(1) Whether racism is really a problem in America

(2) Whether racism is just a subset of classism

(3) How you're not racist

--and particularly not:

(4) Random ventings about Obama -- from right or left -- that aren't germane to the political and cultural difficulties that Coates is talking about here.

Coates is making some very nuanced, long-wave points about race in America, and about the lived experience--and concomitant fears, anxieties, etc.--of white and black Americans over many generations of difficulty.

If you aren't prepared to engage with at least some of that, please don't get in the way of people who are.

Patrick's right: read the whole thing.

I wish I'd known, back in 2008, that Jeremiah Wright had done something almost no Republican official or spokesman or commentator has done, namely actually served his country in uniform. I would have loved to have thrown that in their faces, when they tried to humiliate Barack Obama for having once been in the room when Wright said something that was not even 1% more incendiary than what John Brown said from the gallows.

When we're confronted with monstrous injustice, if we want to talk about it and not have the conversation derailed, we have to restrict our emotional tone to the range from Vulcan logic to, at most, very gentle satire. This prohibition on anger has become, for me, one more thing to be angry about!

(Expletive deleted), I don't know how any black man in America is ever NOT angry. SAMSHA studies have shown that black men make up about 5% of our drug users, but about 75% of the people imprisoned for drugs. If you poke into that, it's not hard to find out why: Terry v Ohio allows cops to search anybody that they feel afraid of to see if they're armed, and later court decisions say that they can use any evidence found "incidental to" that search to bring charges. And cops know that if they say that they were afraid of any rich person, or any woman, or any white person over about the age of 25 who appears sober, the jury won't believe them -- but no jury every doubted that a police officer was afraid of a black man, so every black man who ever interacts with police in any way gets searched for drugs. And every black man in America knows this.

Separately studying the history of financial panics in this country, I spotted an appalling bit of history: in every investment bubble we've had in this country since 1870, the last phase of the bubble comes when rich investors, desperate for the last remaining suckers to dump their investment on before the price tanks, set up charities to persuade black heads of household to invest in their overpriced investment. Which is why every black family in America knows from experience that every 20 years, at most, and sometimes in as little as 5 years, rich people conspire to steal the entire family savings of every black family in America. Every older black person I've brought this up with seemed surprised that I didn't know this already, seemed surprised that everybody doesn't know this.

Is THIS why we're so afraid of anger? Are we afraid that if we let black men be angry, let them experience or express the anger that (I guarantee you) we white men would feel under the same circumstances, that they'd realize that they should entirely justifiably murder us all?

Thanks for signal-boosting this--I hadn't seen it anywhere else yet, and I would really hate for this one to have slid under my radar.

Gotta go link this everywhere.

He's an amazing writer, blogger, and thinker. It's been my profound privilege to watch him get deeper into the Civil War stuff, tie it into current events, and talk about race issues with his typical nuance and depth. Also, his blog community is absolutely the best. He basically moderates harder than anyone I've ever seen. Assholes are banned quickly. It's a privilege to be there, not a right.

If we all work at it, we might convince him to come to Readercon next year. He is a fan, you know. I have this dream of watching him and Junot Diaz talk about whatever they want.

"Separately studying the history of financial panics in this country, I spotted an appalling bit of history: in every investment bubble we've had in this country since 1870, the last phase of the bubble comes when rich investors, desperate for the last remaining suckers to dump their investment on before the price tanks, set up charities to persuade black heads of household to invest in their overpriced investment. Which is why every black family in America knows from experience that every 20 years, at most, and sometimes in as little as 5 years, rich people conspire to steal the entire family savings of every black family in America. Every older black person I've brought this up with seemed surprised that I didn't know this already, seemed surprised that everybody doesn't know this."

This alone explains the housing bust, from cash-flow swindles to the forgotten Presidential decrees that "everyone should own a home", to the constant mail spam from subprime branches of investment banks, to hiring the sketchiest people -- people needing a second chance, but who received the barest training or guidance -- to become mortgage brokers for their communities, just like low-level drug dealers cannibalizing their families, first.

