Black Identity
I first saw Ta-Nehisi Coats on a YouTube interview with professor Barbara Fields; discussing her brilliant book “Racecraft” he was humble. He understood the premise of Professor Fields book: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race.
Now, to how I feel about the article “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates in “The Atlantic.” About reparations for African Americans. I like it – it’s an excellent article, and it is a needed conversation. However, I disagree with Ta-Nehisi Coates. He is building a moral foundation. He is preserving a slave morality a positivism that demands description from individuals. And separation by that inhuman classification of a race by advancing a morality that puts a group of people at odds based on the color of their skin.
To say African Americans is different races that deserve help depending on their skin color or are to be treated differently because of assign genetics classification is wrong. The injustices in the United States of America are many, and so are the human beings who fought against injustices and for their rights; all kinds of people build this nation.
Nonetheless, this nation is ours. Made from a crucible of Mercantilism injustice’s, with groups of individuals who demanded their rights to be sovereign. They established The United States of America’s Declaration of Independence based on “natural law.” African descendants arrived not only naked but without political rights. Unlike European indentured slaves, Asian Americans, and captive Native Americans counterparts. Afro-American fought for the rights to be equal human beings; Afro-Americans who were property without political rights would eventually gain the rights to be equals.
All persons fought for equal rights. Everyone who lived under a Lord or a King. And now this morality, this “The Case for Reparations” being disseminate by one of Americas hip intellectuals. It is complicity with positivism. Whatever the Democratic majority the lawgivers says is the written law. A morality based on guilt. Justifying: affirmative action, political correctness, abuse, power, and control by segregating a group of people from another. Based on political rights granted by the color of their skin for the purpose of controlling both groups with the ignorance of race. But today we should know better. We know skin color does not make the race; categorizing groups of humans based on skin color is relegating black people to a subhuman category. After all under this dumb-ass system white is the accepted high standard.
I also like the post “Against The Case for Reparations” by Kevin D. Williamson, a correspondent for National Review, he wrote...” Mr. Coates is largely correct about the past and is to a degree correct about the present. About the future, he is catastrophically wrong. The political interests of African Americans, like those of other Americans, are best served by equality under the law. The economic interests of African Americans, like those of other Americans, are best served by a dynamic and growing economy, preferably one in which the labor force is liberated from the dysfunctional, antique Prussian model of education (This model of “free and compulsory” education was designed by the Prussian Emperor, to generate obedient workers and soldiers who would not question his authority.) that contributes so much to black poverty. The people to whom reparations were owed are long dead; our duty is to the living, and to generations yet to come, and their interests are best served by liberty and prosperity, not by moral theater.
Similarly I found interesting and relates to the slave morality, Is the thinking that many descendants from Africa have about what is a black person. I was looking at BET’s new show ” Being Mary Jane” created by Mara Brock Akil, an excellent show on some level, the beautiful and the talented Gabrielle Union…“Fortunately, as Mary Jane, Gabrielle Union makes the character engaging even when we’re not quite sure how to take her. Although her reactions aren’t always relatable, her problems, whether soapy or gritty, are. Viewers will root for her to win…” Quotes Tom Conroy from medialife.com another is the insight of its creator’s brilliant characterization of black women and disclaimer: “42 percent of black women have never been married. … This is one black woman’s story…not meant to represent all black women.” And on the other hand, crazy manipulating, irrational codependent stereotype. One premise of the show is a commentary on an article in Psychology Today magazine about “Are Black Women Ugly?” actual article by evolution psychologist Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa. Mary Jane is troubled about this objective standard of beauty, so much so that her friends are warning her not to pursue it, or she will be label “ angry black woman” by her white bosses.
This story resonated with me because Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa article with the more politically correct title: “Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?” Send people running to attack this crazy notion by a pseudo-race scientist – but why?
