Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. More

Born in 1975, the product of two beautiful parents. Raised in West Baltimore -- not quite The Wire, but sometimes ill all the same. Studied at the Mecca for some years in the mid-'90s. Emerged with a purpose, if not a degree. Slowly migrated up the East Coast with a baby and my beloved, until I reached the shores of Harlem. Wrote some stuff along the way.

On Being Your Authentic Self

I watched the first half of Season One of Lena Dunham's much discussed series Girls last night and generally found it to be a riot. I think the best thing you can say about a comedy is that it's really, really funny. I'm a little sad that Girls never was allowed to be just that. When the PR people roll out a show they're generally trying to get as much bang as they can, and being dubbed the "voice of your generation" is quite a bang. But as an artist, I doubt that this the sort of weight you want.

Subjectively speaking, it seems like Girls got way more shine than say, Louie, Mad Men, The Wire, or even Sex and the City. The result was that all of those shows were allowed to blossom in the first few episodes away from the critical din, a benefit Girls never enjoyed. I don't know how much should be made of that--again, this sort of impact is exactly what PR people at HBO want.

But it's been good to watch the show away from controversy, and away from the discussion. This clip is the funniest scene I've seen on television in a long, long time. ("I'm going to have the last word in this situation." "It was nice to see you. Your Dad is gay.") Just judge Girls as a show--which is the way it should be judged, PR aside--it is really, really good. 

Circling back to that the most cringe-worthy moments actually come when there are people of color on screen. I won't be watching Season Two for another year or so, and I am hoping that the Donald Glover thing works out. I have never met a black Republican in all my time in New York. And I'm black. So I have trouble believing that Hannah is found that one black dude in Brooklyn who is anti-marriage equality, anti-abortion, pro-guns, and anti-health care. 

It feels like both an answer and a middle-finger to Dunham's critics. I would just prefer she plug her ears and keep moving. We must tell our stories. And others must tell their's.  It may well all be great, but it takes me back to my initial thought that white people who know few, if any, black people should write that way. The first rule is to write what you know. More next year--along with that review of Django.

Growing Up in the Caves of Chaos

I think I was seven when I started playing Dungeons & Dragons, though that feels like too young. I think I started reading Choose Your Own Adventure at six, and D&D was like right behind. It was a natural transition. I learned the game from my brother Malik. Malik works at Dreamworks. (I'm very proud. Can you tell? If you look at this post, Malik is second row, far right.) I work as a writer.  I like to think it helped introduce us both to the powers of imagination. 

At any rate, Malik was always the DM when we played. The video below is from the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons: A Documentary. I had the luxury of being interviewed for this. In fact, the guys invited me to a game, which I hope I can still take them up on once I know out this book.

Anyway, in the video I talk about the first time Malik led me into the Caves of Chaos, a scenario from the awesome Keep on the Borderlands module. Actually, I think I'm talking about the second time. The first time I rolled a magic-user who had one hit point. He was punched to death by the Mad Hermit. Fun times.


Martin Luther King Makes Everything Better

Even Gun Appreciation Day:

"I think Martin Luther King, Jr. would agree with me if he were alive today that if African Americans had been given the right to keep and bear arms from day one of the country's founding, perhaps slavery might not have been a chapter in our history," Ward said.
Of course the denial of that right was actually part of what it meant to be slave. The right of gun ownership is wholly connected to the notion of "free men." A slave, by the very American definition of the word, wouldn't generally have the right to bear firearms. 

So I guess it's true that blacks wouldn't have been slaves if they had guns, much like it's true that blacks wouldn't have been slaves if there was no such thing as American slavery.

An Open Thread



Toward a Moral Professional Football League

Horde legionnaire David White has offered up some interesting suggestions about how to reform the game. I don't know if any of this is possible. But I think that's also beside the point. Brainstorming is a particular challenge. Making it happen is another. On that note, in addition to critiquing it'd be nice if you guys throw out ideas on your own:

I don't intend to stop watching. I could go into a lot about my thinking, but it essentially comes down to the my belief that these players are making the same Achilles bargin that young men have been making for eons, and I'm comfortable accepting that.

The game will never be "safe," but that doesn't mean that changes can't be made to make the game safer. Some changes I would like to see (some of which may have already been started):

1) Off field changes

-- Move to fully guaranteed contracts and expand rosters. Players would be more willing to sit if they know they won't be cut off/replaced after being injured. And a larger roster would make it easier for a team to keep an injured players on the payroll.

-- Full health coverage for players who played more than 3 years or suffered a career-ending injury.

-- Robust mental therapy program for players transitioning into retirement (possibly make it a requirement for retired players seeking health care coverage).

-- Doctors work for the league, not for the teams. And each doctor has a clear checklist on the sideline that a player must pass if they're suspected of being concussed.

-- Brain function tests at the start and end of every season, which are shared with the players at the start of training camp every year. Make sure their choice is as well-informed as possible.

-- If a player suffers a concussion, they're not allowed to play in the following week. If they suffer a second concussion, they have to skip two games. Any more, they're forced to sit out the rest of the season.

