I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It!, page 8
Whereas in the past the demand for reparations typically got ephemeral notice, Coates’ Atlantic article found broad resonance as it was published in a prestigious journal. To be sure, Coates did not lay out an action plan or, for that matter, any political agenda. Instead he sketched an evocative tour d’horizon, punctuated by personal testimonies, of the many-sided super-exploitation of African-Americans from chattel slavery right up to the post-World War II housing market. If he were merely making a moral appeal, justice would surely be on his side. But Coates represented his “case” as a practical initiative. The obvious question is, Why should one expect Coates’ case to carry the day in the court of public opinion and halls of Congress where so many others preceding him have failed? He himself acknowledged that a bill calling on Congress merely to investigate the possibility of Black reparations has languished in committee for decades. Indeed, the reparations demand has never galvanized a mass movement even in the Black community, whether it be because political priority has attached to more pressing concerns,110 or because prizing out of Congress who-knows-how-many-hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars to compensate Black people for four hundred years of exploitation appeared to be a bridge too far.111 But Coates imagines it’s an idea whose time has now come. His optimism rests on a pair of suppositions:
• If white Americans feel, or can be made to feel, guilty for impoverishing Black America, then they will embrace reparations as a release from this insupportable psychic pain.
“What is needed,” Coates prescribes, “is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt…. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.” In other words, he invites white America to sign up for a three-step recovery program to overcome its “intoxication” of denial:
Step 1. A national conversation about race;
Step 2. A cathartic acknowledgement by whites of the massive theft they committed;
Step 3. The bestowal of Black reparations as an act of collective white expiation.
It might be deflating, even depressing, but the truth of the matter is: white people don’t—and it’s doubtful they ever will—feel a burning necessity to heal this putative psychic wound or banish this putative guilt. A recent study found that “Americans are largely unaware of the striking persistence of racial economic inequality in the United States.”112 Even were they enlightened, whites could still draw on a vast arsenal of prejudices to rationalize it away—If Blacks live in poverty, it’s because they’re lazy and loose—or alibis to exonerate themselves of personal culpability—What did I have to do with slavery? Even as a poll in the wake of George Floyd’s lynching found that 71 percent of white Americans believed “racial and ethnic discrimination is a big problem,” a huge gap would need to be closed before the categorical imperative put them in a “gift”-giving spirit. The fact is, most white people are themselves just barely staying afloat. But didn’t the Civil Rights Movement, which demanded a massive redistribution of, if not economic, then political power, garner white support? Its achievements, however, sprang from the perfect convergence of a quartet of factors. First, Blacks demonstrated en masse a resolve—come what may—to eradicate the system of Jim Crow. Second, the protesters’ demands were anchored squarely in the bedrock law of the land. Third, amid the “propaganda” Cold War with the Soviet Union, on the one hand, and the political emergence of the “colored” Third World, on the other, the White House couldn’t afford to ignore the images of sanguinary racist infliction being transmitted abroad. Fourth, white Northerners sympathized, or were shamed into sympathizing, with the nonviolent protesters’ demands113 and—further to this point—these Northern liberals could occupy the high seat of moral judgment without personal sacrifice, as the full burden of the original Civil Rights agenda was to be borne “down South.” Compare the call for Black reparations. It hasn’t come close to igniting a fervent popular movement; a legal right to some financial reparations might eventually be conceded in the courts, but the moral resonance of such a right doesn’t remotely approach that of the concrete, constitutive, and Constitutionally-based rights of suffrage and access to public accommodations; were it to ignore the reparations demand, the national government wouldn’t catch any flak abroad; and the likelihood of winning white or Congressional support—a “national reckoning” measured in mega buckets of dollars—is nil. Indeed, if the early Civil Rights Movement flourished while the later phase floundered, it’s perhaps because, even amid the spiritual headiness and booming prosperity of the 1960s, largesse crashed up against egotistical love of lucre. “It is now a struggle for genuine equality on all levels, and this will be a much more difficult struggle,” Martin Luther King foresaw in 1967.
