The Counterpublic Papers

The semester is over. Among the things on the list for the break are preparing for my comparative racial politics course, which grants me the opportunity of taking some of the ideas I’ve used to think about the trump tendency in the United States and apply them more broadly, shaping up the final chapters of my HIV/AIDS book which is close to being done, figuring out what the next year looks like. I’d originally planned to be in Detroit for the holidays, but I’ll be here in Baltimore with my son.

I’m not going to spend too much time on this last part because otherwise I’m not going to get to what I want to write about. But given a few conversations with people I love I’ll say this. I haven’t felt this type of anxiety since COVID. It’s altered both the duration and the quality of my sleep—I rarely have nightmares and have had several not just this past month, but in a couple of instances even during two hour naps (including the one I took before I came back to this issue). And it’s altered how I feel about spaces I am in, the community I’ve cultivated over the past several years, and heightened my need to work. 

Here I don’t just mean what I’m paid to do. My writing and everything that extends from it provides for me and mine, but as important gives my life meaning. If someone asked me why I was put on earth, I’d say I was put here to bring my children into the world….and then do this.  

I’m not done parenting by any stretch. But what is left for me is this.              

For years I’ve felt as if the clock is ticking. 

What I felt then is nothing like what I feel now.

…. 

I’ve been meaning to talk about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ newest work The Message for a minute.    

If the election went the other way I’d suspect we’d still be talking about this work, but as I intimate above, the election made a lot of discussions moot.

For those who haven’t read it, the best way to approach it is as a sequel to Between the World and Me. Same design—I don’t know if the cover designer is the same but it certainly looks as if it could be.  Same writing style, one that samples heavily from Baldwin’s classic “A Letter to My Nephew”. Whereas with Between he’s writing to his son, here he’s writing to his Howard journalism class. But he means to do more with the work. In fact I’d go as far as to say that he attempts to address what was the biggest criticism he faced with Between the World and Me—that he was too pessimistic, and offered no answers. (Note that I think it’s the biggest criticism, not the best criticism.) The title of the first essay “Journalism is not a luxury” gives it away if the title of the work does not. For Coates journalism isn’t just his job. It isn’t just his life. It represents the path forward:

Below I refer to this as “black mapping.” Coates uses the essays that follow, devoted to trips to Africa (his first), to South Carolina (after his book was banned), and finally to Israel and the West Bank, to limn this project.   In “On Pharaohs,” Coates uses the occasion of his first trip to Senegal to ruminate both on the meaning Africa has for many of us, and also on the complications that meaning engenders, complications that make the task of rendering the world as it is as well as the task of imagining what we want the world to be, more fraught. One of the tasks black writers had during and long after slavery was to map black life in a way that countered the myth of white supremacy. Africa and more specifically Ancient Egypt became potent geographic coordinates. For Coates, raised by black nationalist parents (his father Paul just received the National Black Book Award for Lifetime Achievement) and named after ancient Egypt itself this task is personal and fraught. Below, Coates finds himself struggling against the black civilizationism that sometimes came as a result of black mapping: 

 In the next passage Coates pushes his Howard students to fight against the urge to develop a myth of civilization that can do nothing more than replicate the thing we’re fighting against. But this isn’t the only myth Coates fights against.  When he lands in Dakar and is driven into the city, he sees what he thinks are a few public works projects gone awry and finds himself wondering whether the transnational arguments about black dysfunction are right. When he takes in Dakar in all its beauty and finds himself tripping on how beautiful it is, he wonders whether his tripping itself betrays a certain type of black insecurity. Later he expresses wonder at the use of skin lightening cream and how in Senegal appearing “mixed” is a sign of beauty in part because it is associated with being black American. But when he communes with Senegalese writers, including one writing a dissertation on Between the World and Me he finds himself home, the words he wrote in Between creating a space for him in advance. 

Which brings me to the third essay “Bearing the Flaming Cross.” The black mapping project doesn’t simply work to transnationally (re)connect black people, it works to connect Americans as well. In “Bearing” Coates befriends Mary Wood a white South Carolina teacher who as a result of teaching Between the World and Me comes against South Carolina legislators (who used a Trump administration Executive Order ALEC-style to ban anti-racism in schools). Coates attended the board meeting in which Wood’s attempt was discussed, fully expecting it to be filled with parents radicalized by white supremacy and surprised when he finds the exact opposite. He uses this essay to argue that black mapping that has the potential to rewrite interests, identities, and institutions in ways that generate new forms of solidarity. 