-- Add another bye week to the season, and either end Thursday night games, or schedule them in such a way that teams only play them when coming off of a bye week.

2) On field changes

-- Make every offensive player an eligible receiver. Over the long term, I think this would reduce the size of linemen to TE sized players, and it'd eliminate a lot of the "in the trenches" hit a player takes over his career. It would also make the game more strategically complex, as defenses would have to guess who's going out to receive and who's staying to block. It's a big break from tradition, but ironically, it'd make the sport much more similar to the way that it's played by ordinary people in backyards around the country.

-- Ban the 3-pt and 4-pt stance. Instead of firing into each other in a way where it's impossible to avoid head-to-head contact, make offensive lineman line up in the way they often do already for pass plays, and make defensive linemen line up more like linebackers. There'd still be head to head contact, but it wouldn't be as natural and inevitable.

-- Experiment with different helmet materials. The history of the sport proves that helmets are needed (players regularly died on the field back before helmets were used), but they should experiment with materials that make leading with the head less likely. Maybe something closer to the leather helmets of old, or like the headgear boxers use when sparring.

(To fantasize for a moment about helmet technology: I don't think they'll ever be able to create a helmet to stop concussions, despite what NFL PR tries to tell us. But I'd like to see something that registers the amount of force taken by a player over the course of a game. And once it reaches a certain threshold, a player has to leave the game. Like it slowly turns red the more hits it takes, and once it's glowing red, the player has to leave the game.)

What do you guys think of these ideas? What ideas do you suggest?

The Ethics of Letting RGIII Play

Somewhat related, Bill Barnwell has a good piece in Grantland looking at RGII's injury from both an ethical and a practical standpoint. He concludes that it was wrong to let RGIII play in the moment for practical reasons (hampered by injury) and wrong when you look at the entirety of the situation. The most damning piece of evidence isn't what happened in the game, but what happened weeks before:

Sunday broke with the news that Dr. James Andrews hadn't cleared Robert Griffin to come back into the Week 14 game against the Ravens after suffering the initial knee injury, despite Mike Shanahan claiming otherwise as part of the justification for pushing RG3 back in for four plays. Shanahan pretended that there was a conversation with Andrews offering his consent for the move when Andrews noted that he had been shielded from evaluating Griffin by the head coach.  

The medical staff -- including Andrews -- evaluated Griffin on Sunday after his injury and said that he was, according to the untrustworthy Shanahan, "fine to play," suggesting that the team had checked with the doctors to "ask them their opinion if we would be hampering his LCL ... or was he in good enough shape to go into the game and play at the level we need for him to win." It seems like an impossible argument to win. Griffin didn't have an MRI during the game or miss time until suffering his second knee injury of the day. He had a gigantic brace on his knee built specifically to support his LCL, so it's not a surprise that the doctors would suggest that LCL wouldn't be hampered. Even if Griffin was healthy enough to step back onto the field, the dramatic dip in his performance should have been enough to tip off a coach who's been around football for his entire life that something was wrong.

From USA Today:

Andrews, however, told USA TODAY Sports on Saturday that he never cleared Griffin to go back into the game, because he never even examined him. 

 "(Griffin) didn't even let us look at him," Andrews said. "He came off the field, walked through the sidelines, circled back through the players and took off back to the field. It wasn't our opinion.

"We didn't even get to touch him or talk to him. Scared the hell out of me." 

Yet when asked by news reporters, Shanahan described a conversation with Andrews this way: 

"He's on the sidelines with Dr. Andrews. He had a chance to look at him and he said he could go back in," Shanahan said Dec. 10. 

"(I said) 'Hey, Dr. Andrews, can Robert go back in?' 

'Yeah, he can go back in.' 

 'Robert, go back in.' 

"That was it," Shanahan said.

I think it's worth recognizing that circumventing medical opinion is an old tradition in football. Barnwell makes the point that Shanahan has been around the game for his entire life. But that is actually the problem. Football is premised on the hazy morality of "playing through pain." And it isn't hazy simply because of what football is, but because of what people are--which is to say very different from each other. 

Even by those standards, it's still dishonorable to conjure medical cover for a questionable decision. In a league where coaches are cycled in and out every two or three years, and players are disposable, the incentive toward conjuring cover is obvious.

Junior Seau Had CTE

Junior Seau's death prompted me to stop watching football. It wasn't clear to me, at the time, that Seau actually had CTE. But thinking about it (the way I now think about Jovan Belcher) made it really hard to be entertained by the sport. With good reason:

"I think it's important for everyone to know that Junior did indeed suffer from CTE," Gina Seau said. "It's important that we take steps to help these players. We certainly don't want to see anything like this happen again to any of our athletes." She said the family was told that Seau's disease resulted from "a lot of head-to-head collisions over the course of 20 years of playing in the NFL. And that it gradually, you know, developed the deterioration of his brain and his ability to think logically." 

CTE is a progressive disease associated with repeated head trauma. Although long known to occur in boxers, it was not discovered in football players until 2005. Researchers at Boston University recently confirmed 50 cases of CTE in former football players, including 33 who played in the NFL. 

