THE COATES COROLLARY OF GODWIN'S LAW

Dear Ta-Nehisi Coates, [...]

I have to ask, Am I displaying my privilege if I disagree? Is my job just to respect your experience and accept your conclusions? Does a white person have standing to respond?

If I do have standing, I find the causation between the legacy of lynching and some guy's decision to commit a crime inadequate to the complexity of most individual choices.

I think you distort American history. This country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame. There's a Lincoln for every Jefferson Davis and a Harlem Children's Zone for every K.K.K. -- and usually vastly more than one. Violence is embedded in America, but it is not close to the totality of America.

In your anger at the tone of innocence some people adopt to describe the American dream, you reject the dream itself as flimflam. But a dream sullied is not a lie. The American dream of equal opportunity, social mobility and ever more perfect democracy cherishes the future more than the past. It abandons old wrongs and transcends old sins for the sake of a better tomorrow.

This dream is a secular faith that has unified people across every known divide. It has unleashed ennobling energies and mobilized heroic social reform movements. By dissolving the dream under the acid of an excessive realism, you trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future.

With his 2014 Atlantic cover essay on "The Case for Reparations," which explores the brutal U.S. history of redlining and housing discrimination, and now with the critical rapture surrounding his new book, "Between the World and Me," he has become liberal America's conscience on race. "Did you read the latest Ta-Nehisi Coates piece?" is shorthand for "Have you absorbed and shared the latest and best and correct thinking on racism, white privilege, institutional violence and structural inequality?" If you don't have the time or inclination or experience to figure it out yourself, you outsource it to Ta-Nehisi Coates. [...]

And the audience is rapt. "Between the World and Me is, in important ways, a book written toward white Americans, and I say this as one of them," writes Slate critic Jack Hamilton. "White Americans may need to read this book more urgently and carefully than anyone, and their own sons and daughters need to read it as well."

In one of the earliest assessments, New Yorker editor David Remnick described "Between the World and Me" as an "extraordinary" book and likened Coates to James Baldwin. (Actually, everyone else has, too.) Reviewers have hailed it as "a classic of our time" (Publishers Weekly), "something to behold" (The Washington Post), "a love letter written in a moral emergency" (Slate) and "precisely the document this country needs right now" (the New Republic). This is more than admiration. It is an affirmation of enlightenment. New York Times film critic A.O. Scott went as far as one could go, calling Coates's writing  "essential, like water or air." Yes, we cannot live without Ta-Nehisi Coates.

What does such veneration -- especially from a news media that Coates has attacked as indifferent to black America or inclined to view black America as a criminal justice problem -- mean for Coates's arguments about the enduring influence of white supremacy? Does the praise disprove him, or to the contrary, does it only suggest that, in an age when liberal elites line up to lament their white privilege, the structures of inequality are resilient enough to accommodate, even glorify, this most radical critic?

In his 2009 memoir, "The Beautiful Struggle," Coates tells the story of his childhood in West Baltimore and his relationship with his father, "Conscious Man," a librarian and ex-Black Panther, publisher of obscure black texts, father of seven children by four women, but a man who "never shirked when his bill came due." He sought to instill consciousness in the young Ta-Nehisi, awareness of a community's historical struggle. "He covered the crib with Knowledge, until rooms overflowed with books whose titles promised militant action and the return to glory," Coates wrote of his father. The son absorbed the lessons, listening to Malcolm X's "The Ballot or the Bullet" on his Walkman, becoming "a plague" on his father's books. "My Consciousness grew, until I was obsessed with having been birthed in the wrong year," Coates wrote in the earlier memoir. "All the great wars had been fought, and I was left to rummage through the myths of my fathers."

Coates has found his new wars, mainly by realizing that the old ones never really went away. And now "Between the World and Me" seeks to impart that consciousness not just to his son but to all of us: that the violence done to black Americans is not accidental but by design, "the product of democratic will"; that white America's dream of nice houses, good schools and Memorial Day cookouts is built on centuries of plunder of African American bodies, through lynching and redlining, bullets and chokeholds; and that "sentimental firsts"-- the first black this or that -- are little consolation. "Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free," he writes.

The more radical Coates's critique of America, the more tightly America embraces him. Challengers are soon shouted down, whether Politico's Byers or New York magazine's Jonathan Chait, who last year debated Coates in a series of thoughtful posts on culture, poverty and personal responsibility, and was deemed the loser. Those who posit any shortcomings in Coates's analysis -- as when Buzzfeed's Shani O. Hilton argued that in his worldview, "the black male experience is still used as a stand in for the black experience" -- do so almost lovingly. Even conservative critics, such as National Review's Kevin D. Williamson, must spend nearly as much time extolling Coates as tackling his arguments, or like Shelby Steele in a painful appearance on ABC's "This Week," they seem to capitulate even before the battle has been joined.

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