You see, the gains in the first period, or the first era of struggle, were obtained from the power structure at bargain rates; it didn’t cost the nation anything to integrate lunch counters. It didn’t cost the nation anything to integrate hotels and motels. It didn’t cost the nation a penny to guarantee the right to vote. Now we are in a period where it will cost the nation billions of dollars to get rid of poverty, to get rid of slums, to make quality integrated education a reality. This is where we are now. Now we’re going to lose some friends in this period. The allies who were with us in Selma will not all stay with us during this period.
Is it really plausible that, in these by comparison morally calloused and economically straitened times, white Americans will undergo a spiritual epiphany such that they will seek atonement for their ill-gotten gains by writing out a blank check to Black America?114 The ultimate irony is, Coates posits that racism is entrenched in the innermost recesses of the innermost sanctums of the White Mind115—a dybbuk—yet he also posits that it can be extirpated by a nationally televised Oprah extravaganza.
• If the State of Israel could extract reparations from the German government after the Nazi holocaust even despite popular German opposition, Blacks can also extract reparations for the horrors they endured.
To sustain the tenability of his proposal, Coates invokes the precedent of the reparations Germany paid out to Israel right after the Nazi holocaust. But Germany had just lost a war; the spectral and skeletal victims of its barbarism still haunted Europe’s landscape. To restore Germany’s good name and its esteemed station in Western civilization, the German government resolved on the dramatic gesture of reparations. It’s hard to figure how this episode “should be instructive to us.” Does Coates really imagine that, in the wake of his “national reckoning,” there before an unforgiving Humanity will lie white America, prostrate, exposed and mortified, desperate to redeem its moral standing in the world at almost any price? The more recent chapter in Holocaust reparations, however, does provide an “instructive” precedent.116 In the mid-1990s, World Jewish Congress (W.J.C.) president Edgar Bronfman, alongside a gang of crooked Jewish lawyers, crooked Jewish politicians, and crooked Jewish communal leaders, acted in cahoots with the Bill Clinton administration to perpetrate a shakedown of Europe in the name of “needy Holocaust victims.”117 The allegation that, for example, Jews who perished in the Nazi holocaust had deposited billions of dollars in Swiss banks and after the war their heirs couldn’t withdraw the money was fabricated out of whole cloth. But by enlisting every level of U.S. power—from local city comptrollers all the way up to Clinton administration officials such as Stuart Eizenstat, as well as the President himself—this cabal of ghouls and grave-robbers brought to their knees Swiss bankers, and then other European countries, as they extorted billions of dollars. The “needy Holocaust victims” never saw more than a pittance of the loot. Instead, it poured into the coffers of Jewish communal organizations and pockets of Jewish lawyers. But then Divine Justice intervened. One by one, the Holocaust hucksters ended up in jail or publicly disgraced. It was revealed that sublimely slimy Rabbi Israel Singer, who orchestrated the Swiss shakedown via his chairman’s office at the W.J.C., had, unbeknownst to anyone, squirreled away W.J.C. monies—ah, the delicious irony—in his own secret Swiss bank account. The indignant president (Bronfman) then fired the pilferer chairman (Singer): “Israel helped himself to cash from the W.J.C. office, my cash.” Of course, “my cash”—at any rate, the extorted portion of it—belonged not to him but, first, the Swiss banks; second, Holocaust victims; and third, no one. New York State comptroller Alan Hevesi, who had threatened to withhold pension fund investments in Swiss banks, was thrown behind bars for enriching himself from a “pay to play” pension fund kickback scheme. The lead shakedown lawyer, Burt Neuborne, piously proclaimed to everyone within earshot that he was donating his services pro bono in memory of his daughter who had passed prematurely while attending rabbinical school. It turned out that this Holocaust huckster had raked in a cool eight million plus dollars for his “pro bono” services. In an unprecedented editorial, the New York Times rebuked Neuborne for “billing for 30.5 hours of work in a single day” and for “the hourly rate Mr. Neuborne put in for, $700.” Each having committed sundry crimes and misdemeanors, Holocaust huckster lawyer Edward Fagan was disbarred while huckster lawyer Melvyn Weiss served time. The Jewish Claims Conference, which was headed by Singer and mandated to distribute the Holocaust booty to “needy Holocaust victims,” was wracked by one public scandal after another of insider theft. Were Coates’ case successfully prosecuted, it wouldn’t surprise, at all, if in this revival of the Reparations Reckoning, Reverend Al Sharpton stands in for Rabbi Israel Singer, and Sharpton’s National Action Network for the Jewish Claims Conference. As Black reparations hucksters queue up buckets in hand to cash in, it will be a veritable miracle on 34th Street if the well doesn’t run dry long before “needy Black victims” taste a drop from it. On the other hand, Coates nobly aspires to a national conversation about race that will provoke deep soul-searching in white America. But if he has homed in on financial remuneration as the purpose and goal of this exercise, it cannot but provoke deep skepticism among white interlocutors: is this just another tugging-at-one’s-heartstrings extortion racket? The Holocaust hucksters used to ceaselessly drone that reparations were “about truth and justice, not about money.” “It’s not about money,” the jaded Swiss agreed. “It’s about more money.”