Seau shot himself in the heart May 2. His death stunned not only the football world but also his hometown, San Diego, where he played the first 13 years of his 20-year career. Seau led the Chargers to their first and only Super Bowl appearance and became a beloved figure in the community.
I am listening to Herman Edwards talk about how this information can help other players. But the information can only lead to the end of football as we know it. You can't fix this by getting rid of big hits. You can't fix this by focusing on concussions. Junior Seau never had such a diagnosis, and even if he did, it is the repeated "minor" hits that cause CTE. The enemy is the game itself. And it is killing men.

At the time of Seau's death it was said that we should not jump to conclusions. I generally think prudence is a good idea. Except that an astonishing number of football players keep shooting themselves. 

A rather stunned Mike Greenberg just put it well: "You can't live with a business when one of the results can be Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. It's a hard word to even pronounce. it's a brain disease." 

Here is Tyler Seau on his father's death:

Tyler said he was holding tightly to his memories of getting up at 5 in the morning to lift weights with his father before heading to the beach for a workout and surfing. And while the diagnosis helps, he said, it can't compensate for his loss. 

"I guess it makes it more real," he said. "It makes me realize that he wasn't invincible, because I always thought of him as being that guy. Like a lot of sons do when they look up to their dad. You know? You try to be like that man in your life. You try to mimic the things that he does. Play the game the way he did. Work the way he did. And, you know, now you look at it in a little bit different view." 

Tyler added: "Is it worth it? I'm not sure. But it's not worth it for me to not have a dad. So to me it's not worth it."

Toward a More Badass History

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We probably should have seen this coming:

Last fall, the National Entertainment Collectibles Association, Inc. (NECA), in tandem with the Weinstein Company, announced a full line of consumer products based on characters from the movie. First up are pose-able eight-inch action figures with tailored clothing, weaponry, and accessories in the likeness of characters played by Foxx, Kerry Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Leonardo DiCaprio, James Remar and Christoph Waltz. 

The dolls are currently on sale via Amazon.com. A press release announcing the deal stated that the line was similar to the retro toy lines that helped define the licensed action-figure market in the 1970s and that the collection will include a full apparel and accessories line. At the time of the announcement, NECA president Joel Weinshanker said the company was "very excited to bring the stellar cast of Django to life and honored to be working with another Tarantino masterpiece."  

Action figures for Tarantino films Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 may have been better suited for such commercial pursuits. But for some projects, anything goes. On Facebook last week, a post from "Black Is magazine" posed the question: "Who's in the market for a Django Unchained action figure? Funny or offensive?"

I don't think it's particularly funny or offensive, so much as it is apropos. I'm not going to see Django. I'm not very interested in watching some black dude slaughter a bunch of white people, so much as I am interested in why that never actually happened, and what that says. I like art that begins in the disturbing truth of things and then proceeds to ask the questions which history can't. 

Among those truths, for me, is the relative lack of appetite for revenge among slaves and freedmen. The great slaughter which white supremacists were always claiming to be around the corner, was never actually in the minds of slaves and freedman. What they wanted most was peace. It's true they had to kill for it. But their general perspective was "Leave me the fuck alone." 

This is disturbing if you come up in a time where slavery is acknowledged by much of society as one of the great tragedies of history. There is a feeling that "They" got away with it, a sense of large injustice that haunts all of us. I am certain that my earliest attractions to the USCT had everything to do with the presence of guns, and the possibility of vengeful badassery. I found very little of that. I did find a lot of courage, a lot of humor, and a lot of pain over family divided by auction blocks. There was some talk of "Remember Ft. Pillow." But there was very little in the way of "Kill them all." 

It was the same with my studies of the Underground Railroad. If you read William Still's compendium of  escapes, you find very few revanchists. Instead you see an incredible number of people who escaped, not because of the labor or torture of slavery, but because a relative was sold or because they, themselves, were about to be sold to family. Slave revenge has the luxury of making slavery primarily about white people. It is a luxury that the black rebels of antebellum America had little use for. Uppermost in their minds was not ensuring that white slavers got what was coming, but the preservation and security of their particular black families. Their husbands and wives were not objects to be avenged, but actual whole people whose welfare was more important than payback I so longed to see.

It was almost as though history was refusing to give me what I wanted. And I have come to believe that right there is the thing--the tension in historical art is so much about what we want from the past and the past actually gives. All the juice lay in abandoning our assumptions, our needs, and donning the mask of a different people with different needs. This is never totally possible--but I have found the effort to be transcendent. It fills you with a feeling that is outside of yourself.

My larger point is that Django "action figures" are an excellent comment on our needs today. In that sense, they are actually like the Confederate Flag and the deification of Robert E. Lee. I don't know if this is a problem, or not. You can't really expect Americans--black or otherwise--to be American in all their other incarnations, and then suddenly change when discussing slavery. I'm pretty sure that Robert E. Lee has an action figure, too. 

So this is progress. And this is democracy. It's just not for me. And I think that's alright.

You Can't Fight Rape Culture With Bad Data

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I think everyone should read Amanda Marcotte's piece on this graphic put out by the Enliven Project which both understates and overstates the problem. Hopefully they'll redo the graphic. But folks who are sending this around should know what they're dealing with. No point in going to war with water pistols.

