OUR BONES/OUR ASHES/OUR MINDS
In his nicely crafted review essay "The Anger of
Ta-Nahesi Coates" (New York Review
of Books, February 11, 2016 issue), Darryl Pinckney raises the penultimate
question of our day:
"Which is
better: to believe that blacks will
achieve full equality in American society or to realize that white racism is so
deep that meaningful integration can never happen, so make other plans?"
In the first choice of response, the word
"equality" really ought to be "power," so that the second choice
would appear with better advantage. Moreover, the word "power" might
provoke certain neoliberal, colorblinded readers to have epiphanies. We recognize, of course, that Pinckney is
writing for the NYRB audience, and
some liberties of vision are simply forbidden.
One must not trample on the tender sensibilities of an august
readership. For the 1% of the readership
that has achieved post-humanity, even the common sense phrase "white
racism" will be deemed micro-transgressive.
For that portion of the readership that is still capable of
being enlightened, however, Pinckney's offense is weaving a male-centered
discussion of anger. In order of
reference he names: Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Booker T. Washington,
Marcus Garvey, DuBois, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Leroi Jones, Malcolm X,
Paul Coates, George Jackson, Eric B & Rakim, Robert Hayden, Ta-Nehisi
Coates, Michael Brown, Prince Jones, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delaney, and
Harold Cruse. The deliberate absence in
what purports to be a liberal overview of the growth and development of
post-Reconstruction anger are the invisible threads named: Ida B. Wells, Sandra
Bland, Barbara Jordan, Anna Julia
Cooper, Fannie Lou Hamer, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Toni Cade Bambara, Michelle
Alexander, Alice Walker, Joyce Ladner, Ann Petry, Mary McLeod Bethune, Margaret
Walker, Angela Davis, Tarika Wilson, Sonia Sanchez, Wanda Coleman, and Elaine
Brown. Had Pinckney dared to weave a
dense fabric, we might have nominated him for an award for prescience.
In fairness to Pinckney, we recognize that his voice is
hedged by the rules of the game. He was
employed to write in a tradition of counter-anger that one associates with
William Stanley Braithwaite and Alain Locke and Nathan A. Scott, Jr. If one has a sliver of understanding about
the neoliberal and protofascist designs of contemporary publishing, one is
aware that Pinckney is embroiled in autarky
--"forcible separation from the rest of the world" in the footloose
interpretation used by Jeffry A. Frieden in Global
Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (2006). One must
turn to the Oxford English Dictionary to recover a better
definition of autarchy. The game demands that Pinckney situate
Ta-Nahesi Coates and Between the World
and Me inside the discursive WEB (Wright/Ellison/Baldwin mechanism of emotional assurance). The game has an old, rather ignoble history. Therein,
Pinckney has implied authority to play riffs on sagas of black fathers and
sons. He can use lightweight historical
and cultural analyses and comparisons to defang the modest revolutionary
potential of Coates's prose, to transform the promise of a flame into a
flicker. He will not cause the NYRB
readership to suffer a single moment of cognitive indigestion. He speaks in the pages of the NYRB as effectively for his kind of people as Donald Trump speaks
on the airwaves for his race and Hillary Clinton speaks for her gender. Pinckney is an experienced player in the five
rings of our national intellectual circus.
And the sales of Coates's book shall not be significantly diminished.
However much Pinckney's review essays is a heartfelt reading
of the roots of Coates's alleged anger, what one reads may be other than what
one gets. Although we lack grounds for
accusing Pinckney of insincerity or want
of moral integrity ----after all he is playing a literary game without spilling
blood, we should not ignore how Werner
Heisenberg's Uncertainty (or
Indeterminacy) Principle functions within the game. A few black and non-black readers among us
may experience acid reflux as they grasp the implacable rightness of Coates's
success where tamed anger is unexceptional and welcomed. In territories where belief that the social
destiny of black people is fixed in a dualist tradition has no funk-appeal, we
recognize the severe limits of literary persuasion and why Between the World and Me is a highly accomplished but incomplete
representation of authentic anger. Indeed, I dare to imagine that were our
nation more literate, Coates and his publisher could have entitled his book A Father's Law rather than Between the World and Me in order to
expose just how much the obscenity of
domestic genocide in the United States of America is complicit with
irreversible changes in world order.
I have reasons, which I care not to interrogate, for
repeating the following paragraphs from August 7, 2015:
Dread is the real
deal in the United States of America and elsewhere. The Dream is an evil
fiction that attempts to enslave people, and
too often it succeeds beyond the expectations of its authors.
Ta-nehisi Coates has produced a first-rate
secular jeremiad, an honest meditation on Dread. There is a thin but critical line between a
sermon and a jeremiad. Coates is neither
a priest nor a preacher.
You sit in the desert, secure in your
idiosyncrasy. You and the ghost of
Claude McKay sit in the sand and take bets on who shall be the first to see
Time's unerring terrorism, with much help from Nature, dispatch the millions of people who worship
in the temples and cathedrals and
mosques of white supremacy.
Thus, I announce as a response to Pinckney's penultimate
question of our day that I have chosen to make other plans.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
January 24, 2016
