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‘A Racist Society Can’t But Fight a Racist War’ – James Baldwin

A reminder: There is no separation between the social relations inside the US and its imperialism. 


“The intimate relationship between America’s internal and external wars, established by its original sin, has long been clear. The question was always how long mainstream intellectuals could continue to offer fig-leaf euphemisms for shock-and-awe racism, and suppress an entwined history of white supremacism and militarisation with fables about American exceptionalism, liberalism’s long battle with totalitarianism, and that sort of thing.


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From a critical take on the American journalist and activist Ta-Nehisi Coates


“Convinced that the presumption of inequality and discrimination underpinned the making of the modern world, Du Bois placed his American experience of racial subjection in a broad international context. Remarkably, all the major black writers and activists of the Atlantic West, from C.L.R.James to Stuart Hall, followed him in this move from the local to the global. Transcending the parochial idioms of their national cultures, they analysed the way in which the processes of capital accumulation and racial domination had become inseparable early in the history of the modern world; the way race emerged as an ideologically flexible category for defining the dangerously lawless civilisational other – black Africans yesterday, Muslims and Hispanics today.”


“In 2003 Ta-Nehisi Coates “found it ‘searing’ to watch ‘reasonable people assemble sober arguments for a disaster’.


In retrospect, the most remarkable of these reasonable people were not the neoconservatives but the liberals – some of them now Coates’s colleagues and supporters – who recommended war and condoned torture while advancing America’s mission to bring democracy to the world’s benighted.


“[T]he apparent successes of social liberalism, culminating in Obama’s election, managed to obscure the new regimes of racial sequester for a while longer… [C]ollege-educated elites went together with mass incarceration at home and endless military interventions abroad.


“Identified solely with the Atlantic, a periodical better known for its oligarchic shindigs than its subversive content, Coates also seems distant from the tradition of black magazines like ReconstructionTransition and Emerge, or left-wing journals like n+1Dissent and Jacobin. He credits his large white fan club to Obama.


“Coates, who claimed in 2013 to be ‘not a radical’, now says he has been ‘radicalised’, and as a black writer in an overwhelmingly white media, he has laid out the varied social practices of racial discrimination with estimable power and skill. But the essays in We Were Eight Years in Power, so recent and much discussed on their first publication, already feel like artefacts of a moribund social liberalism.


We cannot “understand from his account of self-radicalisation why the words ‘socialism’ and ‘imperialism’ became meaningful to a young generation of Americans during what he calls ‘the most incredible of eras – the era of a black president’.


“A ruling class that had been forced to make partial concessions to the civil rights movement subsequently worked, as Nixon blurted out, to ‘devise a system’ to deal with the black ‘problem’ without appearing to do so.


“The detractors of ‘identity liberalism’ are still prone to the fantasy that the end of de jure racial inequality ushered in a new era of opportunity and mobility for African-Americans. In reality, even the black people admitted into the networks of prosperity and privilege remained vulnerable compared to those who had enjoyed the inherited advantages of income and opportunity over several generations.


“[T] blame a racist ‘whitelash’ for Trump is to exculpate the political, business and media luminaries Coates has lately found himself with, especially the journalists disgraced, if not dislodged, by their collaboration in a calamitous racist-imperialist venture to make America great again.


“My President Was Black’, a 17,000-word profile in the Atlantic, is remarkable for its missing interrogations of the black president for his killings by drones, despoilation of Libya, Yemen and Somalia, mass deportations, and cravenness before the titans of finance who ruined millions of black as well as white lives. Coates has been accused of mystifying race and of ‘essentialising’ whiteness. Nowhere, however, does his view of racial identity seem as static as in his critical tenderness for a black member of the 1 per cent.


“As long as Coates is indifferent to the links between race and international political economy, he is more likely to induce relief than guilt among his white liberal fans.


[E]ven a radicalised black man can write in the Atlantic without dissolving the rainbow coalition of liberal imperialism or alienating its patrons.”

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