Racial pessimism denies the importance of economic structures

(Susannah, JewishStudies@Dartmouth What Manner of Man Is the Prophet? Cornel West, Abraham Heschel, and the Hebrew Prophets Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope New Essays on the Work of Cornel West Ed. Will)

The enactments of disavowal include racial capitalism, enslavement, and Jim Crow segregation; heteropatriarchal homophobic sexuality, misogyny that protects wealthy women and abandons poor women to sexual assault, harassment, and discrimination; and depoliticized intellectual jousts over intersectionality. Herein lies the root of West’s critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates: Coates’s pessimism is produced by focusing on racial identity rather than the deeper economic forces that construct American society. Participating in the disavowal, Coates allows white Americans to adore him because he takes the pessimism onto himself, as a Black condition, and avoids the call to revolution that would challenge more than their guilty emotions. White supremacy, to West, does not exist without capitalist economic structures, and pessimism over race becomes a tool to ignore those structures and disavow the need for radical economic overhaul. Racism keeps capitalism functioning, much as antisemitism was crucial in the political functioning of pre-1945 Europe; Hitler needed antisemitism to come to power and German antisemitism prevented their repudiation of fascism. West writes, “A race-transcending prophet is someone who never forgets about the significance of race but refuses to be confined to race.”58 As George Shulman writes, the problem is “not quite ignorance, but the ‘innocence’ of whites who do not want to know, or who disavow what they already know, about racial injustice, the conduct of the state acting in their name, the humanity of the other.”59 As a “fantastic system of evasions,” innocence itself is the crime.60 Prophecy, for Baldwin, “does not decree a fate but demands a decision.”61