absent evidence

ABSENT EVIDENCE

Ta-Nehisi Coates's "The Whitest White House" (The Atlantic, October 2017) is a substantial essay on the ascent of Donald J. Trump to the presidency and on the progress to date on  tragic reshaping of the Office of the President.  Coates's tone is satiric, rich with all the audible and obvious  tropes native to neo-liberal discourses.  His prose, to borrow words from the poet Sterling D. Plumpp, is ornate with smoke.  And it needs to be said the smoke is a bit stronger than the fire. It is an illustration of why the claim that many self-identified white American  readers are charmed by Coates's writing has merit: he speaks with authority to and for them, affirming the vacillating  status of their deeply frustrated whiteness.  Their tongues are as tied as their minds are knotted. They hear in his work the lamentations of Hamlet, the admonitions of James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Jr. , the faint echoes of Richard Hofstadter's and  Albert Murray's social intelligence even if they calculate  in ignorance of William Shakespeare, the moral tradition of the jeremiad, or anything that has more heft than tweets and post-truth prattle. Coates provides the negative comfort that Richard Wright and Malcolm X chose not to donate to their non-black readers.

Coates plays it safe.  However critical and sarcastic he might be about the historical grounding of bogus white supremacy, he will not cross the line and abandon the obvious seductiveness of the black/white binary.  Coates is responsible enough in noting that "land theft and human plunder" are among the "founding sins,"  but he dares not explore those sins from the judicious perspectives of indigenous peoples ---those who possessed the territories prior to colonial invention of the Western Hemisphere. The binary needs to be exploded by including discussion of what is virtually absent evidence in American memory.  History and economic, political, and cultural analyses which pretend indigenous populations --however minority they are in number ----count for nothing are blatantly obscene.   I do not condemn Coats for playing it safe.  He has  the responsibility to feed his family and pay his debts, and he belongs to a line of  writers who are commodities of a special kind.

 African American readers who exercise severe criticism of the brilliance of Coates in addressing race-marked tragedy, capitalism,  and domestic terrorism in the United States of American  and  the nicely gendered brilliance of Michelle Alexander in dealing with how the white supremacy of the criminal justice system canonizes mass incarceration and systemic  disparities  ----those readers truly know brilliance alone does not render air-tight or judicial, crucial analysis.  When the primal necessary and sufficient evidence of the indigenous goes missing, the analysis slips into the vicinity of the abject and flawed.  Such is the case with "The Whitest White House."  The essay does inform us greatly about how the rule of madness governs the behaviors of President Trump's 'loyal-to-the-death" white supremacist tribe.  Had  Stephen Paddock committed his massive Los Vegas act of racial treason in January 2017, it is probable that Coates might have written his essay as an exquisitely ironic masterpiece.  Paddock was very much a native son and beneficiary of white supremacy, and one hopes that Coates and other African American writers will address that issue in a future.  One hopes they will renounce the enslavement of the white/black binary and more thoroughly expose how the drift from democracy into fatal American fascism is the first draft of our obituary.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            October 8, 2017