Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me burst upon the public in the midst of national turmoil over racist police terror. It is a central text in the college-wide freshman seminar at Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington, DC. Coates appears regularly on MSNBC television network in connection with the Black Lives Matter movement.
But in the words of the famous dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, “What about the working class?”
All Talk, Missing in Action
The book is written as a letter from Coates to his 15-year-old son, who was both frightened and enraged by the police murders of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. Recounting his own struggles on the mean streets of Baltimore and as a student at Howard University and beyond, Coates meditates on what it means to be a Black male in a country founded on racism.
He stresses his own trauma after the 2000 murder of a well-off Howard student peer named Prince Jones. A Black cop named Carlton Jones (no relation) fired 16 shots; eight of them hit Prince Jones, five of them in the back. Any man marked by his “Black body,” Coates concludes, is similarly vulnerable at any time.
To his credit, Coates refuses to endorse the grossly mistaken liberal notion that we are in a “post-racial” society. But in designating racism as a “majoritarian” belief, rather than a capitalist ruling-class ideology, he proposes that racism has taken on a life of its own. Coates’s idealist approach — separating ideas and behaviors from their roots in political economy —makes it impossible for him to correctly analyze the fact that Jones was killed by a Black cop under the control of Black politicians. Or that the politicians are in turn controlled by the capitalist rulers who need racism to terrorize and pacify all workers. And so Prince Jones’s murderer was let off the hook.
The author conveniently neglects to mention the protest movement, in which Progressive Labor Party played an important role, against the racist cop and the system that enabled and protected him. The killing garnered national attention. There were mass demonstrations on the campus and in the broader community, a bus caravan of student protesters to the Fairfax County prosecutor’s office, and finally a march of hundreds of students on the U.S. Justice Department to demand federal intervention (see more next issue).
Coates was absent from those protests. When he treats Jones’s death in his latest book as a turning point in his own awareness of the vulnerability of Black lives, it rings hollow.
Why is Coates’s book being so widely celebrated? First, because it is a timely testament to what it means to be Black in a country built on anti-Black racism. It speaks to readers enraged by the countless police killings of Black women and men. But the real reason Coates is hailed by the capitalist media is because his work breeds cynicism and inaction. He sees no escape from racism in the U.S. and so rejects the possibility of a multiracial, revolutionary strategy to defeat it. He becomes, then, a guiding spirit for the reactionary, nationalist Black Lives Matter movement. He promotes no kind of fightback.
What About the Working Class?
Coates’s main failing is his lack of class analysis. As a result, he cannot explain how or why the capitalist ruling class created racism to divide workers, increase profits, and prevent multiracial fightback. Racism is the foundation of capitalism. Unlike Theodore Allen, whose Invention of the White Race demonstrates the divide-and-conquer origins of the notion of whiteness, Coates fails to show how and why racism has always served the bosses. Communists in Progressive Labor Party need to build a class-conscious movement against racism, one that shows how all members of the working class are hurt by the violence of the capitalist state. We need a communist analysis to understand the material roots of racism in the capitalist profit system. The ruling class created racism, and the working class can abolish it!