In the wake of Staten Island and Ferguson, there has been the expected round of soul-searching and counter-soul-searching that has come to mark racial incidents in the age of the think-piece. Even here in Britain, protests in solidarity with the black community of America have proved quite the draw, which might seem surprising given the extremely specific nature of these two events: these are not massacres of crowds or imprisonment of journalists but rather an overstepping of the line we expect police officers to toe in the discharging of their duties. After all, no-one disputes that if justice were done both Michael Brown and Eric Garner would be tried for their petty crimes and pay their penalties.
The murkiness of at least the former case goes only to prove that the rich seam of fury that these months have unearthed, a seam that extends to these shores, has very little to do with those specifics. That police officers will overstep the violence sanctioned them on occasion is accepted by all reasonable people, that they will then find the law obsequiously flexible in punishing them is an injustice, true, but one that would have been wearily expected by populations from here to the dawn of the city-state. But it touches a civil nerve when injustice is so obviously meted out overwhelmingly to one race. This is a protest about systemic racism - which is to say, history wasn't solved in 1964 and people who live with that history's legacy every day need flashpoints to notify demographics who are comfortable pretending that it was.
Think-pieces have for this reason repeated a cliché that is no less uncomfortable for being so resolutely obvious: that for all the talk of body cameras and reforms to the indictment process, there are no practical solutions that would have realistically saved the lives of these men. Anyone who read through the evidence in the shooting of Michael Brown will have had a moment where they saw the world through Darren Wilson's eyes at the moment he pulled that trigger as a large black man came towards him. And they know at that moment he was a scared white man with a lifetime of cultural conditioning, a gallon of adrenaline in his veins and a gun in his hands. And the inevitable happened.
The idea that this whole mess is not actually about the police at all is dispiriting in a way that I'm not sure progressive forces know how to handle. Social progress has always been best achieved by ruthless pragmatism and the swiping of low-hanging fruit, such that it could well be argued that the end of slavery in America was more a morally fortuitous by-product of Lincoln's war measures and on a larger scale the incompatibility of federal republicanism and sharply divided agricultural/industrial regional economies than anything abolitionists achieved. Votes for women resulted from war, social health insurance from Bismarck's anti-socialist machinations, and so on.
Absent a useful war or political crisis, the lowest-hanging fruit are the laws or lack thereof that entrench oppression. To call these low-hanging is perhaps to stretch to the term to insulting lengths - the struggle to enact the 1964 Civil Rights Act took quantities of grit, blood and tears so wrenching that it will remain a byword for unambiguously heroic social change for many generations yet unborn. And yet such changes in law are still the easiest thing that can be done to combat oppression. Once they are done, and with the fall of unequal marriage there are vanishingly few such laws left to target, progressives must cast about for ways to tackle the mass of human horror left to shift. They usually come up with "changing attitudes".
That phrase always strikes me as a weak one even when I use it myself. The task set is nothing less than reaching inside millions of people's thoraxes and resetting their hearts from the settings society has ingrained in them, an undertaking so ambitious as to be near-meaningless. I previously described today's progressives as "swiping at midges", which may be a tad unkind but I feel reflects a little of the frustration involved. In a case like Ferguson, where exactly is the law we can change to stop white cops being afraid of black kids? James Baldwin in 1968 was similarly despairing in his diagnosis:
"Those cats in the Harlem street, those white cops; they are scared to death and they should be scared to death. But that's how black boys die, because the police are scared. And it's not the policemen's fault; it's the country's fault."
That the country is on trial as opposed to the police or even Darren Wilson is a notion of which the sage of modern racial conversation, Ta-Nehisi Coates, is similarly convinced. It is the case of Coates, who I think of as one of the finest writers at work today, that fascinates me at this point, because he is capable of being every bit as eloquent with what he leaves unsaid as with what he says. For though his tweeting, writing and media appearances have made clear that structural racism is the cancer that must be healed for these incidents to stop, he is silent on what actions we might take to effect this healing.
Many commentators including Coates were quick to point out that the case which appeared to make the best argument for body cameras, in Ferguson, was immediately pursued by the case that refuted that argument, in Staten Island where the whole incident was clearly caught on camera and still failed to elicit an indictment. Oversimplifying this may be, but it is emblematic of the despair many feel on racial issues that there are simply no concrete proposals left to make. In the clip below, Coates argues that the justice system is actually only doing what the population wants it to do, so holding it out for special attention is wrong, and by extension we might suppose wholesale retraining of cops is useless.
