Ta-Nehisi Coates v Cornel West: Black Academics and Activists Give Their
Verdict
By Melvin Rogers, Patrisee Cullors, Carol Anderson and Shailja Patel,
Guardian UK
23 December 17
One of the foremost black intellectuals in the US has deleted his Twitter
account after a public row. Commentators Melvin Rogers, Patrisse Cullors,
Carol Anderson and Shailja Patel discuss the impact on the debate and
struggle for racial equality
In a blistering Guardian article last Sunday, Harvard scholar Cornel West
labelled award-winning African American author Ta-Nehisi Coates the
neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle. A furious debate raged all
week among black academics and activists.
"The disagreement between Coates and me is clear," said West. "Any analysis
or vision of our world that omits the centrality of Wall Street power, US
military policies, and the complex dynamics of class, gender, and sexuality
in black America is too narrow and dangerously misleading. So it is with
Ta-Nehisi Coates' worldview."
Coates hit back on Twitter, listing the articles he has written criticising
US foreign policy, before quitting the social media site and deleting his
account of 1.25 million followers.
So did this row between two of the best-known African American thinkers set
back, or advance the struggle for black equality? We asked black academics
and activists for their verdict.
The disagreement between Cornel West and Ta-Nehisi Coates takes place
against the backdrop of a long and rich tradition of struggle and internal
conflict among African American intellectuals and activists regarding the
quality and form that resistance to white supremacy should take. And there
is much value in this. As WEB Du Bois noted in 1903: "The hushing of the
criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing. Honest and earnest
criticism. this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern
democracy."
Rather than treating the West-Coates disagreement as a feud, we would do
better to ask what might we learn from it and how might it provide
direction. First, the criticisms we direct to those who are rightly viewed
as our allies must be properly pitched. Those of us who are committed to
racial justice achieve nothing by alienating those who otherwise are
standing with us. In the face of our criticisms, we mean for them to lean in
and learn from, rather than pull back and opt out of, intellectual debate.
Second, once we inhabit the space of the social critic - and, in truth,
there is a little bit of a social critic in all of us - we cannot simply
abandon debate when it has become intense. Nor should we allow others,
seeking to foment division for their own ends, co-opt the conversation.
.Melvin Rogers is associate professor of political science at Brown
University
Patrisse Cullors: The spotlight is on two men whose debates are not
definitive of our communities
"Revolutionary Unity
gained only thru struggle
long sought for
must be fought for
`Revolutionary Unity"
So wrote Amiri Baraka in 1979. The exchange between Cornel West and
Ta-Nehisi Coates is evidence that black political debate in the US is at a
historic low. I was trained within a black radical tradition that encouraged
struggle within our own movements because it sharpens collective analysis -
bringing us closer to the tools we need to achieve liberation.
Freedom for black people (and by extension, everyone) looks like a world
without policing and incarceration, a world where black people live to raise
their children, where our country doesn't rely on corporations, and where
our nation is primarily concerned with the livelihood and dignity of our
communities. Freedom means the US government not being the main threat to
countries around the world.
Wherever there are communities fighting for freedom and liberation, there
are serious tensions. Let's quote Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr and Ella
Baker without romanticising them, but rather acknowledging that they had
legitimate arguments about tactics and strategy.
Another key element missing from the West-Coates conversation is the role,
analysis and wisdom of black women and black queer folks. Again, our
narratives and analyses are erased. The country's spotlight is on two black
cis-gendered men whose debates are not definitive of our communities or
movements.
The culture we have created today is one where debates fall into call-out
tropes; where we silo our conversations to social media. While this is an
incredible tool, can we facilitate healthy debate off social media? Do we
have the interest, ability, patience and compassion to have face-to-face
conversations? Social media is not the only space we should rely on.
And finally, when we are calling for black political debate, I ask, is it
fundamentally changing the material conditions for black people? Here, I
don't see it; and black life is at stake.
.Patrisse Cullors is an African American advocate for criminal justice
reform and co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement
Carol Anderson: The real radical is the man who hits power in high places
It was the 1920s. A morally and sexually compromised president had come to
power promising a regime fundamentally different to his predecessor's. The
new administration was packed with conmen, hucksters, and unqualified shills
raiding the public treasury and selling public lands to Big Oil. There were
also those in the cabinet with an agenda that would place inordinate,
unbridled power in the hands of corporations while millions of poor
Americans took the brunt of a Great Depression that hit before anyone knew
what to call it.
Greed fever ran like an epidemic in the financial sector giving the illusion
of prosperity and wealth when, just underneath, the economy had major
fissures and faultlines that threatened to topple the American behemoth.
Meanwhile, black people were being terrorised in Tulsa, the Ku Klux Klan was
gaining political power in key states in the north, voting rights were under
attack, and a new racist immigration law effectively shut the door on anyone
not Anglo-Saxon.
The international scene was just as vexing. The rise of fascist regimes in
Europe and Japan ran headlong into an American retreat from the League of
Nations, and by the 1930s there was a growing internal fifth column,
marketing itself as "America First", that undermined any effective response
to regimes that threatened US national security.
In the midst of the maelstrom, an intellectual brawl broke out among African
Americans. Unbelievably, the real issue was not the political and economic
horror that confronted the nation and black people, who were dealing with
massive disparities in access to constitutional rights and wealth. Instead,
one African American intellectual openly and mercilessly challenged another
over what was essentially ephemera. Du Bois looked on at the row within Fisk
University, Tennessee, and shook his head. This peacock display was merely
the effervescence of faux bravery. "The real radical," he noted, "is the
man, who hits power in high places, white power, power backed by unlimited
wealth; hits it and hits it openly and between the eyes."
It's 2017. A morally and sexually compromised man has assumed the presidency
of the United States. His regime is attacking black and brown people with
reckless abandon while, under the guise of "America first", shielding Nazis
and other white supremacists, and providing no defence against a government
that threatens US national security. He and his minions have also unleashed
wanton corporate greed, reduced public lands, attacked voting rights, and
imposed or threatened immigration restrictions to warm the cuckold of any
eugenicist.
In the midst of this maelstrom .
.Carol Anderson is Charles Howard Candler professor and chair, African
American studies, at Emory University
Shailja Patel: An unrealistic and ahistorical code has been invoked to
silence debate
Imperial privilege is reducing a vital assessment of Barack Obama's
devastating harm to black and brown peoples outside the US to a personal
beef between two African American men.
It's painful to us, in the global south, to see that American writers that
we read assiduously, and take seriously, are not reading us. They are not
listening when we say: "Please ask your president to stop killing us." They
appear to simply not see black and brown bodies beyond US borders.
Obama's bombs took tens of thousands of civilian lives. His military
intervention in Libya destroyed the country with the highest standard of
living in Africa. To resist a public discussion of these crimes, for fear
that our political differences will be deployed against us by racists,
exemplifies what writer Mmatshilo Motsei calls "colonial hangover". Aren't
we full, complex, thinking, sovereign human beings? Didn't we fight
liberation battles, mount civil rights struggles, for the right to engage in
public life? Dare we not, still, claim equal space in the forum?
An unrealistic and ahistorical code has been invoked, of global solidarity
among people of colour, to silence debate on the actual mass slaughter of
black and brown bodies by the first black head of Empire. Gabeba Baderoon,
South African professor of gender and African studies at Penn State
University, calls this "the imperialism the US engenders, even in its
citizens of colour".
Why should it concern us if Nazis retweet us? White supremacy, imperialism,
patriarchy, neoliberalism, are inherently parasitic. We will never be human
within these systems. We're not here to perform for their gaze. We're here
to be fully human to ourselves, fully accountable to each other.
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