Wise words from Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ed Kilgore
by digby
If you are a white person who has on occasion felt aggrieved at the persistence of allegations of white racism in America, do yourself and your conscience a favor and read Ta-Nehisi’s Coates’ guest column today in the New York Times.
Yes, read it. It’s amazing. He talks about a humiliating incident that happened to the actor Forrest Whittaker when he was frisked in a Manhattan Deli under suspicion of shoplifting. He relates the fact that the man who did it, the owner of the place, has since apologized, proclaiming that he isn’t a racist and is a “good person.” Coates writes:
The idea that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the heart of a democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their tongue sprinting ahead of their discretion. We can forgive Whitaker’s assailant. Much harder to forgive is all that makes Whitaker stand out in the first place. New York is a city, like most in America, that bears the scars of redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal. The ghost of those policies haunts us in a wealth gap between blacks and whites that has actually gotten worse over the past 20 years.
But much worse, it haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence that is given tell only when the victim happens to be an Oscar winner. The promise of America is that those who play by the rules, who observe the norms of the “middle class,” will be treated as such. But this injunction is only half-enforced when it comes to black people, in large part because we were never meant to be part of the American story. Forest Whitaker fits that bill, and he was addressed as such.
I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people.
The other day I walked past this particular deli. I believe its owners to be good people. I felt ashamed at withholding business for something far beyond the merchant’s reach. I mentioned this to my wife. My wife is not like me. When she was 6, a little white boy called her cousin a ni**er, and it has been war ever since. “What if they did that to your son?” she asked.
And right then I knew that I was tired of good people, that I had had all the good people I could take.
Can you blame him?
Kilgore writes about his own family in the south and mentions Martin Luther King’s admonitions to the preachers and the “white moderates” in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”. I get this. Many of us grew up in families much like Kilgore’s and we know what it is to love someone and yet hate this part of them — or try to rationalize it as something other than what it clearly is. But then good and evil resides inside every human being. He says:
Now that racism is no longer respectable, it’s tempting to reason conversely and suggest respectable people can’t be racists. But to do that is to reason racism virtually out of existence. Most of the world’s religious and moral traditions try to remind us that while good works are always to be valued, there is something in the human soul that makes good people prone to doing bad things. That did not stop being the case when racism was deemed “bad” by national consensus in this country, and those of us who will never suffer a single indignity for the color of our skin should remember that before turning all human experience on its head and claiming we are the victims of racism if our own good will is challenged.
People sometimes say that it’s foolish for liberals to point out racism, that it accomplishes nothing and only creates hostility. I always ask them when they say this, “what do tell our African American friends and family?” It’s not just up to Ta-Nehesi Coates and his family to confront these good white people. It’s our job as fellow human beings, to stand with them.
.