Given the hollowness of the creedal imagination, the growing radicalism of a new generation of activists feels inevitable. In everything from calls for reparations to attacks on the Confederate flag to arguments about mass incarceration, these activists are reconnecting to the black radical tradition—opening doors that have been closed for decades. This is a profound development, particularly for activists’ reengagement with a politics of national disavowal and revival of arguments against the carceral state. In many ways, the figure who has come to embody both positions in the current discourse is Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose political disillusionment is best exemplified in his stark statements to his son (“We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America”).
But one problem with Coates’s version of black radicalism is that at times—more in his book Between the World and Me than in his political interventions in the Atlantic—he depicts disillusionment in individual terms. That book in particular conveys little of the communities of solidarity African Americans belong to, or of how things like reparations ground a shared social vision of the future. Instead, Coates combines radical rejection of polite society with a personal notion of resistance, in which “struggle” is presented as the individual’s ethical refusal to comply with the totalizing injustice of racism and its structures. What is missing is a collective sense of action, let alone of the possibility of transformation through such action. We are left in the world of either overwhelming and oppressive institutions or isolated individuals of conscience.
The force of Between the World and Me can be too easily contained. Precisely because Coates imagines isolated individuals in the face of totalizing oppression, one can walk away from the book feeling that real change—rather than just window dressing—is out of reach. And for this reason, the book’s sensibility can have the odd effect of buttressing the very institutions it condemns. This form of creedal rejection can be neutered publicly through praise: treated by those like David Brooks as “hard truths,” but truths that by their very profundity may be too difficult to overcome. The consequence is a mainstream (especially liberal) culture that laps up the attack and even accepts the structural dimension of race at the same time that it abandons fundamental racial reform as ultimately hopeless.