THE SAD REALITY IS THAT...:

Since the end of Jim Crow, authors who have asserted that white America is not just misguided but actively wicked in its dealings with black America have tended to grow hazy when it comes to what benefit, exactly, white America derives from this villainy. Here we see why: Generally it is the least plausible link in an already tenuous logical chain. In Baldwin's case, one can only say that if there was a conspiracy to make diligent worker bees of black urban males, it has not gone to plan. In the annals of cui bono, this ranks with the time the head of SNCC said we were in Vietnam "for the rice supplies."

With Coates, the central weakness of his argument is that everything always comes back to the violence of "the streets." School, to him, is just a meaningless hurdle designed to furnish a pretext for white indifference to that violence. The "daily everyday violence that folks live under" puts the April 2015 riots in Baltimore beyond condemnation. What "daily everyday" violence, and at whose hands? That the perpetrators are mostly young and black can be surmised from the list of little violence-avoiding choices that, Coates says, tyrannized his mental life as a child--what to wear, where to sit at lunch, what route to take to and from school, with what friends from what neighborhoods. Then there is this story he tells about his mother:

When your grandmother was sixteen years old a young man knocked on her door. The young man was your Nana Jo's boyfriend. No one else was home. Ma allowed this young man to sit and wait until your Nana Jo returned. But your great-grandmother got there first. She asked the young man to leave. Then she beat your grandmother terrifically, one last time, so that she might remember how easily she could lose her body.

And here the weakness becomes plain, because the connection that Coates keeps trying to insinuate into existence between the black violence he has observed and the white menace he has postulated just snaps. White supremacy did not invent the rule that young women should generally keep male callers on the doorstep when they are home alone. The danger against which this rule is a precaution is not a racial one.

Once the reader pulls on this string, the whole web starts to unravel, because the connection between white supremacy and the other violence Coates describes is not very well substantiated either. If suburbia is to blame for young Ta-Nehisi getting beat up on his way home from school, it is only in the most abstract, cosmic sense. And at what metaphysical remove does it become fair to write, as Coates does, that the Baltimore street toughs of his youth "in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length fur-collared leathers ... their armor against their world," were "girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered round their grandfathers"? A damned rarefied one--the same one from which Baldwin blamed white people for the assassination of Malcolm X because "whoever did it was formed in the crucible of the American Republic."

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