Must our ancestors be reduced to villains of the past who do not fit our model of political correctness? Or were they just folks who had it far rougher than we citizens of the 21st century, and sacrificed their all so that we would not have to endure everything they did?
Of course we all owe an enormous debt to those who developed the Enlightenment values that underpin modern civilization, and the ridiculously awesome material and civic benefits they bestow, and if their sins were legion then their contributions were far greater, and far more painfully bought than modern First Worlders can really conceive.
Unfortunately, not everyone understands the import of failing to pay the interest on that debt:
In his memoir The Beautiful Struggle, Coates described how his father, a former Black Panther and full-time conspiracy theorist, drove his son around West Baltimore “telling me again the story of the black folk’s slide to ruin. He would drive down North Avenue and survey the carry-outs, the wig shops, the liquor stores and note that not one was owned by anyone black.” Whites had “plundered” what belonged to blacks, his father explained, as they had done with once-great African kingdoms. Coates, who lived in fear of black street toughs as a teen, sees the police as a greater threat to black well-being than the drug “crews” and gangs roaming the streets of West Baltimore today. His vision, in part, is to free gang-ridden areas from the malign grip of white standards and aggressive policing. Coates has adopted his father’s view that “our condition, the worst of this country’s condition—poor, diseased, illiterate, crippled dumb—was not just a tumor to be burrowed out but proof that the whole body was a tumor, that America was not a victim of a great rot but the rot itself.” Not even a hurricane of violence, says the new riot ideology, justifies a vigorous police presence in black localities.
…
For Ta-Nehisi Coates, the crews and the gangsta rappers singing about the need to “Fuck the Police” are preferable to the cops. The cops, complains Coates, “lord over” young black men with “the moral authority of a protection racket.” There is a touch of truth in this. But, Coates goes on, the problem with the police “is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.” The solution, he implies, is a black population released from the ideals of the American dream and from the “false morality” of white Americans. For Coates, blacks can only be freed from racism after whites have been emancipated from capitalism.
The more evolved sensibilities of future generations, armed with higher IQs (Flynn) and superior rationality (moral reasoning and psychiatric biochemistry do advance, in tandem) will doubtless view such sentiments with something akin to the horror our generation sees in the attitudes that demanded the castration and suicide of Alan Turing or the burning of black Tulsa. A lot of good people always die in these riots and moral panics and abdications of order.
A man, a city, a movement, and a moment have met: West Baltimore has, for the time being, been liberated from American morality. Let’s judge Coates’s vision on how that plays out.
Comments
10 responses to “Subprime”
I strongly disagree that we are heirs of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was followed immediately by the Romantic Era, which explicitly rejected the Enlightenment values of reason and science in favor of feeling, intuition, art and submergence in Nature, seen Romantically, not mechanically. Beethoven and Shelley are the immediate products and expositors. Most of German culture (including Naziism) to this day is Romantic, and the Environmental Movement, New Age stuff and the modern Protestant heresies are obviously Romantic. I think Coates and BlackLivesMatter can be regarded as Romantic, too, especially because of their emphasis on delusion and unreason.
coates reaction to white racist ameriKKKa is heartfelt but does not solve the problem. conservatism doesn’t have the answer they are the problem. even bernie sanders doesn’t go far enough. donald trump supporters prove the problem is in the white lower class as well. band aides won’t work. neither does trying to solve social problems with law enforcement or trying o do away with food stamps and other conservative ideas. come up with good paying jobs for the working poor other then drug dealing. if drugs are legalized white will take it over andblack men will loose another economic source of income.
” . . . come up with good paying jobs for the working poor . . .” And how do you propose to do that, cap’n? I ask because you seem to have such a sound grasp of economics, as well as reality in general.
The good Captain has company:
To protect the lives and futures of black Chicagoans we need more than just changes in policing. We need to address structural and systemic oppression; that involves securing a living wage and guaranteed jobs; keeping our schools public and stopping closures and speeding up decarceration by ending things like cash bail.
The key is to artificially drive up wages so high that no business could afford to hire unskilled workers, than somehow guarantee those same unskilled workers jobs.
I’m absolutely confident that some politician will figure out how to successfully repeal the law of supply and demand. And free candy too. For everyone.
capitalist road kill bulwick. the reason trumenfurher is leading the republiscum is that he claims he will bring the good paying jobs back against the wishes of the coke brothers, who by the way helped to fund the democratic leadership council so the could control both parties both bush and clinton were for “free trade” ross perot like the trumpeter were not and self funding. both trump and sander are not beholding to the corporate establishment and that is why their voters overlap in this area.
Yeah, Captain, Trump is an economic idiot. He’s very close to the Dem candidates with respect to idiotic economic populism, especially Bernie. All think that forcing citizens to stop buying the highest quality, lowest price goods from wherever they can is good economic policy. See the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act and its aftermath to see how another Trump/Hillary/Sanders trade protection racket would work out.
You talk about corporations but realize that trade barriers are a boon to incumbent politicians too in that those politicians have a ready source of cash from captured domestic firms. If foreign companies are free to ship goods and services to the US, where would US politicians get their cash? Closing the borders to furrin’ stuff will allow labor unions and domestic corporations and politicians to have a three-way circle jerk. To hell with consumers, right? They don’t need no cheap Chinese socks for their kids. Instead they should pay 3x the price for socks loomed in the good old US of A, dammit.
road kill a question if your job was sent oversea how will you buy these low cost goods if you don’t have a job?
@captain
Move overseas, where cost of living is cheaper?
(Yes, I did that for a while – and yes, it was fun and educational.) I might do it again.
Get another job? Captain, what would you do? What did all the buggy whip factory workers do? The world is a dynamic place. Creative destruction and all that. We bombed the crap out of almost all other industrial powers during WWII and we lived high on the hog while those industrial economies were rebuilding, hence the high wages for blue collar workers from ’45 to ~’75. That era was an anomaly. Workers have to adapt. The days of going to work at GM out of high school and retiring from GM after forty years are gone.
there can be only so many walmart greeters and mowing lawns doesn’t pay all that well and people in the south would rather get their gun and start shooting.