Race not ontological- social determinants matter

(Charisse, AfricanaStudies@Carleton, 9-20)

Oliver Cromwell Cox offered a scathing critique of An American Dilemma, arguing that it brought “to finest expression practically all the vacuous theories of race relations which are acceptable among the liberal intelligentsia and which explain race relations away from the social and economic order.” Interestingly, Cox’s indictment of this evasion of social determinants in favor of a moralistic interpretation of American society applies almost perfectly to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ most recent attempt at analysis, “The First White President,” published in the October 2017 issue of The Atlantic. The article epitomizes the fundamental aporia of Coates’ brand of Black liberalism: that whiteness and racism constitute and stabilize U.S. politics even as they present an “existential danger to the country and the world.” In other words, whiteness and racism are totalizing structures, both thesis and antithesis. Much like Myrdal’s erroneous explication of racism as a set of individual attitudes, Coates disastrously employs “whiteness” as a type of metaphysics that is neither contextually specific nor historically situated, and that defies any grounding in social relations.