This brings me to the final essay. The one that garnered the most attention. And arguably the one that bears Baldwin’s stamp the most. 

Baldwin was an internationalist, consistently bringing the strength of his pen to bear on issues outside US borders, issues that the US government was in many instances responsible for. Further, he was fearless, tackling subjects few black writers dared to tackle. It has been decades since a black writer with standing has examined Israeli politics vis a vis Gaza and the West Bank. Part of this may be because for the better part of three decades black politics in the US has been parochial, this even black US life has been and still is a template of sorts for international movements. But I’d say it’s only a part.

Compare for instance one of Baldwin’s experiences in Paris, to Eddie Glaude’s attempt to mimic him.

First Baldwin. 

Now Eddie Glaude:

(Glaude Begin Again p. 8)

Baldwin spent time in Europe more or less continuously from 1955 until his passing in 1987, doing so in part to flee, in part to get a better vantage point. But whereas Glaude does so from a vantage point generated by Princeton largesse (“my hope was to begin the writing in St. Thomas in a nice flat overlooking the Caribbean Sea”), Baldwin does so from a very different position. 

Here’s Baldwin on Israel and Palestine less than ten years before his death.

(Glaude writes of the 1979 Baldwin but not of this essay. Indeed to Glaude and others though not Coates it is as if Baldwin’s eyes were always turned to Harlem, no matter where in the world he was.)  

Coates himself doesn’t reference Baldwin’s 1979 essay but you can read and even feel echoes. If he uses the first three essays of The Message to argue that writing is a political act of meaning making through truth telling, and that black writers have used writing to make meaning for themselves and others, and address the biggest criticism of Between the World and Me in doing so, he uses the last essay to deal with the greatest flaw he saw with his work. The flaw of using the state of Israel to make his reparations case.

…I was proud of ‘The Case for Reparations’ because it did rely on instinct but was a synthesis of facts. It was crafted in the mold of the (mostly white) magazine writers I’d admired. They were courageous reporters and masters at taking in many streams of that reporting and turning it into a coherent and gripping narrative. Quite a few of them wrote about the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict,’ and from their writing I derived a sense that comprehension of ‘conflict’ was a matter of knowledge, not morality. And that knowledge was as foreign to me as computational mathematics. To that was added my steady diet of beat reports, Sunday talk shows, and loose conversation, all of which validated the apparent complexity over the ‘conflict.’ But even amid that complexity there as a certain incontestable narrative punctuated by platitudes that assumed an air of indisputable truth: Israel was a ‘Jewish democracy,’ indeed ‘the only democracy in the Middle Wast,’ one with both ‘the right to exist’ and ‘the right to defend itself.’ (Coates p. 134) 

This was a mistake, one Coates realized not long after the essay was published, but one that became crystal clear when he visited the West Bank and then Jerusalem. What he saw there was not “Jim Crow” and not Apartheid—neither term works in describing Israeli occupation. However, what he saw was close enough to cause him to revisit his previous writings, and the broader sensibility that caused him to use Israel as a case black Americans should favorably turn to. Through rhetoric, legislation, military might, and technique, one population is rendered capable of exercising governing capacity, and another population is not.       

I reference Coates’ students—his  Black readers in particular—and with this essay Coates is arguably not only writing to his Howard students but to black nationalists young and old—may see themselves in two ways. For most, Coates’ experiences will remind them of what they imagine Apartheid to be. But for Coates the experiences work to remind him both of the dangers of taking the dream as one’s own—in Between the World and Me he writes of the dream as being made of broken and bruised black bodies—and again of the possibilities black map making can play.

I’ve critiques. His “On Pharaohs” doesn’t reflect quite the same appreciation for black heterogeneity I see expressed in Between the World and Me. And perhaps because he missed the height of what I’d call “generation X black nationalism” by about a decade, he misses the cultural-ethical turn many of us made in studying Ancient Egypt. While he’s beginning to see the connections between ideas, interests, and institutions, he isn’t quite there yet—the lack of Palestinian journalists is very much the result of a political project I’m unsure the presence of Palestinian journalists would by itself render the region more democratic. 

But those critiques are minor. For someone like me, with a ticking clock and a mission, reading The Message is a tonic.        

That’s all for now.

If you haven’t done so already, take a bit of time to tell the ones you love that you love them. We’re going to have enough to do come the new year.