—and remains—the fact that the expansion of the safety net comes at the price of delaying its extension to a segment of the population in which poor black and brown people are overly represented. I am convinced that within the next five to 10 years forces beyond morality will make the Medicaid expansion national. But in the meantime there will be a benefits gap. Again. But with that said, the question isn't, "Should we be horrified?" It's, "Why is arguing that we should have a health-care expansion for the most vulnerable or no health-care expansion at all ultimately wrong?" And I think David pretty much get its right.History is instructive here. After the Civil War, the country extended the vote (nominally) to black men. Feminists and lefties (like me) have spilled much ink noting that women did not get the vote. The position of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton—who'd fought for years as radical abolitionists—was basically "the vote for white and black women and black men, or the vote for no one." (An enraged Stanton later took this further and argued "the vote for white women above all." Things got worse from there with the cause being taken up by feminists like the inveterate racist Rebecca Felton and slightly less racist Frances Willard.)In her book, When and Where I Enter, the historian Paula Giddings focuses on the debates among black men and women over the prospect of only half the community getting the vote while the other half remained disenfranchised. Giddings argues that black women ultimately supported the vote for black men because there was at least the possibility of influence within the home and family. Extending the vote to white women exclusively—in addition to boosting the power of the white revanchists—would not have offered the same prospect.Was it "immoral" to advocate, as Frederick Douglass did, for the extension of the franchise to black men, but not to women? Or was it moral to take what could be gotten, and then continue to argue for the franchise extending to women? (As Douglass also did.) I've said before that I actually have a lot of sympathy for Anthony and Stanton. Still, the answer is clear to me. Douglass was right. Obamacare isn't perfect—but it's what we could get. The question remains whether we shall always have to "get" things in this same manner.I should add on a personal note that I can run hot sometimes. I hope to remain that way, but it doesn't always make for the tightest thinking. Sometimes it even makes me dead wrong. I have said before that you should not come here with the expectation that I will be "right." I'm often not—and frankly I believe that this is true of anyone who writes. But I try my best to be honest with you and giving you my thinking as it stands in the moment, though it might well change in the next. I have a lifetime's worth of questions. (Why is the train to Boston as slow as the bus? What really makes planes fly? When will Peter Parker get his body back? Will we be racist to the end? Am I too old to learn French? Why does raw cheese taste so good?) Unfortunately, I have very few definite answers. For no particular reason--or for a reason I can not articulate right now--I want to share something with you. At the end of the Civil War, when the United States was considering selling homesteads to black freedman, some number of white Southerners decided to turn to fraud. Whites would sell them painted sticks claiming that gave them possession of a particular parcel of land. They'd also sell them "deeds" to the land. One such deed reads as follows:Know all men by these presents, that a naught is a naught, and a figure is a figure; all for the white man and none for the nigure. And whereas Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so also have I lifted this damned old nigger out of four dollars and six bits. Amen. Selah!Given under my hand and seal at the Corner Grocery in Granby, some time between the birth of Christ and the death of the devil.The recipient of this deed was a black man who could not read. His money was taken, and then he was mocked. The mockery is almost a show of cause. His illiteracy is a weakness and that weakness makes him worthy of contempt and suitable for plunder.When I was a child in West Baltimore it was a hobby to jump people who'd somehow wandered through your neighborhood. But you could not jump them for the hell of it--even if that's what you were actually doing. You had to make up some fraudulent reason for plunder--"Yo, ain't that the dude that was messing with your cousin?" or some other nakedly false show of cause. We could not accept the fact we were behaving thuggishly, that we had embraced villainy. Even in total cowardice we had to make ourselves hero #file_links[D:\keywords5.txt,1,S] ic.I learned this. It was not natural to me. I was a tender boy, until I wasn't. And then I learned to despise weakness and to mask that contempt behind narrative and myth. If you have ever done this--and I suspect if you think about it, you will find you have--you can see how such cowardice could be practiced across a society. The people I was raised around were humans, and so it is not shocking that the same rituals we practiced there, the same feelings of contempt, are all around us--the Germans inventing reasons to invade Poland, the rapist who claims the short dress made him do it, an entire town organizing to back him up. Weakness, misery, does not always elicit sympathy. Perhaps that is because the weakness reminds of what we we fear for ourselves. Or perhaps it reminds us of our own complicity in some broad crime, and more, our presumed