Ultimately, Coates himself doesn’t appear persuaded that his case will yield much beyond token monetary concessions: “Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate, … we may find that the country can never fully repay African-Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion…. I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific [dollar amount] answers that might be produced.” In other words, if not serious compensation, then let’s at least have a serious conversation. Might this be why his article was featured in a coveted literati publication and why he’s a hot-ticket item on the woke circuit? Jeffrey Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. In the 1990s, Goldberg served as an accessory to torture of Palestinians in an Israeli prison. He even memorialized his heroic service in an acclaimed book.118 (Like the rapist who purports that “she asked for it,” Goldberg said of his victims that they “want to be” tortured.) He then served as chief stenographer for white Jewish supremacist Benjamin Netanyahu in the American media. Goldberg was elevated in 2016 to The Atlantic’s top post; Coates, basking in the glory of “The Case,” was Goldberg’s “national correspondent.” “Jeff” and his homeboy “T” seemed to have gotten on famously, a mutual-admiration, kissing-cousins lovefest.119 Why would Goldberg, of all people, showcase a “Black militant” whose signature issue was reparations? Was Goldberg so tormented by white guilt that he was ready to embrace a massive transfer of wealth to Black people? Or did this racist sack of shit reckon that even—or especially—as reparations was politically a dead letter, Coates’ musings made for a terrific idle-chatter item that, to boot, burnished The Atlantic’s woke bona fides? Indeed, one could judge the good faith of Coates’ fan club on Martha’s Vineyard by the venomousness with which these slithering social justice warriors assailed Bernie Sanders as he called for massive wealth redistribution. Or, alternately, they cancelled him. As New York Times journalists lined up to sign the Harper’s petition decrying cancel culture, the irony was, the single most cancelled person the year gone by was Sanders, while the Times led the pack in cancelling him.120 His campaign was whited out except when an occasion arose to asperse him. But that’s not all, far from it. The woke Democratic Party weaponized Black reparations as a Trojan horse to derail the movement Bernie set in motion. Aspiring to cobble together a coalition of the 99 percent, Sanders advocated universal programs that would benefit all the have-nots. It was in the nature of things, however, that African-Americans would be the prime beneficiaries of Bernie’s platform as they were least able to afford health insurance and higher education, and most in need of jobs:
What we should be talking about is making massive investments in rebuilding our cities, in creating millions of decent paying jobs, in making public colleges and universities tuition-free, basically targeting our federal resources to the areas where it is needed the most and where it is needed the most is in impoverished communities, often African American and Latino.