Alex Jones Pitches Government by Boxing Match




There's a telling moment in this Piers Morgan interview with Alex Jones, wherein Jones challenges Morgan to a boxing match. Jones is one of the authors of a petition to deport Piers Morgan. He also commands a fairly large talk radio audiences, and began the interview by angrily warning Morgan that any move toward gun control would open the doors to "1776."

Nevertheless, I think the fact that Jones responds to a disagreement over government policy by telling his interlocutor "well how 'bout we take this outside" is illustrative. Jones spends much of the interview ranting about the evils of government use of force, without much attention to the kind of individual violence with which he threatened Morgan. More accurately, Jones believes that the only answer to such violence is more -- presumably defensive -- violence, though his pose makes him a poor advocate for such a position. 

One argument, and perhaps the greatest argument, for civil society is that we do not settle actual policy questions by asking, in Chris Rock mode, "Yes, but can you kick my ass?" That way lies the path to government by ogres, or chaos, or all against all, or all against them, or all against me. There must be a better way.


I Can Feel the Changes

I finally took some time to give a few serious spins to Kendrick Lamar's Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City. Bad on me. Really bad on me. Good Kid is not simply one the best hip-hop albums I've ever heard, but one of the most moving pieces of art I've seen/heard in a long, long, long time. I sort of initially bristled at the notion of comparison to Illmatic--my personal favorite ever--but it is exactly the right comparison. Nas was able to do was conjure the chaos of inner city black America in the late '80s and '90s. Now Kendrick Lamar summons it nearly 20 years later (with more focus, by the way) and virtually nothing has changed.

Good Kid chronicles a 17-year-old's effort to visit a romantic interest, and the kind of violence that haunts such a pedestrian effort. This scenario is right out of my young Baltimore city life. I used to love The Wonder Years. But Kevin Arnold didn't have to roll five deep to go see Winnie Cooper. That was the street law when I young man, and it's depressing to hear that it still is today. But it shows how violence warps the most ordinary routine.

Lamar's album is, in part, about the consequences of forgetting that law. But more than that it's also about the people who enforce it. Everyone should listen to "The Art Of Peer Pressure." It is commentary on everything from Chicago to Steubenville. Everyone should listen to "Black Boy Fly." All I can tell you is the feeling behind "Two niggas making it had never sounded logical" mirrors my own feelings as a child.

A word on "bitch." I initially felt that the album was a beautifully produced work of misogyny.  That mostly came from me giving a quick, inattentive listen. Good Kid deserves a lot better. It is that rare rap record that actually abandons triumphalism, invulnerability, and wears the mask. Rappers like to claim to be broadcasters, not endorsers. Except it's usually clear that they think, say, guns are pretty cool. This was that rare rap record where I thought the reflection to endorsement ratio was roughly 20 to one.

This is a great album--one that I wish had been around when I was 13. Non-rap fans should give this a listen. it is some of the best word-smithing, sentence-crafting, and beat production that hip-hop has to offer. And it is how it feels to be a black boy in the mad city.  Hip-hop is obsessed with soldiers. This may be the first great record I've heard by someone obsessed with speaking as a civilian. And there have always been more of us than them.

MORE: Another quick note. Hip-hop has long been obsessed with "confessionals" and showing that gangstas have sensitive sides too. Usually this just comes off as whining. Puffy's "No Way Out" is a classic of Whine-Rap, as is almost everything Kanye West does. Rappers who whine tend to talk about Jesus a lot. 

Of course not all rappers who talk about Jesus are whining. Kendrick Lamar is the MC that every other whine-rapper thinks he is.  Their idea of making sensitive art is to cut a track say "HEY THIS IS ME BEING SENSITIVE. THUGS CRY TO GIRL. AND IT IS WRONG THAT I AM OBSESSED WITH WHITE WOMAN. BUT BLACK GIRLS BE BITCHEZ (DON'T JUDGE ME. JUST SAYIN.)" 

 Whereas Good Kid doesn't talk. It just kinda is. As great art always is.

Steubenville Justice

Some news from the horrifying Steubenville rape case. Michael Nodianos, who was filmed laughing his head off about a girl who was "so raped right now," has left Ohio State University:

Michael Nodianos hasn't been charged with a crime in connection to the alleged rape of a 16-year-old girl by two members of the Steubenville High School football team in August. The case ignited a firestorm of controversy and national attention after hackers affiliated with the group Anonymous began breaking into the websites and email accounts of several football players and locals. The hackers believed these people had gotten off too lightly.

Nodianos' departure from OSU is the result of Anonymous' hacking campaign. Amanda Marcotte takes on the ethics of all of this:

As some initial gleeful Twitter responses from students to the alleged rape demonstrate, one reason rape continues is that communities not only don't hold perpetrators responsible, but close ranks to defend or even celebrate them. By stepping in and holding people accountable, Anonymous stands a very good chance of taking action that actually does something to stop rape. 