helplessness for it to be any other way.I don't know. There's no good reason to show you this. I think I just want you to know that this happened. In an earlier post ruminating on Obamacare and the large swath of poor black people who will not be helped by it I used the term "immoral." I should not have done that. I think that's the kind of word that tends to excite, but not much else. I don't want to bring heat to this thing, I want to bring light. I come to this as a card-carrying lefty and Black Panther diaper baby (is that a thing? #file_links[D:\keywords1.txt,1,S] ) who believes the 2008 election to be one of the great events of my life. At the same time I am worried that we are effectively conceding that any expansion/improvement of the social safety net will likely be done on racist terms. Perhaps it was inevitable that Obamacare would exclude a lot of poor black people. I don't think it's a good idea to accept that on face value. If I must accept it, I will do so begrudgingly, greedily demanding more. I will not make the perfect the enemy of the good. And I will not allow the good to masquerade as the perfect.Again, I want us to think about politics beyond the ballot box, and consider that which shapes the options that come before us. In that sense, this is beyond the man Barack Obama. I have no particular enmity toward him, on the contrary I have a great deal of pride. I think that using the term "immoral" was unhelpful. More later. Last week someone alluded to the liberal critiques of radical leftism arguing that the limits of dwelling "too long and too angrily on the systemic racism of America" should not be ignored. This amused me. As I noted, the problem is not that I dwell too long and too angrily on America's systemic racism, but that America's systemic racism has tended to dwell too long and too angrily on me. The commenter replied and expanded, pointing out that he had not expressed himself well. I actually think he addressed the liberal political consensus quite well. And as a point about electoral politics it probably is true. I just reject the idea that "politics" begins with the voting booth, the nominating convention, or the pocket veto.I was talking to Eric J. Miller, a law professor at Loyola Law School, for a magazine piece the other day. He made the point that talking about white supremacy as foundational to America is not merely cathartic-- it's citizenship. More, it is providing correct information that helps us understand what ideal policy might look like -- even if we don't get there:The political sphere is where you engage with your humanity. You have not merely a right, you have an obligation to participate, to make sure the people, as a whole, are able to make good decisions, and pass good laws and treat you as a human. And if one group subjugates another, if it says 'You can talk about anything you want, except everything that matters to you,' then you are not a full member of the polity. So then voting is not enough because we can't even have the debate.Voting is not enough. Defining the terms of the debate is politics too. To a great degree (though not totally) the politics which define the debate around the expansion of our social safety net are the politics of white supremacy. To understand how true this has been across history, it's worth checking out Robert Lieberman's tome Shifting the Color Line. His conclusions are bracing. "Deracialization, the side-stepping of direct confrontation of difficult racial issues," Lieberman writes. "Can have grim consequences." Like leaving the majority of the most vulnerable class of Americans uncovered, while the rest of the country enjoys the expanded safety net. What you must understand is that this is actively harmful. Black wealth in America is roughly a tenth of white wealth. Black people are the most segregated people in the country. What this means is that even black people who do personally reap the benefits of Obamacare will reap them less. They will live in communities where there is less coverage. (Remember Patrick Sharkey's work on neighborhoods.) They will have family members and friends who will be uncovered. In this way one can see how an ostensibly, and well-intentioned, progressive and color-blind policy proposal can actually expand a wealth gap. I want to be careful with that last sentence. I don't know that that will actually happen. My sense of this is historical -- selective expansions of the safety net and of wealth-building opportunities have not been helpful to black people.Lieberman argues for the long-term nationalization of the safety net. In the case of health-care reform this would have meant national single-payer. That was never on the table in 2008, and I have my doubts about the ability of a black president to pass such a program.More vexing for me is how to think about this as a citizen. The conventional liberal approach says, "Obamacare didn't get all we wanted but it got a lot of it. We took what we could." But what if that logic really does exacerbate the wealth gap? Is it moral to support a program that fails to help those who need it the most? The response might be that -- like Social Security -- eventually all states will adopt the expansion. But this does not address the damage done in the meantime, nor does it address the possibility in increasing if not the wealth gap then the overall gap in life outcomes.There is a more radical possibility -- Obamacare is ultimately immoral, not because it didn't get "everything" but because it didn't get to those who needed it most. The stated impulse of class-first liberalism is that those who