Substitute "churches" for "charities", and you've added those who preach the Prosperity Gospel (i.e. pay off our church mortgage and God will help you with yours) to the whole mess. That's why blaming those with the worst credit once the bubble burst was so repellent -- *they* didn't see the profit, did they? Can they get work with a ruined credit history? Stay out of debtors' jail?

Then add the history of life insurance in minority communities, from death benefit policies worse than savings accounts to secret corporate-owned life insurance policies, and you have the dispassionate continuation of practices familiar during Jim Crow, but have much more nicely-designed spreadsheets, attached....

Is there a source or something you can point me to on the last-stage-of-financial-panics thing? I have no trouble believing it, but I rather suspect that people I'd want to mention it to would want something more than "some random dude in the comment thread on a blog post"...

Dav2.718

"Our estimates indicate that [the subprime housing crisis] will cause the greatest loss of wealth for African-Americans in modern U.S. history."

This is another good article on the disproportionate impact of the housing crisis on black families, showing that white households in 2009 had 19 times more wealth than black households -- that's almost twice the ratio from 1988.

Unfortunately for all of us much of what he says is news and/or unacceptable to most whites in the US, while I suspect very little of it is news to most African Americans. And it will probably be impossible to make any headway on the racial problems in this country until there is a some consensus that what Coates writes about might be true, and needs to be talked about in public and without immediately reducing the conversation to name-calling and cries of "STFU!".

My computer is about to reboot; more comments later.

How hip-hop fell out of love with Obama.

There is, in fact, one of Donald Westlake's Dortmunder novels in which that fact sets off the plot.

That said, I am astonished by some of the things being mentioned in this thread. I did not know any of that stuff about who gets left holding the bag at the end of the game of financial musical chairs, mentioned by Brad Hicks (awesome comment #4) and amplified by cgeye (awesome comment #7) and, with links, by Emily H. (awesome comment #9).

Don't stop.

Nothing to say but "wow."

They act like they don’t love their country
No
what it is
is they found out
their country don’t love them.

When I say that I hate the place and even more the religion that I grew up in... that's what I mean.

And I feel that same paradoxical defensiveness which Shirley Sherrod evinces when other people, people who don't understand, attack them.

A lot to unpack here.

(On a happier note, if you haven't seen this picture taken in the Oval Office, you really should. It will make your day. They're such geeks, which I say with all the love in the world.)

Everybody comes to New York. There are several ways to spot first-generation black African immigrants, but the one I find most striking is that in a relatively relaxed and safe situation, they can be at ease. Until I'd seen black Africans and native-born black Americans riding the same subway cars and sitting out on the same sidewalks of an evening, I hadn't realized that the latter never quite relax in public.

Or it may be that they never relax in public if I'm there. I was grieved and delighted one Halloween to discover how much louder and happier the black children in my neighborhood were when I was wearing a costume that covered every inch of my skin.

(He sounds like many of the people in my family, who were from the same part of Kansas as his grandparents. It sounds ordinary to me.)

And Coates is brilliant. Always. But even more so, this time.

Can we have an Essayist Laureate of the United States?

I was particularly struck by the unresolvable tension around keeping cool. If Obama shows the slightest bit of anger or even just vehemence about anything at all associated with race, then the backlash is so huge that it can actually make things worse -- because people with deep-seated racist issues still have so much power in this country. (And to many of those people, everything he does is associated with race, so they react badly to him showing the slightest bit of forcefulness anywhere.) Yet things don't get any better by totally avoiding anything related to race, either.

All the political finesse and verbal judo in the world can't escape that double bind. The only way out I see is for racist people to stop having so much political power, so that a black president no longer has to seriously consider their reactions.

And that's something I have no idea how to accomplish. Lots more time, lots more work, lots more bending the arc towards justice. But it seems to bend so slow.

Sleep now.

Sleep now.