Science has proven that they are no races; there is no genetic difference between people of color they are many cultures – we’re all human beings. Like two football teams: Germany and Argentina they are very different culturally but the players are all the same genetically. Under that categorization people who are quick to challenge his comments and defend their black identity give credibility to his pseudo race science widening a schism relegating a group to the color of their skin. Professor…” David Brion Davis had the courage and honesty to argue the disturbing thesis that, during the era of the American Revolution, those who opposed slavery were complicit with those who favored it in settling on race as its explanation. We must be courageous and honest enough to admit something similar about our own time and our own actions…” Barbara Fields – Into this fracas comes hip intellectual Te-Nahese Coats with his brilliant essay providing a moral foundation for our apartheid from humanity.
For what purpose, could the belief in our blackness and subsequent relegation to subhuman is the catalyst for self-defense at all cost – to be better that white people. To lift a little self-esteem. That will continue to be low so long as the belief that we are victims of injustice because of the color of our skin. It’s an unachievable objective you’re chasing a standard that will never reach. Because it’s your low self-esteem that is creating the standard; and it will raise that bar higher each time: Frederick Douglass will not be enough, W.E.B. Du Bois will not be sufficient, MLK, Malcolm X, Mandela, Toni Morrison the list is endless, if you add the prefix black, you will always come up short.
Barbara Fields, Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America…“One of the most important of these absurd assumptions, accepted implicitly by most Americans, is that there is really only one race, the Negro race…Americans regard people of known African descent or visible African appearance as a race, but not people of known European descent or visible European appearance. That is why, in the United States, there are scholars and black scholars women and black women. Saul Bellow and John Updike are writers; Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison are black writers…”
Ta-Nehisi Coats ” The Case for Reparations” and Mar Brock Akil ” Being Mary Jane” are the example the ideology that keeps racism alive and entrench in the lives of our next generation. As Professor Barbara J. Fields stated in her essay: Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America...Those who create and re-create race today are nor just the mob that killed a young Afro-American man on a street in Brooklyn or the people who join the Klan and the White Order. They are also those academic writers whose invocation of self-propelling ‘attitudes’ and tragic flaws assigns Africans and their descendants to a special category, placing them in a world exclusively theirs and outside history–a form of intellectual apartheid no less ugly or oppressive, despite its righteous (not to say self-righteous) trappings, than that practiced by the bio- and neo-racists; and for which the victims, like slaves old are expected to be grateful. They re the academic ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives’ in whose version of race the neutral shibboleths difference and diversity replace words like slavery, injustice, oppression and exploitation, diverting attention from the anything-but-neutral history these words denote. They are also the Supreme Court and spokesmen for affirmative action, unable to promote or even define justice except by enhancing the authority and prestige of race; which they will continue to do forever so long as the most radical goal of the political opposition remains the reallocation of unemployment, poverty and injustice rather than their abolition.
The creators and re-creators of race include as well a young woman who chuckled appreciatively when her four-year-old boy, upon being asked whether a young friend whose exploit he was recounting was black, answered: ‘No; he’s brown.’ The young woman’s benevolent laughter was for the innocence of youth, too soon corrupted. But in all its benevolence, her laughter hastened the corruption whose inevitability she laments, for it taught the little boy that his empirical description was cute but inappropriate. It enacted for him, in a way that hand-me-down stereotypes never could, the truth that physical description follows race, not the other way around. Of just such small innocuous and constantly repeated rituals, often undertaken with the best of motives, is race reborn every day. Evil may result as well from good as from ill intentions. That is the fallibility and tragedy of human history or, to use a different vocabulary, its dialectic.
Nothing handed down from the past could keep race alive if we did not constantly reinvent and re-ritualize it to fit our own terrain. If race lives on today, it can do so only because we continue to create and re-create it in our social life, continue to verify it, and thus continue to need a social vocabulary that will allow us to make sense, not of what our ancestors did then, but of what we ourselves choose to do now. Barbara Jeanne Fields.
You can add hip intellectuals like Ta-Nehisi Coats ” The Case for Reparations” and Mar Brock Akil ” Being Mary Jane” to the list of those who recreate racism albeit from good intentions.
Manuel Palacio
