I wasn’t going to read The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates because I’m doing what I can to end the genocide and occupation, and because Coates seems like such a nice guy that it saddens me that he nonsensically defended the U.S. Civil War.
I’m very glad that I did read it. I did so because someone led me to believe that in it Coates changed his mind about the Civil War. This turned out to be a misunderstanding that grew out of the fact that in the book he does slightly change his mind about a different — much more popular — article that he had written in the same magazine, one about reparations.
I’m glad I read the book because it is full of useful information and perspectives on the life of the author, on racial injustice, on propaganda, and on rebellion. One insight in particular strikes me, and it is related to what Coates regrets about his article on reparations, namely his use of the example of German reparations to Israel.
Abused Jews dreamed through Zionism not only of reparations but of replacement — of becoming like those who had harmed them, and doing so through the harming of others. This is a danger in every wronged group or individual. Coates refers in passing to the harm done by colonizing Liberia, and at greater length to African-American dreams of return to Africa and of empowerment on the terms of oppressors. That Zionism was realized strikes Coates as akin to the dreams of Marcus Garvey having been realized:
“There was the dream — the mythic Africa my father cannot get back to. I think it’s best that way — for should that mythic Africa have ever descended out of the imagination and into the real, I shudder at what we might lose in realizing and defending it.”
This champion of reparations is expressing relief that Black Power has not been made into something as powerful and destructive as White Power. This is a profound and difficult insight for any member of any oppressed group — and one that members of non-oppressed groups like myself are generally not supposed to even mention. It’s easily confused with the false belief that, for example, white power is not devastating Africa as we speak — as if the only possibilities are one type of terrorism or another.
But we are all on this misshapen Titanic together, and Russia starting the apocalypse is no better than the U.S. doing so, Hamas or Lebanon or Iran murdering people is no better than Israel doing so, and hatred is ugly and dangerous no matter its historical roots.
A refusal to mirror others’ evil is not a refusal to demand justice — or reparations. Coates’ article on reparations is a fine survey of historical discrimination, apartheid, and terror. I’d support his conclusion over the status quo in a heart beat. I just think a universal solution would be wiser, and that exacerbating the fighting over the oligarchs’ scraps is not the way to disempower the oligarchs or to build a just world in which nobody has to dream regrettable dreams.
I don’t see any problem with Germany paying reparations for its wrongs either. I just think that all victims should be compensated equally, and that a war that killed 60 million, 9 million of them in camps, and 6 million of those Jews, should cease being recounted as a war that killed 6 million Jews fullstop. Making that the whole story has had terrible results.
I do see a problem with justifying the U.S. Civil War while recognizing the damage done by of regrettable dreams of vengeance — namely the endless bitter fantasies of the people who think they lost that war. Think of all the harm still done by that war today. We are creating similar enduring and angry notions right now in Ukraine, in Russia, in Sudan, in Syria, in Palestine, in Lebanon, in the already loaded down myth-machine of Israeli culture, and in the minds of Westerners who see the endless gusher of war funding as depriving them of basic needs.