ETA: Server error

By the reaction on the comments here, I think you are missing some of the nuance. You cannot read this essay and say: wow, look at those stupid racists; no wonder we can't have nice things. The author is indicting you, himself, white America, African-America, everything. If you other the problem, then a lot of the message has not sunk in. If you cast it in a simple oppositional dynamic, even if you lump yourself in with the "bad," I also think you have missed something.

My biggest concern with the essay, not a problem with the essay taken as a thing in itself, but in its reception in the larger discourse on racism: it keeps the discussion of race centered on the black/white dynamic with no pointer as to how to adapt to the much more mulilateral world that is being created these days (to the extent there was not something beyond black/white in the old days already.) As an example, Zimmerman figured so prominently, he could have addressed how weirdly Zimmerman's racial identity was framed throughout the development of that story.

I also think that to be complete he would have to address Powell. Doesn't Powell deserve some of the credit for creating a space for a black man to potentially look Presidential? Alternatively, wasn't Powell's acceptance another indication of how America had changed and not just on the left? (And I say this as someone who wants to give no credit to the Sothern Strategizing B***ards.) On the third look, what led certain African American leaders like Powell and Rice to choose the strategies they did? (Rice grew up in a house where she met "radical" black power leaders all the time. There's a pretty complex story there; not that I think I know how to tell it myself, just that I can sense it is there.)

It's a complicated subject and I don't want to just thow out half-thought-through comments in a blurb; so I am not going to react to specific points. I will give Ta-Nehisi big ups for showing the daunting task of evaluating Obama or even finding the proper perspectives from which to look.

I heard it pitched as "and therefore may not be accepted by American blacks", but I'm sure that it came across to other ears as "and therefore may be more acceptable to American whites", with a side order of "mutter mutter reparations mutter".

In either case, it's a relatively minor element in the entire picture. I note it only for completeness.

I have found that google seems to disproportionately value data from google+, so I filled out one of those profiles and seeded it with portfolio work, just to be sure it stayed high on google and has only the info I want on there. If I weren't trying to defend against possible confusion, I probably wouldn't bother with it at all.

You ask when things will get better between blacks and whites in America? In Coeur d'Alene, he interviewed the head of the Aryan Nations church, who invited him to join. Yes, even knowing that he's black. He explained to Benjamin that the Aryan Nations church now teaches that blacks are practically white, these days, it's the Mexicans that both Anglo-Americans and African-Americans should both be worried about.

Facepalm all you want, and yes, it shows how awful anti-Mexican prejudice is and how long it'll be before they're accepted as human by some Americans -- but when an African-American descendant of slaves is "white enough" to be invited in all sincerity to join the Aryan Nations, I think it's plausible to say that this particular problem will have finished solving itself pretty soon.

(Colin Powell comes to mind for some reason....)

I may have to revise this: the US needs *some* sort of racial divide, but the divide is redefined as necessary.

I recall a history class in college where we were learning about how industry changed with safety regulations. The early process for galvanizing steel was so highly toxic that the workers died after a few years. The only people who took the jobs were immigrants. At that point in time, they were likely to be Polish. A manager who was interviewed at the time said something along the lines of "Well, yes it's nasty, but it's not like they are white men."

And see this, which mentions a Mexican-American as a defendant in a KKK-cross burning case.

The motivation seems to similar to what you describe, though for lower status people. The white power groups described are essentially havens for alienated young men, and spend a lot of their time fighting other white power groups. They aren't terribly picky, though I get the impression the Mexican-American was an anomaly.

This is not to deny that these groups can be very dangerous to their nominal targets.

[Alas, your chosen e-mail address is one that ... well. You know. (Also, any mention of Reddit will be examined.) -- Carionn Qunestro, Duty Gnome]

Did you see the delicious little twist in this story (not in the sense that it matters in any grand scheme, but it just shows yet again how convoluted American racial history and categories are) that it seems that Obama *is* descended from slaves... on his mother's side. (Which really *oughtn't* to be surprising, since most American whites, unless they're fairly recent arrivals, have some African American ancestors.) There was an attempt (pointed out on Talking Points Memo recently) to argue that Obama's ancestor was the *first* American slave... but that particular argument required a lot of special pleading.