need it most -- measured by wealth and income -- will get the most help. In the case of Obamacare, this may eventually happen, but great damage will be done in the meantime. I'm not sure where to go with this. What would Martin Luther King say, faced with the realities of Obamacare? Why is the radical approach -- a health-care expansion for the most vulnerable, or no health-care expansion at all -- ultimately wrong? It certainly isn't a plan for right now. But what do we lose when neglect to even attempt to make the long-term argument?Lieberman is a supporter of universal programs (as am I) but he argues that we should not fool ourselves into thinking we are implementing those programs in a country where racism is a minor force, easily dismissed: The implication of this analysis for public policy is that broad, universal policies stand a better chance of succeeding if we we pay careful and forthright attention to both institutional structure and racial consequences....Lieberman writes this in a critique of William Julius Wilson, who in the '80s argued for the kind of color-blind approach that Obama now touts. But it's worth pointing out that Wilson has changed his mind. He responds to Lieberman in the latest edition of his classic study The Truly Disadvantaged by adding:I accept this criticism. Indeed since writing The Truly Disadvantaged my position on framing has changed. In addition to making sure that institutional mechanisms are in place to allow for an equitable distribution of resources, I also feel that in framing public policy we should not shy away from an explicit discussion of the specific issues of race and poverty; on the contrary, we should highlight them in our attempt to convince the nation that these problems should be seriously confronted and that there is an urgent need to address them. The issues of race and poverty should be framed in such a way that not only a sense of fairness and justice to combat inequality is generated, but also people are made aware that our country would be better off if these problems were seriously addressed. In other words, I now feel that appeals to America's sense of fairness and justice will be more effective in the long run than attempting to neutralize the effects of racial biases by highlighting initiatives that seem to benefit all groups. That is basically my position. I am fan of universal programs. I am not a fan of lying or self-delusion. I am a fan of Obamacare. I don't know that the president could have gotten more. I am not a fan of defending Obama's record in black America by changing the subject. One caveat: This analysis focuses on Obama because he is the titular head of the American state. To some extent, I regret that. What I want people to think about is beyond the president. Obama's "rising tide" thinking did not appear from thin air. It is the result of liberal thinking in sociology and history over the past few decades, as well as the impulses of coalition politics. I want people to expand their thoughts about politics beyond the immediate and the electoral. I am trying to think beyond Obama, as an individual actor, to the inherent biases and predilections of our system. I don't have many answers here.UPDATE: I am aware of what happened with the Supreme Court and how the ACA was written. I addressed that critique here. When President Obama leaves office there will almost certainly be efforts to ascertain the impact of our first black president on the black community. Defenders of the president's record will likely point to Obamacare as the kind of program that expanded the safety net for everyone but specifically for those in need -- a class in which African Americans are overly represented. I have, of late, been anxious to add an asterisk to this accolade. As I've noted before, black people are also disproportionately represented in many of the states which are refusing the Medicaid expansion. Thus the idea that Obama has aided poor black people through a broad race-blind expansion of the social safety net deserves some scrutiny.This morning the New York Times offers us just that:A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have insurance, the very kinds of people that the program was intended to help, according to an analysis of census data by The New York Times...The 26 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion are home to about half of the country's population, but about 68 percent of poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers. About 60 percent of the country's uninsured working poor are in those states. Among those excluded are about 435,000 cashiers, 341,000 cooks and 253,000 nurses' aides.Blacks are disproportionately affected, largely because more of them are poor and living in Southern states. In all, 6 out of 10 blacks live in the states not expanding Medicaid. In Mississippi, 56 percent of all poor and uninsured adults are black, though they account for just 38 percent of the population.Dr. Aaron Shirley, a physician who has worked for better health care for blacks in Mississippi, said that the history of segregation and violence against blacks still informs the way people see one another, particularly in the South, making some whites reluctant to support programs that they believe benefit blacks....Dr. Shirley said: "If you look at the history of Mississippi, politicians have used race to oppose minimum wage, Head Start, all these social programs. It's a tactic that appeals to people who would rather suffer themselves than see a black person benefit."Indeed. Liberals who believe they can fool racists by changing the subject from