Prefer the material politics of the alternative to solutions that emphasize “interiority”. Political struggle makes life meaningful

(RL, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/ta-nehisi-coates-racism-afro-pessimism-reparations-class-struggle)

Though Coates has never explicitly cited it as his theoretical framework, the dour outlook of his work evokes the themes of Afro-Pessimism. The pivot to the ontological that is apparent in Coates’s rhetoric is a hallmark of Afro-Pessimism. “Ontology by definition is the study of being, and to speak of Blackness as an ontological condition means analyzing the state of Black bodies through the lens of slavery,” Afro-Pessimist scholar Michael Barlow, Jr., writes in the academic journal Inquiries. However, for Barlow, the relation of slavery that ontologically defines blackness is not a matter of political economy, but rather a “libidinal economy.” In this telling, labor and ownership — that is, political economy — are merely incidental to racial slavery. Instead, it’s the white imagination and its depraved “metaphysical desires for Black flesh” that both predated and catalyzed racialized chattel slavery. Racism is reduced to the spiritual, more a matter of a sinful nature than a political struggle. Coates has echoed this retreat to interiority, to the spiritual, to consciousness. It’s the ontological pivot that leads Frank Wilderson, perhaps the world’s foremost Afro-Pessimist, to declare in his foundational text “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” that black people are no more than cows in a slaughterhouse. Wilderson posits that “death of the black body is foundational to the life of American civil society,” just as a cow’s death is essential to the slaughterhouse. Flippantly, Wilderson asks, “how would the cows fare under a dictatorship of the proletariat?” Coates adopts a similar sense of impotence. He characterizes struggle as aimless toil — an apolitical end in itself. “The struggle is really all I have for you,” he tells his son, “because it is the only portion of this world under your control.” Yet how are we to struggle against earthquakes and physical laws? How can we fight gravity? Both Coates and Wilderson speak of power in terms of dreams. Coates writes of monolithic white “Dreamers,” those whose investment in the American Dream requires a faith in their own whiteness. Similarly, Wilderson sees America as enacting two distinct dreams. For Wilderson, “the dream of black accumulation and death” is separate from “the dream of worker exploitation.” Ultimately, in both Coates’s and Wilderson’s respective frameworks, solidarity is unimaginable and class struggle is rendered futile. Though Coates does not go to the lengths Wilderson does to position himself in opposition to materialist politics, the result is effectively equivalent: a separation of race and class combined with a deep skepticism of class-based solidarity, reforms, or even revolution. This is a turn away from the Freedom Tradition embodied by Fannie Lou Hamer. For her, the problem of racism wasn’t cosmology or ontology — it was an expression of politics implicated in class antagonism. Fannie Lou Hamer stood “with the masses,” both white and black. Solidarity through struggle from below, including class struggle, formed her path to victory. Coates’s ontological pivot is more muddled than Wilderson’s. Fleetingly peppered throughout his work are allusions to material reality, betraying the imposition of metaphysical abstraction that ultimately drives his perspective. “We did not choose our fences,” he writes. “They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible.” Coates knows that Virginia planters did not invent gravity or earthquakes. Yet this historicizing impulse does not prevent him from essentializing racism when he confronts it head on. In string of tweets from December 2016, Coates conceded that racism is not transcendental, noting that “at its very root it was always economic.” But acknowledging racism’s economic impact has not led him to embrace class struggle. Even Frank Wilderson can acknowledge that racism has an economic impact, but he still believes that class struggle and racism exist on distinct planes. Coates holds a similar belief; that racism is wholly different in kind from class. In the same series of tweets, he concluded that “in America, ‘class’ isn’t the only kind of class.” Just as he mystifies racism, even while locating its impact in the bodies of black people, here he again pivots. Coates cannot address material politics on its own terms, preferring instead to retreat to a contrived mystification. He replaces action with interiority. As he recently told an auditorium of eager Northwestern students, “The process should not be… people looking out at the world and saying, ‘I would like for there to be change in the world, how do I do that?’” Instead, he implored the crowd to engage from the “inside-out, not outside-in… because if you are in the business of justice, and making this society more democratic, you might get a lot of disappointment.” Consciousness matters, of course. “Baby you just got to love ’em,” Fannie Lou Hamer would say of the white segregationists who routinely threatened her life. “Hating just makes you sick and weak.” This was Hamer in a reflexive moment, but it was no retreat. In the very next breath, she warned, “I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom and the first cracker even look like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won’t write his mama again.” Fannie Lou truly was her mother’s daughter. Reflection, whether through intergenerational story or her own thoughts, enhanced her resistance. The same cannot be said of Coates. Instead of finding relief in political action, Coates finds it in a cookout at Howard University’s homecoming, surrounded by black people. He fantasizes that he is “disappearing into all of their bodies,” as the music and dancing, the black cultural zeitgeist of the moment, cure him of the “birthmark of damnation.” The curse is lifted. Blackness is transfigured, becoming a space “beyond the Dream.” It’s another ontological pivot, this time allowing Coates to conclude that The Mecca’s” — his term for Howard — cookout has a “power more gorgeous than any voting rights bill.” It’s a fantasy of retreat, as if black culture were beyond the machinations of capitalism, as though black cultural expression existed in the world but was not of it and were enough to take us to a new one. Between the World and Me concludes with Coates considering climate change. He sees climate change as a manifestation of a polluted white consciousness, rather than the unfettered excess of industrial capitalism. It is a “noose around the neck of the earth,” allegedly resulting in large part from white flight, the mid-century exodus of negrophobic white families to the suburbs and the pollution caused by the cars that took them there. Coates’s words here are poetic but grossly inaccurate. They mimic Afro-Pessimism’s emphasis on the white libido, relegating his rhetoric to the realm of interior life, the souls of white folks, and stopping well short of the political domain. For Coates, the Civil Rights movement was not a struggle to alter a material world; rather the “hope of the movement” was merely to “awaken the Dreamers.” Black politics is only relevant as far as it can arouse white consciousness, which he sees as a largely futile exercise, due to “the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness.” Coates sees common interest between the black elite and the black poor, as he marvels at “the entire diaspora,” from lawyers to street hustlers, present at Howard’s homecoming. Yet he cannot conceive of anti-capitalist class solidarity across racial identity. He has a darker vision, of a kind that Corey Robin has described as “apocalypticism.” Coates’s ultimate hope is not in collective human action, but rather the total annihilation of the world and all those living in it— another feature that unites him with Afro-Pessimism, which calls explicitly for the “end of the world.” As he says of the Dreamers, “the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all.” Paradoxically, though he can see a collective fate in apocalypse, he rejects shared struggle for liberation. “The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves,” he declares. The problem is, the whole of capitalist enterprise, both past and present, cannot be reduced to race as Original Sin. Left out of Coates’s mythology is the fact that colonial enterprise, in what would become the United States, relied first on European indentured servants, most of whom died within a handful of years after arriving on the continent. It’s Coates’s reading of race as sin that pushes him to imagine a perverted form of salvation in the fantasy of apocalypse. In this racial fatalism, reparations for slavery emerges as the anticipation of the inevitable Judgement Day. It is therefore no surprise that Coates has taken up racial reparations as his cross to bear — not to change the world, but to condemn it.