I thought this was also an interesting comment (emphasis mine):
Ezra Klein: Why do you think there is this conversation about race in America right now? . . .
Ta-Nehisi Coates:I think crime is down. That's huge. But it's scary because we don't know why crime went up or why it dropped. We have some theories about crack cocaine and about policing. But when crime went up in America, it went up in Canada and Great Britain and the Nordic countries and Australia. And when it went down in America, it went down in these countries too.
What the hell happened? Even the lead explanation can't explain all that. It's as if some natural disaster hit us. And what scares me about that is if crime goes up today, this entire conversation will be a casualty of it.
I don't think that's true. I think the conversation about race has gotten broad enough that it won't just go away, but his concern seems reasonable and that's a very blunt way to put it.
I'm just delighted that he inserted the lead hypothesis.
Unfortunately, I think TNC is exactly right in 2. We're already seeing a clampdown in Congress over incarceration issues related to the poor woman who was murdered in California by an undocumented immigrant. And that was ONE (high-profile, stranger-murder) case.
I seriously just spent 30 seconds wondering which hypothesis was "in the lead" before I realized h-g in 3 was referring to the metal.
That seems like a partial answer to the question of why he has focuses so specifically on the African-American experience, rather than talking about class inequality more broadly
Thanks to the OP for linking to that. I've been musing over the focus on class rather than race/identity in, e.g. the Sanders campaign -- but also in progressive politics in general -- and the extent to which it's just not moving African Americans much. This is perhaps the best explanation I've seen so far for why that is.
General observations: the kinds of political/policy solutions that might address African American ghettoization (and that's what it is) mostly happen at the local level. Not entirely, but mostly. A lot of people don't understand this.
The Democratic party has been losing, big time, on the state level. An absurd number of state gubernatorial and legislative offices are held by Republicans now. Activism in this realm needs to happen locally, though of course the bully pulpit held by those at the federal level can help.
* I would like to hear more about what the feds can do. The DOJ can step into investigations regarding voting rights, police and judicial excesses, and so on, but I'm not sure what they can do about housing issues. SCOTUS recently weighed in on that ... but they operate at a snail's pace.
I am frustrated. I should look again the Black Lives Matter list of demands.
Well, TNC is pretty damn explicit in the quoted piece about why the emphasis on race over class. His Moreland education, his hard work, his professional status, along with his black peers, has not granted him the relative status and privilege he thinks he deserves...because racism.
And this is true of the neoliberal left that attacks we classists, they are very explicit about wanting maintain the current culture of wealth, achievement, and privilege, they just want a more comfortable position, an acceptance and recognition without the insults and hassles of sexism, racism, and homophobia etc which as TNC explains, they still get at upper income/status levels.
I suspect they may succeed, or at least to top 10-20%, and this may even trickle down. The bottom 50% will still be living in a world of pain and oppression, but it may end up being a more pure class dominance.
"specifically on the African-American experience, rather than talking about class inequality more broadly"
Actually, in the quoted passage, he talks about income rather than class:
"One of the misguided things that happens in this country is people take poor African Americans and compare them to Latino households or Asian households just by looking at the income."
Income is related to class, but there are important differences between the two. If you compare two families of equal income, their respective class statuses may be very different, and class definitely affects the odds of having experiencing compound deprivation. In the list of items below, exposure to drug use might be the only one unrelated to class, at least if we're talking about the odds of having witnessed any type of drug use, not specific drugs or patterns of use:
"He doesn't just look at salary. He looks at wealth, at educational facilities, at exposure to drug use, at the chance of moving out of that neighborhood, at all of that."
Regarding "there really is no community like the African-American community," I'm trying to think of what this means when controlling for class, not just income. And I'm coming up with things like chances of experiencing police brutality (Henry Louis Gates) and of seeing someone on TV who shares your top two or three most socially defining community memberships.
"class, not just income" -
If class is already something other than $ resources, surely this is an argument that Black Americans are a class, one that carries mostly downside and risk (as being a grandchild of power carries connections and second chances).
"Black Americans are a class"
Would that mean all Black Americans share the same class? If we're talking about social class, that doesn't sound right. Or do you mean that there is a US social class that consists of only Black Americans (but not all Black Americans belong to this class)?