racism to class underestimate the intelligence of their audience. "All that it would take to sink a new WPA program would be some skillfully packaged footage of black men leaning on shovels smoking cigarettes," writes sociologist Douglass Massey. "Papering over the issue of race makes for bad social theory, bad research and bad public policy." To say nothing of morality. Because we live in a segregated country, the people who must bear the burden of the uninsured black poor will ultimately be other black people. This is not just a matter of individual black people not having insurance. It is a shock to the entire system, the entire network of black people who -- because of white supremacy -- live segregated lives, and must bear this on their own.More later. If you've been reading me the past few months, you know that I am wholly unsurprised. "We're not going to be disrespected," conservative Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., added. "We have to get something out of this. And I don't know what that even is."I'd like to advise everybody to keep a safe distance from each other until our national public health institute is back up to full strength. "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are facing a reduced ability to detect and investigate disease outbreaks. The annual influenza program — the one that tracks the flu and helps people get flu shots — has been shut down. The CDC has also stopped offering its usual assistance to state and local authorities, who rely on the agency for help in tracking unusual outbreaks." So, the flu program has been shut down right as flu season begins. And we just have to hope there are no unusual outbreaks of disease, since we won't be able to adequately track or respond to them. Gee, what a worthwhile risk to take, even if just for a few days! As a matter of substance, constant-shutdown, permanent-emergency governance is so destructive that no other serious country engages in or could tolerate it. The United States can afford it only because we are -- still -- so rich, with so much margin for waste and error.However, some of the idiotic and noxious consequences of the shutdown, like our inability to adequately monitor infectious disease, have no respect for wealth. It's a roll of the dice that everything will be fine. I know I'm preaching to the choir, but Lord, what a pointless gamble.I work as an air traffic controller in a facility just outside of Washington, D.C. Our airspace extends from South Carolina to the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, and then along the southern half of Pennsylvania into New Jersey. By the time an airplane departing an airport in that area leaves 10,000 feet or is more than 30 miles from its departure airport, it enters our area of responsibility. Last year, we handled just over 2.5 million flights, which makes us third behind similar facilities in New York and Atlanta for total flights handled. If you are an air traffic controller with a current flight physical and any current position certifications (i.e., the ability to work a given piece of airspace unsupervised), you are part of the exempted or essential employee base, and therefore are expected to come to work. However, there is no plan for how we are to be paid during this time, since all of our payroll employees are furloughed (and the Department of the Interior's people who actually cut the checks/EFTs for most of the other federal agencies are too). Any leave for vacations, illness or personal emergencies is to be counted as a voluntary unpaid furlough until the government is funded again. If you had booked a wedding and a honeymoon a year in advance, you can still go, but you apparently won't be allowed to use accumulated leave to ensure that you are paid for that time. If a family member is sick and requires your help for an extended period, the same conditions apply. I would imagine this is playing out the same at the FBI, Customs Service, TSA and several other agencies where people are too valuable to furlough but not valuable enough to pay on time and in full. Contra Fox News, calling this a "slimdown" is bullshit, and it's dangerous bullshit. I am in a position to go a few pay periods without borrowing money to live, but I don't know that I am the rule rather than the exception among exempted federal employees. If you want to see how well government services function when the providers are worried about paying the mortgage, you need only wait through October 13 to find out.More coming. As always if you've got particular experiences, like our commenter above, feel free to email me. Part of writing is figuring out whether you have anything interesting to say. I'm following the shutdown as much as the rest of you. But it's not my lane. I should not pretend otherwise. With that said, a couple of hits. Check out Terry Gross interviewing Robert Draper a few years back. You can see the seeds of today in Draper's reporting:GROSS: You're writing a book about the House. So I'm wondering if watching how the House dealt with, you know, passage of this debt ceiling deal, if a lot of members of the House now admire President Obama for his willingness to compromise with them or if they just see him as weak and easy to take advantage of. Mr. DRAPER: I haven't seen any sign of admiration for President Obama in the Republican camps. If anything, there is a belief that President Obama was not always good on his word at the negotiating table. There was this suggestion that another $400 billion in revenue should be considered that President Obama sort of sprung on Speaker Boehner, which he felt