Alt kills black agency

There is, in this, a danger. When one conceptualizes white supremacy at the level of ontology, there is little room for one’s imagination to soar and one’s sense of agency is inescapably constrained. The meaning of action is tied fundamentally to what we imagine is possible for us. “The missing thing,” Coates writes, “was related to the plunder of our bodies, the fact that any claim to ourselves, to the hands that secured us, the spine that braced us, and the head that directed us, was contestable.” The body is one of the unifying themes of the book. It resonates well with our American ears because the hallmark of freedom is sovereign control over our bodies. This was the site on which slavery did its most destructive work: controlling the body to enslave the soul. We see the reconstitution of this logic in our present moment—the policing and imprisoning of black men and women. The reality of this colonizes not only the past and the present, but also the future. There can be no affirmative politics when race functions primarily as a wounded attachment—when our bodies are the visible reminders that we live at the arbitrary whim of another. But what of those young men and women in the streets of Ferguson, Chicago, New York, and Charleston—how ought we to read their efforts? We come to understand Coates’s answer to this question in one of the pivotal and tragic moments of the book—the murder of a college friend, Prince Jones, at the hands of the police. As Coates says: “This entire episode took me from fear to a rage that burned in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my days.” With his soul on fire, all his senses are directed to the pain white supremacy produces, the wounds it creates. This murder should not be read as a function of the actions of a police officer or even the logic of policing blacks in the United States. His account of this strikes a darker chord. What he tells us about the meaning of the death of Prince Jones, what we ought to understand, reveals the operating logic of the “universe”: She [referring to his mother] knew that the galaxy itself could kill me, that all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy spilled upon the curb like bum wine. And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of ‘race,’ imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world’s physical laws. But if we are all just helpless agents of physical laws, the question might emerge again: What does one do? Coates recommends interrogation and struggle. His love for books and his journey to Howard University, “Mecca,” as he calls it, serve as sites where he can question the world around him. But interrogation and struggle to what end? His answer is contained in his incessant preoccupation with natural disasters. We might say, at one time we thought the Gods were angry with us or that they were moving furniture around, thus causing earthquakes. Now we know earthquakes are the result of tectonic shifts. Okay, what do we do with that knowledge? Coates seems to say: Construct an early warning system—don’t misspend your energy trying to stop the earthquake itself. There is a lesson in this: “Perhaps one person can make a change, but not the kind of change that would raise your body to equality with your countrymen…And still you are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory, but because it assures you an honorable and sane life.” One’s response can be honorable because it emerges from a clear-sightedness that leaves one standing upright in the face of the truth of the matter—namely, that your white counterparts will never join you in raising your body to equality. “It is truly horrible,” Coates writes in one of the most disturbing sentences of the book, “to understand yourself as the essential below of your country.” Coates’s sentences are often pitched as frank speech; it is what it is. This produces a kind of sanity, he suggests, releasing one from a preoccupation with the world being other than what it is. Herein lies the danger: Forget telling his son it will be okay. Coates cannot even muster a tentative response to his son; he cannot tell him that it may be okay. “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.” What a strange form of control. Black folks may control their place in the battle, but never with the possibility that they, and in turn the country to which they belong, may win. Releasing the book at this moment—given all that is going on with black lives under public assault and black youth in particular attempting to imagine the world anew—seems the oddest thing to do. For all of the channeling of James Baldwin, Coates seems to have forgotten that black folks “can’t afford despair.” As Baldwin went on to say: “I can’t tell my nephew, my niece; you can’t tell the children there is no hope.” The reason why you can’t say this is not because you are living in a dream or selling a fantasy, but because there can be no certain knowledge of the future. Humility, borne out of our lack of knowledge of the future, justifies hope. Much has been made of the comparison between Baldwin and Coates, owing largely to how the book is structured and because of Toni Morrison’s endorsement. But what this connection means seems to escape many commentators. In his 1955 non-fiction book titled Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin reflects on the wounds white supremacy left on his father: “I had discovered the weight of white people in the world. I saw that this had been for my ancestors and now would be for me an awful thing to live with and that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill me.” Similar to Coates, Baldwin was wounded and so was Baldwin’s father. Yet Baldwin knew all too well that the wounded attachment if held on to would destroy not the plunderers of black life, but the ones who were plundered. “Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.” Baldwin’s father, as he understood him, was destroyed by hatred. Coates is less like Baldwin in this respect and, perhaps, more like Baldwin’s father. “I am wounded,” says Coates. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” The chains reach out to imprison not only his son, but you and I as well. There is a profound sense of disappointment here. Disappointment because given the power of the book, Coates seems unable to linger in the conditions that have given life to the Ta-Neisha Coates that now occupies the public stage. Coates’s own engagement with the world—his very agency—has received social support. Throughout the book he often comments on the rich diversity of black beauty and on the power of love. His father, William Paul Coates, is the founder of Black Classic Press—a press with the explicit focus of revealing the richness of black life. His mother, Cheryl Waters, helped to financially support the family and provided young Coates with direction. And yet he seems to stand at a distance from the condition of possibility suggested by just those examples. One ought not to read these moments above as expressive of the very “Dream” he means to reject. Rather, the point is that black life is at once informed by, but not reducible to, the pain exacted on our bodies by this country. This eludes Coates. The wound is so intense he cannot direct his senses beyond the pain.