But: This type of online vigilante justice is potentially invading the privacy of or defaming innocent Steubenville residents, and even if everything published is true, there are very serious legal limits to the Anonymous strategy. Not all of the leaked allegations are attached to Twitter or YouTube accounts--many of the most serious cover-up claims, which we won't reprint here, are at this point only rumor. The allegations will infuriate you, but they don't rise to the level of real evidence that can be used to truly hold responsible those who participate in sex crimes.

Nodianos and his family have all faced threats and people attempting to find out his class schedule. I think that's wrong. Nodianos should have the right to go about his life, free of violence -- both threatened and actual -- no matter what he said on any tape. 

At the same time, I also think that violent crime is not just an offense against any victims, but an offense against society. If your response to a brutal crime perpetrated against a defenseless victim is to cut a video in which you laugh your head off, you should expect society to take offense and subject you to some amount of inconvenience.

A the core of all of this is the really poor job we do in terms of prosecuting rape. I have little in the way of ideas as to how to get better. But if there is support for Anonymous's tactics -- which I think are as spectacular as they are dangerous -- it comes out of an utter frustration with how we handle (or don't handle) sexual violence.

The Hollywood America Deserves

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A painting by Jacob Lawrence from his Harriet Tubman series

One of the rather frequent responses I get when posting the stories of people like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, or Robert Smalls is that their story deserves to be a movie. A biopic is seen by a lot of us as the ultimate testimonial to a person's life. Moreover, movies have the unique power to reach and influence millions of people. Finally, movies offer the possibility of all the imagery and input we hold when thinking of, say, Harriet Tubman to be made manifest before the world. I think this impulse is basically correct. It is especially correct given that Hollywood doesn't just ignore slavery and the Civil War but turns out revisionist dreck like Gods and Generals.

At the same time I think it's important to not talk as though it were an entity separate from the politics, economics, and history of America. The person who would bankroll a Harriet Tubman biopic would likely be someone who was particularly touched by her story. Such a person would not have to be black, but I don't know how you separate the paucity of black people with the power to green-light from the paucity of good films concerning black people in American history.

Moreover, movie-making is risky and expensive. Any discussion of the lack of a Harriet Tubman biopic should begin with the shameful fact that median white wealth in this country stands at $110,000 and median black wealth stands at around $5,000. It would be nice to think that this gap reflected choices cultural and otherwise, instead of the fact that for most this country's history its governing policy was to produce failure in black communities, and most of its citizens supported such policies. It would be nice if Hollywood were more moral and forward-thinking than its consumer base. But I would not wait around for such a day.

What I would do is interrogate the basic premise that holds that black lives (or any heroic life) is not truly legend unless a financier decides it should be. Movies are an art form—one that I very much enjoy—but they are one of many. Those of us who are unhappy with Hollywood's presentation of black life should not restrict themselves to Hollywood. What was the last play we saw by a black writer? What was the last book by a black writer we read? What did we give for Christmas, Kwanzaa or Hanukkah? When was the last time we went to see an exhibit by a black artist?

Finally, this is a particular moment in Hollywood—one wherein glorious righteous violence and what Alyssa Rosenberg calls "transgressive badassery" reigns supreme. I do wish Hollywood would do other kinds of movies. But a constant view of slavery through lens of badassery somehow feels like more of the same.

The Myth of Harriet Tubman


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Jacob Lawrence

I recently finished Kate Larsen's excellent biography of Harriet Tubman--Bound For The Promised Land. Tubman, like any mythical figure has had her exploits elevated beyond actual events. But even in Larsen's historical telling she emerges as a super-heroic figure. It's true she didn't shepherd 200 slaves out of Maryland. The number was more like 70--which is to say, given the logistics, a lot.

At any rate, I've done a lot of thinking on the place of myth in African-American history. Django aside, we don't really have many avenging angels. Reviewing the primary documents of the time, I don't even detect much taste for mass vengeance. There's often a taste for particular vengeance on particular people, but more than anything there's a strong desire to be left the fuck alone. Actions, like absconding with oneself, are usually set in motion by the threat of sale and the disruption of family ties. At first I was surprised by the lack of race hatred. But when I thought about it, it makes sense. 

Race hatred among whites was not irrational devolution. On the contrary it served an actual political purpose--defining the borders of citizenship, manhood and the broadest aristocracy ever created. Race hatred among blacks is just vengeance. It doesn't really go anywhere. It doesn't offer access to anything you didn't have before. Even if you look at the actual ideology of black nationalists what you will find more than "Kill Whitey" is "Leave us the fuck alone." Whereas integrationists wanted to be left alone here as Americans, separatists wanted to be left alone elsewhere. But both wanted to left alone.

That said, the black freedom movement isn't faultlessly benign. Above is painting from Jacob Lawrence's awesome series on Harriet Tubman. It takes as inspiration Tubman's famous aphorism--"Dead niggers tell no tales." (Yes that's Harriet Tubman, not DMX.) Tubman was known, on at least one occasion, to force an escaped slave forward at gun-point. The point was practical--should the slave return he would be tortured, and give up Tubman's methods. What I love most about this piece is how the man is shielding his face from the freedom that lay before him, or perhaps mourning the friends, and possibly family, he's left behind.