was untenable, given how — the difficulties he was having in his Republican conference to convince them to accept any kind of revenue package. No, I don't see that any of them have viewed Obama's willingness to compromise as a virtue. I think that they recognize it, but they don't see this as something to be admired or even to be emulated. I think that if anything they've calculated it as a kind of weakness.And as always, my colleague Jim Fallows is on it. I'd add in this interview with National Review's Robert Costa on what motivates John Boehner. Otherwise, it's yours. Leave the magic. Bring us science. I encourage everyone to check out Sarah Abdurrahman's utterly horrifying tale of being detained, along with the family, at the border. Adburrahman's family was held for six hours. The detention included being held in the cold, being handcuffed, and subjected--repeatedly--to a full body-search. To this day they have no idea why. We are six years into the Obama administration and with each report of profiling, with each report of unaccountability, with the scuttling of the Democrats 2008 national security platform, the horrific success and mad genius of 9/11 becomes clearer. Our defeat is bipartisan and broad:The NSA inspector general, in the letter dated September 11, detailed 12 investigations that found the NSA's civilian and military employees used the agency's spying tools to search for email addresses or try to snoop on phone calls of current or former lovers, spouses and relatives, both foreign and American. In one instance, a military member queried six email addresses of a former girlfriend, an American, on the first day of having access to the data collection system in 2005. In another instance, a U.S. government-employed foreign woman suspected an NSA civilian employee, who was her lover, of listening to her phone calls. An investigation found the man abused NSA databases from 1998 to 2003 to snoop on nine phone numbers of foreign women and twice collected communications of an American.Its true that in times of war civil liberties take a hit. But this war has the potential to last as long as someone, somewhere is claiming the mantle of Al Qaeda. It looks like our next mayor is going to be the progressive Bill De Blasio. But for all the noise made about Stop and Frisk, I've heard very little about shutting down the infamous Demographics Unit, which basically spies on Muslims for the hell of it. I want to do something I've never done--wish Happy Birthday to someone I do not know. Mijin Cha is somewhere out there among the Horde. I am told that on this day, some years ago (never mind how many) Mijin joined the living. And we are most happy that Mijin joined the living and not some other random zygote who might favor cat videos over watching me glummy doom-say everything, fail at French, and otherwise discover at age 37, that which normal people discover 16. I don't much know why people come here to read, but I am happy they do. It's easy to forget that the vast majority of these readers do not comment but sit in their own private spaces quietly taken my measure. The most vocal members of the Horde owe this sprawling silent majority quite the debt. Without out them, I'd be back on typepad counting my hits for the day. (Two--me and my Dad.)And so in honor of these lurkers, of who Mijin Cha is clearly Queen, I declare today September 26, the Day Of The Lurker. Let there be song. Let there be dance. Let there be drink. Let there be merriment, for this the day for all those who don't talk, but understand. But mostly this is a day for Mijin. Happy birthday. I hope you have a great one. Happy birthday Mjin. Keep fighting the good fight. We love you much, but Susan loves you even more. So in our continuing run of posts, which The Horde has dubbed "The TNC Futility" series, we have a chart showing the relative poverty levels of the neighborhoods where blacks and whites in America have lived across two generations. One generation was born between 1955 and 1970. The other generation was born between 1985 and 2000. The data was compiled by Patrick Sharkey for his excellent book Stuck in Place. It is pulled from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a longitudinal study which began in the late 60s. I think I've used this chart before, but it bears another look.As you can see, the majority of black people live in conditions that very few white people ever experience, and a significant number of black people live in conditions whi #file_links[D:\keywords3.txt,1,S] ch virtually no white people experience. This has not changed. For the first generation 62 percent of black people, but only 4 percent of white people, lived in neighborhoods where 20 percent or more of the people were poor. In the second generations 66 percent of black people, and 6 percent of white people, lived in such conditions. In both generations a third of all black people lived in neighborhoods where 30 percent of the population was below the poverty line. Only one percent of all white people lived in such situations.The vast majority of white people live in low poverty neighborhoods. The vast majority of black people live in moderate to high poverty neighborhoods, with the scale tipping toward the high end. Only 10 percent of all African-Americans experience the kind of neighborhood ecology that 61 percent of white people experience. It's interesting that the trend line--even for white neighborhoods--is pointing down. Canaries in the coal mine I guess.It's important to understand that a direct line from neighborhood poverty to individual poverty can not necessarily be