Again, no real importance here, just a nifty little fact.

[Citation needed]

On the not "the descendent of slaves" point, I have an observation. I was in an elementary school that was 99.9% white, with one outlier, George. His father was white, and his mother black. I recall being very puzzled when one of my classmates told me that George isn't a negro. His mother is from Brazil.

This is a description of anecdata, not a provision of statistics.

The reference I'm familiar with is Robert Stuckert in the 1950's; that (based on estimates, not DNA) estimated that about 20% of the white population of the US had some African ancestry.

“The thing is, a black man can’t be president in America, given the racial aversion and history that’s still out there,” Cornell Belcher, a pollster for Obama, told the journalist Gwen Ifill after the 2008 election. “However, an extraordinary, gifted, and talented young man who happens to be black can be president.”

It is often said that Obama’s presidency has given black parents the right to tell their kids with a straight face that they can do anything. This is a function not only of Obama’s election to the White House but of the way his presidency broadcasts an easy, almost mystic, blackness to the world. The Obama family represents our ideal imagining of ourselves—an ideal we so rarely see on any kind of national stage.

What black people are experiencing right now is a kind of privilege previously withheld—seeing our most sacred cultural practices and tropes validated in the world’s highest office. Throughout the whole of American history, this kind of cultural power was wielded solely by whites, and with such ubiquity that it was not even commented upon.

In response to which, I would note that it is not just whites, it is straight white Christian males (similar to John Scalzi's post), and present Jon Stewart talking about what we grow up knowing we can never be, with Kevin Pollak in March of 2000, notably five months before Gore appointed Lieberman to the candidacy for vice president:

Tom: I'm not sure what your point is. Stewart and Pollak are talking about the assumption common to Jewish men - that a Jew cannot aspire to be President. Which I share.

Because all the Presidents so far have been straight Christian males. Obama is no exception (unless you think he's a seekrit Muslin).

The 2008 primary showed that a woman cannot yet be president either. Think about it. If Florida and Michigan had counted, and the Party Leadership hadn't otherwise rigged the vote to emphasize Obama, Clinton quite likely would have been the nominee.

Similarly, the Supremes acted to prevent a Jew from getting within a heartbeat of the White House. That wasn't their primary goal, but it certainly was an effect of Bush v Gore.

You say "there's a difference". Of course there is, the Black experience has been very different from the Jewish experience, although plenty of Jews in my grandparents' and parents' generations suffered from antisemitism in this country. It wasn't the kind of systemic exclusion and cultural assumptions based in 250 years of involuntary servitude to the same population among which they still live. And often, but not always, Jews can pass, regardless of personal observance or consciously dressing Jewish. Still, Jews and other immigrants have been excluded, and have not all yet been fully included in white society.

BTW, re Brad Hicks @ 43: My wife's grandfather, a Jew, a Zionist, owner of a small reupholstery factory, an immigrant from Poland by way of Palestine, who hired a black guy over a white guy for his foreman (because the black guy was better, natch), in Birmingham AL in the 1940s, was asked to join the Klan. He declined, of course.

Perhaps I should emphasize to Mr Whitmore, that when I said "not just whites, but straight white Christian males", I was talking about who *is* the privileged class, where "straight Jewish males" are not the privileged class the same way, although some can pass.

[You were flattering in a way that is, sadly, common to spammers.—Idumea Cheves Novakovsky]

* I consider James Buchanan to have been an anomaly. Certainly he'd never have been elected within my lifetime.

I also wonder how long it will be before we elect our next Deist or Unitarian president?