Freedom must have been scary for these peoples. Tubman says when she first escaped, she felt like a man who'd been let out jail after long bid. There was no one there to greet her. No home to return to. She had to make her way alone. And she did--along with a lot of others.

It's Not You, It's Me

This is the first season of the NFL I've missed in 32 years. I can't say I didn't miss it. I keep up with the news, mind you. I can't name the playoff teams, or tell you who the Super Bowl favorite is, much less pick my own. But I know that Tom Brady and Payton Manning had great years--and that Adrian Peterson cleared 2000 yards. It was not as hard as I thought. I used to live for Fall Sundays--it was the one day I had totally and completely to myself. Everything that had gone wrong in the week--and there was always a lot--just seemed to melt away.  

But now there's the matter of time. I basically have two governing passions in my life--writing and family--and everything, somehow, ties to one of them. And the older I've gotten the more time each has taken from me. (And the more they have given back.) When I was 25 there just seemed like there was so much time. And then there's the fact that both of my passions are so tied to brain function. I don't know what I am without my writing and my family. And I don't what those things would be to me with an (more) inhibited brain. 

I thought about that constantly last season. It probably goes to far to say I watched football strictly for the violence. But I certainly didn't watch in spite of it. I can't say I would have felt the same about flag football. When Ray Lewis would smash into Eddie George, I would feel an electric charge surge through me. And I loved it. I loved Ronnie Lott because he was such a big hitter. I still think fondly of Steve Atwater--like the recovering alcoholic recalling one of his great benders. But the fact of the matter is that my view of violence--ritual and otherwise--has changed in the past ten years. I hear Ray Lewis is retiring. And all I can do is worry about his brain.

Which isn't to say that I didn't miss some things. I'm mostly sad I missed the quarterback play of RGIII and Andrew Luck. I'm really sorry I missed Peyton Manning's comeback. I watched a half of one game this year--the Thanksgiving day game, so I did get to see some of RGIII's wizardry. And on that note, I caught enough news to be very happy to no longer be a Cowboys fan. On Sunday, my twitter stream was filled with people laughing at Tony Romo and Jerry Jones. It was like hearing that your lush of an ex-spouse had, yet again, made of a drunken fool of himself at the company party. You are sort of embarrassed for him. But you are also glad to no longer be attached. He'll never change. 

Barack Obama's Second First Term

Jonathan Chait gives the most hilarious assessment of the fiscal-cliff deal I've seen, calling it a "poor bargain but not an awful one." The deal trades permanency on GOP grounds (much of Bush tax cuts, something Obama claimed was not negotiable) for more temporary measures on Democratic grounds (another year of unemployment insurance.) 

Watching the president operate with a kind of political leverage he won't soon again enjoy has not been a very encouraging experience: 
So what we have is two more showdowns in which the parties disagree not just on the outcome but even on the parameters of an outcome. Obama thinks the debt ceiling needs to be raised, full stop, without becoming a bargaining chip in a fight that threatens the stability of the global economy. Republicans want to use that chip. Then there's the sequester, which Obama thinks should be replaced with spending cuts and tax revenue, and Republicans think should be replaced with spending cuts and more spending cuts. 

If Obama makes it through both these events without either accepting draconian social policy or triggering an economic meltdown, then today's compromise will be seen as a clever first step. That's not what I expect. I expect instead that his willingness to bargain away his strongest leverage, and the central theme of his reelection, will make the next rounds harder, and embolden Republicans further. I suspect he will wish he had ripped off the Band-Aid all at once, holding firm on tax cuts and daring House Republicans to defy public opinion.
Noam Scheiber notes the asymmetry in the GOP's approach and the president's:
Put all that together and here's what the fiscal cliff accomplished then: It affirmed to Republicans that Obama will do pretty much anything he can to avoid a debt default, regardless of what he says. It affirmed the White House anxiety that the GOP might not blink before we default. To put it mildly, that's quite an asymmetry. I want to believe the president can get through the next stage in this endless budget stalemate without accepting some of the more dangerous spending cuts conservatives are demanding. But at this point I'm having a hard time seeing it.
Obama and his allies like to deride lefties as a group of softheads who don't understand that negotiation is essential to government. But they don't like to deal with a more stinging left-wing critique: Negotiation is a part of democracy and Barack Obama, whatever his many, many talents, is not very good at it

Some of us thought that given the election results, and not having to stand for reelection, we might see a different Barack Obama. Probably not. There is no real reason for to take Obama's claim that he won't negotiate over the debt ceiling seriously. That goes for his enemies and his friends alike.

The Wholly Misunderstood Emancipation Proclamation

One of the more interesting arguments I've had to adjust to since diving into the Civil War is the cynic's denunciation of the Emancipation Proclamation as a document which didn't do anything. I assume this is a reaction to a point in our history when people went around claiming that the Proclamation "freed the slaves."

It did not. But, as historian Eric Foner notes, the Proclamation is still one of the most important documents in American history:

A military order, whose constitutional legitimacy rested on the president's war powers, the proclamation often disappoints those who read it. It is dull and legalistic; it contains no soaring language enunciating the rights of man. Only at the last minute, at the urging of Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, an abolitionist, did Lincoln add a conclusion declaring the proclamation an "act of justice." 