drawn. On the contrary, individual affluent African-Americans tend to live in neighborhoods that are a step below individual affluent whites. [A]lmost half (49 percent) of black children with family income in the top three quintiles lived in neighborhoods with at least 20 percent poverty," writes Sharkey. "Compared to only one percent of white children in those quintiles." The sociologist John Logan found that, over the past two decades, affluent blacks tended to live around more poverty, than poor whites.So this is not simply a question of "the black poor" or even "the poor." Helping the poor is a noble goal on to itself. But it isn't the same as addressing the effects of a tradition of racist policy. The two are related--much like homophobia and misogyny are related. But just as same-sex marriage and abortion rights are not the same thing, neither is America's toleration of racism, and its toleration of inequality, color regardless.About those baguettes: I forgot to close out my last post with some sort of notation on the culinary adventures of this particular black family which--for the first time ever--finds itself living in that black ten percent. I tri #file_links[D:\keywords4.txt,1,S] ed to teach my son some knife skills in the kitchen this weekend--I started cutting when I was about his age. This ended in bandages. Just a flesh wound, I assure you. But afterward the boy looked at me like I was Jesus walking and said, "If you weren't here, I would have been freaking out." Do not think I have forgotten the importance, and particular magic, of black fatherhood. I think I wanted to be a father not out of any sense of nobility but for that moment, right there. To feel needed. To be singularly important to someone.After I bandaged him up he sat in the kitchen and watched me cut up a chicken, make a quick stock, and then some noodle soup. I then announced that we would, again, try our hand at a cake--but this time something basic and yellow. The boy went and watched a 20-minute video of Christopher Kimball baking a cake. He then returned and said, "I want to do it." And he did it. It was awesome--light and not overly sweet. The only help he got from me was getting the batter into the pan. It was then that I remembered that someday I would not be so needed, not so singularly important. Already he is coming home with notes from girls. One of them is going to sweep him away from me. And then it will just me and his mother again. And France. We'll be free and that will be nice. But we will never again be so terribly needed. I picked up James Baldwin's new collected joint and haven't quite been the same since. I read a lot of Baldwin in college, and basically left with the sense that he was a badass. But I hadn't gone back to Baldwin in many years. Some people who are important to us as young people, wither under our gaze as older adults. And then other people who we know as genius somehow just increase in our estimation. Baldwin is among those people for me. This is not news. You can see him here giving Bill Buckley exactly what he deserves. And smarter people then me can tell you about his genius. What I can say is that this weekend I read his essay "Price of the Ticket" and felt like someone out there—long dead—understood how I felt.Here is passage from "Price of the Ticket" in which Baldwin reflects on the mentoring he got from Marion Anderson and Beauford Delaney:Because of her color, Miss Anderson was not allowed to sing at The Met, nor, as far as The Daughters of The American Revolution were concerned, anywhere in Washington where white people might risk hearing her. Eleanor Roosevelt was appalled by this species of patriotism and arranged for Marian Anderson to sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. This was a quite marvellous and passionate event in those years, triggered by the indignation of one woman who had, clearly, it seemed to me, married beneath her.By this time, I was working for the Army—or the Yankee dollar!—in New Jersey. I hitchhiked, in sub-zero weather, out of what I will always remember as one of the lowest and most obscene circles of Hell, into Manhattan: where both Beauford and Miss Anderson where on hand to inform me that I had no right to permit myself to be defined by so pitiful a people. Not only was I not born to be a slave: I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave-master. They had, the masters, incontestably, the rope—in time, with enough, they would hang themselves with it. They were not to hang me: I was to see to that. If Beauford and Miss Anderson were a part of my inheritance, I was a part of their hope.Much of Baldwin's writing is roughly contemporaneous with the Civil Rights movement, but he seems to share none of its hope, none of its belief in the power of love to conquer all. There is something so real about him. He is not a nationalist, but a humanist—and yet he is the most clear-headed humanist I've ever read. He is not here to flatter you. He is not here to make white people better. He is not here to change the world. He doesn't even seem like he's trying to "inspire." He is here to write—because it's what he wants to do. I love that, and I feel it on so many levels.I'm often asked what "impact" I hope my writing has. To which I can only respond, "Fuck if I know." I write because I want to, because I can do nothing else. Because I believe they will hang themselves, and this is my attempt to prevent them from hanging me. Fear of a Black President As a candidate,Barack Obama said we needed to reckon with race and with America s
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