Our society simultaneously practices racism and classism, and the hypothetical elimination of one would not necessarily result in the elimination of the other. I suspect the relationship between the two is approximately multiplicative, where upperclass, white Americans' chances of negative experiences (wrt social exclusion, criminal justice, abuse, food insecurity, health) are multiplied by factors for race and class, with being non-white pushing the race factor above 1 and being non-upperclass doing the same for the class factor.
14.2 doesn't seem like a problem to me because I don't think of class as something you have to be in exactly one of to begin with. Seems to me there's precedent in legal language - some people are members of more than one protected class, yesno?
(Not that legal or sociological language is where I started - I was thinking of partitions and predictive value and ...classifiers.)
Coates:
"I was living in a community that basically had resources extracted out of it. We don't really have an analogue for black communities in this country. There's nothing like it."
It is amazing the degree to which Native Americans simply do not exist in American political discourse, left or right.
That's a great fucking point. I remember around the time of the Sandra Bland case, a pregnant Lakota woman died in her cell after her complaints of pain were ignored. You'd think this would have fit the narrative at the time, but it got no attention at all.
I also remember seeing a chart showing the rates at which people suffered violence from the police, broken down by racial categories and Native Americans were similar to African Americans.
16: Aside from the obvious, wrongful reasons Native American issues get ignored, I think a lot of what's going on is that at this point they're a numerically small minority that's highly geographically concentrated. Living in NYC, I think I met a person with significant Native American ancestry for the first time as an adult, and I wouldn't be surprised if Coates were in the same position in Baltimore.
Has someone made this point in a way that TNC would have seen? It seems like an important valid point, but for exactly the reason that LB says together with TNC's curiosity about the world, I think he'd actually learn from it.
18: Higher, actually, and the highest of any racial group. There's a Native Lives Matter movement paralleling Black Lives Matter that has been trying to raise awareness of this lately.
19: Numerically small, definitely, but I don't think "highly geographically concentrated" is quite right. Native populations are pretty widely dispersed, but mainly in areas that have low overall population densities and are geographically distant from high-density areas.
Looks like one person tweeted this at him (quoting that exact sentence and mentioning native Americans), but it's an account with very few followers and it didn't state the point as clearly as one would hope. So not clear if TNC would have read it and gotten the point.
If you were Coates, would you read people tweeting at you? I might have to use my Native American cred to egg his house.
I assume we* ignore Native Americans because of the collective shame over having taken so much from them. The Victorians-in-Port Townsend made me think of that - they daydream in a period in which appropriation of land and other resources was quick and massive, but you can't really read the local news in the Olympics now and not know that people were displaced violently and with prejudice, becausectheir descendants are still there.
*for values thereof.
http://missoulanews.bigskypress.com/missoula/endless-opposition/Content?oid=2457623
You'd think they'd have asked Wi//man how well her Salish language lessons are going. She's pro-assimilation, right?
In his first book, Coates describes getting into a fight with a Native American kid.
Well that explains why he discounts the Native American experience. Because fuck that kid.
Never mind, it was his dad who got into the fight, while in training for the Army.
And that kid's name was "Cher". And now you know the rest of the story.
Growing up on in the northeast, the narrative about Native Americans is hard to distinguish from "Unfortunately, we wiped them all out. If only these societies were still around, what we could learn from them." This despite the nearby existence of many Indian casinos, which we associate with tribes that consist of about 100 people each of which is about 1/8 Native American. (possibly generalizing too much from the Mashantucket Pequots)
Numerically small, definitely, but I don't think "highly geographically concentrated" is quite right. Native populations are pretty widely dispersed, but mainly in areas that have low overall population densities and are geographically distant from high-density areas.
Maybe geographically concentrated in the sense that there are some areas that have quite a high percentage NA population and lots of areas that have virtually zero, rather than "NA per square mile".
Surely geographically concentrated means "segregated schools" not "high density".
Surely geographically concentrated means "segregated schools" not "high density".
24: If I were Coates, he'll no I wouldn't be reading all those tweets. But judging by his retweets he seems to read a lot more people tweeting at him than I'd have thought.