Nonetheless, the proclamation marked a dramatic transformation in the nature of the Civil War and in Lincoln's own approach to the problem of slavery. No longer did he seek the consent of slave holders. The proclamation was immediate, not gradual, contained no mention of compensation for owners, and made no reference to colonization. 

In it, Lincoln addressed blacks directly, not as property subject to the will of others but as men and women whose loyalty the Union must earn. For the first time, he welcomed black soldiers into the Union Army; over the next two years some 200,000 black men would serve in the Army and Navy, playing a critical role in achieving Union victory. And Lincoln urged freed slaves to go to work for "reasonable wages" -- in the United States. He never again mentioned colonization in public.

One part of the problem is that there is a left-radical strain descending from the days of the abolitionists that has trouble crediting Lincoln with anything. (I am partial to Frederick Douglass's ultimate assessment.) And there's a right wing quasi-libertarian strain which fashions Lincoln a tyrant and believes black people should have remained slaves waiting on a compensated emancipation which was never in the offing

Another part of the problem is the idea that, with something as dramatic as emancipation, there should be some break point, some specific document that freed the slaves. But as Foner points out, emancipation is a process (one that I would argue begins with slave abscondance and the Underground Railroad), not so much a point. And emancipation is itself a part of an even larger process -- integrating African Americans as citizens of equal standing. That effort continues even today.

Through the Lens of Disability

Yesterday one of my favorite commenters wrote this:

I have been forced to realize this as my world has been restricted due to chronic pain disability. I choose to push myself to work full-time, which means I have negligible time in which to read and enlighten myself. I work, I come home, I cook/eat/shower/clean and go to bed at ridiculously early hours - honestly I get most of my reading done during my work breaks. I am also an infovore and yearn for new knowledge, but I have a choice between loopy-because-of-pain or loopy-because-of-meds. 

My point is basically, this has all forced me to realize I simply can't be the learned, knowledgeable person I would so much like to be. I like to think I'm a pretty damned smart person. The people I work with are upset that I am "only" a secretary and not something higher-skilled, intellectual-leaning. I loved school, but cannot sustain that type of learning if I value my ability to perform basic self-care. So I move through life learning based on lived experience, of myself and others. And I have come to think it is just as valid a school as is traditional academia.

Great White Men have contributed very much to our society, but so have many others who aren't studied and taught in classrooms. As Ta-Nehisi points out, much of the base of his intellectual approach was formed by hip-hop and other (generally-regarded-by-outsiders-as) "unserious" arts. Those ideas are just as worthy of contention as those of St. Augustine. And yet no one would think it reasonable to point and laugh at the educated white kids who don't know Nas. (FWIW, I don't know Nas either.) But if the ideas of Nas have sense and create a meaningful theory, why don't those kids know Nas, and aren't they just as worthy of ridicule for not knowing his work? The answer is yes, they are, but that is exactly what demonstrates why no one should be ridiculed for not knowing a particular author, artist, or work, even the very Big and Important ones. 

Another thing my disability has taught me is that as long as it gets done, the way you got there doesn't matter (or rather, is just as right as the conventional way). Adaptation is very important for disabled people. And it is just as applicable here: TNC, and other Black thinkers, have arrived at a worldview that is fully-formed and worthy of study and debate. Does the result not count because the method was not conventional? Must outsiders conform to the inside path in order to have their outside-influenced views accepted? Maybe there's more to this world than we can all learn about in a lifetime. Maybe we are all limited beings. Maybe, if the world is so vast and so full of curious and layered experiences ripe for examination and enjoyment, none of us can expect every one of us to know every bit of it. Maybe we can appreciate the place the other person comes from without making sure they first display the correct status markers to be considered serious. Maybe a whole lot more people are "serious" than we have ever allowed for. And maybe our "serious" canon isn't as universal as we've always presented it.

I really appreciate this comment--but more than its content, I appreciate the lens which is one which I have never had to consider or really encounter in any deep sort of way. This is not the first time this has come up--I recall some conversation about identity and the hearing impaired. And it's come up in other blog posts as a kind of side-note.

I don't really have a coherent, or frankly even polite, way to ask this question. But here is what I think: so much social justice writing is about what society owes those who we perceive as getting the short of end of the stick. It's called social justice for a reason. But what I like about this post is that it isn't simply about what the world should do about physical disability, but how a physical disability shaped a person's life, regardless of societal responsibility.

I'm putting this thread here out of sheer curiosity. As I've said I've seen some of my commenters, from to time, allude to their disabilities. I guess I am asking how it feels beyond the realm of social justice? How does disability shape a person and their approach learning, or anything? I know "disability" is a big word. I'd like to leave it that way on purpose. 

Speak your peace please. But be nice. There's nuff sarcasm on this blog. 

My Heroes. Your Stamps.