It's arguable that, religion-wise, we've gone from emphasizing a particular brand name, or, at least, emphasizing what the candidate is not, to emphasizing the need to be seen as *strongly* religious, whatever that brand of religion may be. (You cited Kerry as an example. I think the fact that Romney isn't being dismissed completely out of hand is also evidence.) *That* fact might complicate life for a Jewish presidential candidate (as "strong belief" and "liberalism" generally aren't believed to coincide), but I don't see it as a fatal flaw.

I think of that whenever people say that such-and-such a type of person could never be elected President. (And I think of our current President, but he's a more recent counter-example.)

On Crooked Timber, John Holbo recently pointed out that right now, if you look at the top level of US politics --- the current President and Vice-President, the opposing-party candidates for Pres and Veep, the Speaker of the House, the Senate Majority leader, and the entire Supreme Court --- you won't see a single WASP. And hardly anyone even notices!

LMM, #69: It's much too early to talk about whether or not Obama is an anomaly! Kennedy is more of a gray area; is it only coincidence that no other Catholic has achieved the office in the last half-century, or does being Protestant still confer a large advantage? But Buchanan's term was over 150 years ago, and no one else who has even been suspected of possibly being gay has so much as made it thru the primaries since then. I think that puts him squarely into anomaly territory.

I do think your point about the current necessity for candidates to be strongly religious is a good one. Devoutness is important, although of course that doesn't apply to anyone who is devout in a non-Christian faith.

Nancy, #71: Well, there was John Adams, of course. :-) More seriously, here's a fairly comprehensive list that shows the heights (where known) of all presidential candidates, both winners and losers. Eisenhower wasn't all that tall, although I certainly wouldn't call him short -- just above the short end of average for an American male, more like.

How tall was Winston Churchill? Is it just his "bulldog" image that makes me think of him as being fairly short?

Devoutness is important, although of course that doesn't apply to anyone who is devout in a non-Christian faith.

I'm not at all certain that devout Jews are at a significant electoral disadvantage--both Lieberman and Cantor would be counterexamples. (In the traditionally-Christian circles I am part of, Cantor's Judaism is far less of a problem than Romney's Mormonism.)

"...The political consequences of race extend beyond the domestic. I am, like many liberals, horrified by Obama’s embrace of a secretive drone policy, and particularly the killing of American citizens without any restraints. A president aware of black America’s tenuous hold on citizenship, of how the government has at times secretly conspired against its advancement—a black president with a broad sense of the world—should know better. Except a black president with Obama’s past is the perfect target for right-wing attacks depicting him as weak on terrorism. The president’s inability to speak candidly on race cannot be bracketed off from his inability to speak candidly on every­thing. Race is not simply a portion of the Obama story. It is the lens through which many Americans view all his politics.
But whatever the politics, a total submission to them is a disservice to the country. No one knows this better than Obama himself, who once described patriotism as more than pageantry and the scarfing of hot dogs. “When our laws, our leaders, or our government are out of alignment with our ideals, then the dissent of ordinary Americans may prove to be one of the truest expressions of patriotism,” Obama said in Independence, Missouri, in June 2008. Love of country, like all other forms of love, requires that you tell those you care about not simply what they want to hear but what they need to hear. ..." (emphasis added)

Elsewhere, Coates writes: "His approach is not new. It is the approach of Booker T. Washington, who, amid a sea of white terrorists during the era of Jim Crow, endorsed segregation and proclaimed the South to be a land of black opportunity." That sounds about right to me -- extremely sad, but about right: someone who (despite slogans of "Change" and "Hope") routinely settled for a situation instead of fundamentally changing it. We needed a Douglass or a DuBois, we needed an FDR. We got a Booker T. Obama. Maybe that's what we deserved, maybe that's all Obama could deliver, maybe that's exactly what he wanted to offer. But we really needed more.

Winston Churchill is usually reported as 5 feet 6 inches tall, the same height as Napoleon.

There's a list in the Guardian newspaper.

Charles de Gaulle tops the list.

Wikipedia has an interesting list of
physically disabled politicians. I notice none of them are deaf. I don't know if that's because the Wikipedians don't consider deafness a significant disability, or because verbal ability is so vital to political success.