Still, the woke crowd hounded Bernie with the question, “Do you support Black reparations?” As if answering No proved he was a racist.121 If he did reply in the negative, it was because answering Yes would have estranged his potential supporters in the white working class. If woke Democratic Party hacks could afford to answer Yes, it was because they had already written off a wide swathe of white workers. It was a lose-lose proposition for Sanders: if he came out in favor of reparations, it would drastically shrink the coalition he hoped to build; if he came out against them, he would stand accused of a “blind spot” on race. Blind spot? Was the chimera of Black reparations—touted by Democratic Party con-artists who knew full well that a substantive reparations bill was dead-on-arrival—really to be preferred over the prospect of free health care, free higher education, and a living-wage job? It might be contended that neither program was a realistic possibility. But it’s not an accident that the Democratic Party woke elite, hell-bent against wealth redistribution, entertained Coates’ proposal122 while demonizing Sanders’ platform. If they didn’t fear Coates’ call for massive Black reparations, but dreaded Sanders’ call for massive wealth redistribution, wasn’t it because they reckoned reparations a pipedream but redistribution, behind which stood a militant mass movement, a nightmare? Wittingly or not, by elevating Black reparations to a litmus test, by flagellating Sanders for failing it—
Sanders should be directly confronted and asked why his political imagination is so active against plutocracy, but so limited against white supremacy123
—Coates played right into a cynical ploy of the one percent to stop Sanders by race-baiting him.124
Chapter 4
Robin DiAngelo Kicks Karen’s Butt
One of the most influential tracts to emerge from the identity politics movement is Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism.125 It rapidly climbed onto the New York Times bestseller list after its publication in 2018, remaining there for over a year, and its popularity then resurged after the killing of George Floyd.
While DiAngelo locates the source of racism in social structures, White Fragility fits snugly in the self-help section of a bookstore. Except for a couple of stray sentence fragments, DiAngelo has nothing whatsoever to say about transforming institutions. Instead, racism is depicted as a mental disorder, and its cure as a sustained mental regimen supervised by an expert therapist, preferably DiAngelo (for a fee, of course). The interest of her mishmash of words—the whole of my being revolts at denoting it a book—lies less in her pretense of an argument than in this thing as a cultural datum: Why did White Fragility become a national phenomenon, the go-to text of identity politics? I will return to this question presently. First, however, I must drag the reader through the slog of parsing White Fragility. I confess to a certain reluctance. It feels akin to child abuse. It brings to mind a public service announcement from the 1960s: “Mental Illness: Sympathize, Don’t Criticize.” But were I to stop here, it might be said that my curt dismissal of DiAngelo springs from my own … white fragility. So, begging the reader’s forgiveness, here it goes.
DiAngelo repeatedly describes racism as “complex” and “nuanced.” The problem is that her analysis of racism is neither. It is all of a piece. She doesn’t paint in broad strokes; she paints in one stroke. Racism, DiAngelo posits, quoting a fellow diversity consultant, permeates every nook and cranny of society: “Racism is a systemic, societal, institutional, omnipresent, and epistemologically embedded phenomenon that pervades every vestige of our reality.”126 You might be aware, you might be unaware, but it’s there: “We might think of conscious racial awareness as the tip of an iceberg…. Racial bias is largely unconscious.”127 It contaminates every thought and interracial relationship: “no cross-racial relationship is free from the dynamics of racism.”128 If you don’t or if you do have Black friends, you’re a racist. “The sad fact is many whites have no cross-racial friendships at all.… But even those that have cross-racial friendships” aren’t immune to “the dynamics of racism in the society at large.”129 Even if you and your Black friend “don’t talk about racism, [it] does not mean it isn’t at play. Indeed, this silence is one of the ways that racism is manifest, for it is an imposed silence.”130 If you profess to be “color-blind” or if you profess to “color-celebrate,” you’re either way a racist, as both are “typical white racial claims.”131 If you don’t shed tears at the murder of a Black person, you’re a racist, but if you do shed tears in the company of Black people, that would be “effectively reinscribing rather than ameliorating [sic] racism.”132 If you shout or abjure the n-word, you’re a racist.133 If you protest that you aren’t a racist, that itself is proof positive that you are one. Even if, hypothetically, your mind were rinsed clean of racism, you’re still a racist, as you objectively benefit from a system that privileges white people. Racism is ubiquitous and inescapable: “Everyone has prejudice, and everyone discriminates.”134 It is zeitgeist and cross. You can run, as Joe Louis famously said (wasn’t it racist to invoke his name?), but you can’t hide.