I got a lot of pushback on twitter and some here (a lot less) for not knowing who Augustine of Hippo was. (I hope I have the right Augustine.) One of the problems with a title like "senior editor" or with working at a place like The Atlantic or with assuming mantles like "writer" or "public intellectual"  is people expect those kinds of credentials to mean that the bearer is in possession of a super-abundance of information about great thinkers and great writers. I think I've been pretty straight with you guys about the pitfalls of my eduction. And that isn't because I think my pitfalls are any greater or any worse than any other writer. In fact, I reject the entire business. 

Larry Neal was deeply influential in my writing. Very few of my peers have read the poetry of Larry Neal, and of those who have, every one of them is black. The poetry of Carolyn Forché and Lucille Clifton helped shape my style. (Cop that collected, son.) More people have read Lucille Clifton, but not a lot. My entree into this current project dealing with the Civil War and slavery, was the work of Paula Giddings and her awesome biography of Ida B Wells, A Sword Among Lions. I know one other person whose read the book. My Dad. This is to say nothing of all the obscure rappers and MCs who caused me to fall in love with words.

I believe in a great canon, but as a writer, I don't much care. The artist's canon must be personal. My canon happens to include Clifton, Neal, Rakim, Raekwon etc. and Fitzgerald, McPherson, Hurston, Melville, Wharton, Doctorow, Hurston and so on. Perhaps one day it will include Augustine. But there's a lot of great stuff I haven't read. I've never made it through a Hemingway novel. I have not read a single story of Mark Twain's. I read Plato in college, which is to say I didn't read it all. I loved Foucault but didn't finish. I have not read Nietzsche. I have not read Henry James, Cervantes, Willa Cather, John Edgar Wideman, Wallace Stegner, Joseph Heller or J.D. Salinger.

If you name an important book there is a very good chance I haven't read it. I'm not against important books. I hope to write one someday. But I read what I like, before I read what's important. That's who I am. It's my version of the "senior editor" or "public intellectual." I don't believe my job is stand in front of you and pretend to know things, which I do not. I also don't believe it's my job to be right. It's my job to be honest with you and employ really awful French.

C'est tout.

On Living Armed

Yesterday in the conversation between me and Jeff, the follow quote appeared from me:

And the fact is that I would actually rather die by shooting than live armed.

One thing that happens in writing is sometimes you say something that its "catchy" and it gets repeated outside of the context in which it was actually said. To get clear, I think it's important to understand that I was responding to a question, and the question was not "What is your position on gun control? or  "Do you think guns should be banned?" The question was:

If you were confronted with an "active shooter," do you think, in that moment, you might wish you had a gun?

And my response was:

I think that last question gets to the heart of a difference. I actually wouldn't wish I had a gun. I've shot a rifle at camp once, but that's about it. If I had a gun, there is a good chance I would shoot myself, thus doing the active shooter's work for him (it's usually "him.") But the deeper question is, "If I were confronted with an active shooter, would I wish to have a gun and be trained in its use?" It's funny, but I still don't know that I would. I'm pretty clear that I am going to die one day. That moment will not be of my choosing, and it almost certainly will not be too my liking. But death happens. Life -- and living -- on the other hand are more under my control. And the fact is that I would actually rather die by shooting than live armed. 

This is not mere cant. It is not enough to have a gun, anymore than it's enough to have a baby. It's a responsibility. I would have to orient myself to that fact. I'd have to be trained and I would have to, with some regularity, keep up my shooting skills. I would have to think about the weight I carried on my hip and think about how people might respond to me should they happen to notice. I would have to think about the cops and how I would interact with them, should we come into contact. I'd have to think about my own anger issues and remember that I can never be an position where I have a rage black-out. What I am saying is, if I were gun-owner, I would feel it to be really important that I be a responsible gun-owner, just like, when our kids were born, we both felt the need to be responsible parents. The difference is I like "living" as a parent. I accept the responsibility and rewards of parenting. I don't really want the responsibilities and rewards of gun-ownership. I guess I'd rather work on my swimming. And I think, given the concentration of guns in a smaller and smaller number of hands, there's some evidence that society agrees. 

 Which is not to say those of us who don't own guns don't want to live. We do. But it's not clear that this particular way of living will even be effective. I think about the shooter down at the Empire State Building a few months back. The police showed up to protect the public and ended in a shoot-out with a guy. Nine bystanders were wounded -- all at the hands of the police. It's just not clear to me that this sort of situation wouldn't repeat itself, but with citizens doing the wounding. With that kind of risk, perhaps it's better to handle "gun safety" before we get to the moment of an "active shooter."

I can't really make people not pick a phrase out and deploy it. But I want to ask that people consider the argument as a whole, and consider what, exactly, the comment is a response to.

For some time now, this blog has spent a good deal of time discussing the morality of violence. For the most part this is about blackness. That's what leads me to ask whether Nat Turner was right and whether its the death of 600,000 people in the Civil War was actually tragic. That's what leads me to look at the violence which African-Americans regularly contend with -- whether its the intimate violence of spanking our kids, the intra-community violence of crime, the extra-community violence of the police. And from all thought I've sought to understand what violence does to the actual individual -- how black people (black males, specifically) alter their behaviors to cope, and how that alteration fairs out in the larger world.


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