In retraining America, too, it is difficult to see where we go from here. Laws that needed changing were easy to point out to the moderate middle, but systemic racism is harder to explain to people with no experience of it. This is the swiping at midges I refer to, trying to explain to people who think they live in an egalitarian society just how hard it is to move the remnants of centuries. And with conservative media organisations able to shout louder in their denial, the conversation is almost impossible to make progress in, just another front of the endless cold civil war. With only 16% of whites thinking race played a factor in the Ferguson decision, it is clear that the talking past each other will continue, and many will simply switch off to the he-said-she-said of it all.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is notable amongst contemporary commentators for his grasp of and obsession with history. I can think of no other American journalist for whom the past is as alive, as present as for this writer; indeed it was at Coates's recommendation that I read The Battle Cry of Freedom, and the heaviness of the Civil War era and before hangs on his writing like a construction crane's counterweight. His Atlantic piece The Case For Reparations, which has perhaps done more than any other to vault him to national attention, has another telling silence at its heart. Despite the title, no concrete case for practical reparations for slavery is made, only the suggestion that we investigate it further. I don't think reparations are practical, nor do most white people, but perhaps that misses the point - that if you look at the history of the United States, steeped in the blood of slavery as it is, then we might ask with TS Eliot: "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?"
The "reckoning with compounding moral debts" is his concern, and as someone who understands just how long it took to accumulate those debts, and someone mindful of how stubbornly they resist being paid, Coates is so thunderously silent on how we might find that forgiveness because there may be no solution but waiting until we are all long dead. Perhaps the balm of time is the only one appropriate. History has never cared much for the pushings and pullings of human action, but has always swept them up in its tide, and if the current state of race relations took hundreds of years to establish it will take yet more hundreds to wash away.
This is the grim undercurrent of much of Coates' writing, a gloom which stands in stark contrast to his fellow black intellectuals. Telling a crowd of progressives that they are grappling with the dread might of the ages and are probably doomed to fail is hardly going to be rabble-rousing stuff, but it is probably true, and if there is one thing that is missed in contemporary discussions of oppression, both left and right, it is just how heavy the monkey of history sits on our back. "Why is it not offensive for black people to wear whiteface?" Because history. "Why can't we expect more from our justice system?" Because history.
There have been those who have detected a blue period in Coates' writing, one that Coates is happy to acknowledge. It has waxed this year, without doubt, following Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and god knows who else. This profound gloom has concerned his former colleague Andrew Sullivan as well as his sparring partner Jonathan Chait, who think it profoundly "out of place" with the times. But I think Coates, in his eloquent silence, is far more in tune with the times than either. Because his writing is the cri-de-coeur of the scholar who is able to diagnose a structural problem without any of the tools to fix it.
Between his lines we read the reason why no-one is discussing what to do about systemic racism: because no-one has a clue. In his reparations article he lays out in forensic detail just why black America is like it is today, just how stacked against them the odds have been for blacks - but the edifice of society is so vast and so complex that there seems nowhere to start in the task of changing the fundamentals of people's hearts. The only appropriate instrument would be a time machine.
I fear this moment of despondency for Coates is just the prescient vanguard for a glum period for progressives generally, as in the coming years they increasingly bump up against their own impotence. I hope I am wrong. It is worth noting that for Coates himself, even in the depths of his funk, pessimism is not a position worth consciously adopting. Far from it. In the same video above he says this:
"In terms of avoiding fatalism, listen: I’m the descendant of enslaved black people in this country. You could have been born in 1820, if you were black, and looked back to your ancestors and saw nothing but slaves all the way back to 1619, looked forward another 50 or 60 years and seen nothing but slaves. There was no reason to believe, at that time, that emancipation was 40 or 50 years off. And yet, folks resisted and folks fought on.
So, fatalism isn’t really an option. Even if you think you won’t necessarily win the fight today, in your lifetime, in your child’s lifetime, you still have to fight. It’s kind of selfish to say you will only fight for a victory that you will live to see. As an African-American, we stand on the shoulders of people who fought despite not seeing victories in their lifetime, or even their children’s lifetimes, or even in their grandchildren’s lifetimes."
As for Aquinas, so for Coates, despair is the only unforgivable sin. The greatest consolation of history is that the same discipline telling us why justice will be so long in coming also tells us why that shouldn't concern us. A citizen of Persia in 1215 would have had every right to think his civilisation would remain supreme in culture, wealth and military strength; a decade and a Mongol invasion later everyone that citizen ever knew would be dead and Iran would be so devastated as to not return to its former population for seven hundred years. And this is the rule, not the exception, of history. What can pessimism possibly mean in a world like that?
There is a social contract signed between those dead, those living and those yet to be born. One's place is not to try to rationalise one's own struggle in and of itself - to do so would drive you mad. You must simply fight on, with whatever tools remain, however Sisyphean the task appears, to fulfil the terms set by the dead for the unborn. As Coates later tweeted, "The challenge is for those of us who believe to keep fighting while at the same time understanding it's kinda not about us".
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