Ta-Nehisi Coates and Why #WhiteFragilityMatters
by P.J. Sullivan
When I get into a discussion about race or gender or class online — something I try to avoid, often without success — I often preface my remarks with what I call the Great Asterisk, which is this: I am a white male heterosexual, born into a Christian tradition and the middle class to college-educated, happily married parents in a largely crime-free town.
None of this makes my opinion any less valid (or more valid) than anyone else’s. But I try to remember that controversial events and policies that I can assess from the distance of cool intellectual abstraction impact those without my advantages in much more direct ways.
This is why I made a point of reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” the black cultural critic’s book-length letter to his teenage son — not to critique it, but to learn from a blunt voice about an America I will never experience.
There were things in the book that made me angry. There were things that left me confused. There were times I wanted to just slam it shut and wish it away. But I did not do so, because the black Americans Coates highlights — like his Howard University classmate Prince Jones, slain by a police officer at age 25 in a case of mistaken identity — are never able to do so.
Last summer in America, a man suspected of selling loose cigarettes was choked to death by a police officer. A few weeks later, an 18-year-old’s body was left on the street for four hours after he was shot by an officer. Around Thanksgiving, a 12-year-old with a toy gun was killed by police who denied him potentially life-saving first aid. Around Easter, a young man expired in police custody.
But there are other stories. The Atlantic, for which Coates frequently writes, recently asked readers to submit their own tales of official racism. One man writes of being pulled over while driving to his office and ordered by a police officer with his gun drawn to get out of the vehicle and lift his shirt to prove he was unarmed. The officer said he was “checking out reports of guns being pulled on people.”
Another writes of having a police officer pull a gun on him during an early morning jog through his neighborhood in the suburbs of Boston, which is nearly all white. He writes, “There was no crime in progress; a cop just thought I looked suspicious, pointed a gun at me and forced me to the ground while peppering his orders with lots of curse words. He demanded ID and grilled me about ‘what I was doing in the neighborhood.’ Then he left me with a sarcastic ‘have a nice day.’” This same man writes that on another occasion, a police officer saw him walking with his white fiancée and stopped to ask her if she was okay.
Still another man writes of being tackled by security guards on the sidewalk outside a clothing store after he exited because they suspected him of stealing a shirt. They restrained him, grabbed a lunch box he was carrying, spread the contents on the ground, and, seeing that no theft had taken place, returned to the store, leaving the contents spilled out. Store management said not to bother filing suit, since he had not been physically harmed.
What these stories have in common, besides their base injustice, is that all these men seemed resigned to such things happening again. For someone like me, from my position of privilege, such an episode would be life-shattering. For these men, it was just part of being black.
When Coates’s book came out, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote that “the last year has been an education for white people,” immediately following this admission with the condescending observation that “there has been a depth, power and richness to the African-American conversation” about police violence.
Brooks says everyone should read the book, but can’t bear Coates’s condemnation of the American dream as a chimera that can only exist if the ruling race keeps others oppressed. Brooks says Coates’s words are “like a slap,” asking, “Am I displaying my privilege if I disagree? Is my job just to respect your experience and accept your conclusions? Does a white person have standing to respond?”
Certainly one need not accept everything Coates writes. But the fact that Brooks felt moved to respond at all says something. As Robin DiAngelo, professor of multicultural education at Westfield State University, writes, “White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. … White fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.”
People like me, and Brooks, recoil from the words of Coates and stories like those above, and want to slam the book shut. But it’s not about us, and it’s not about whether we see ourselves as racist. It’s about accepting that there are Americans whose experience of this nation is very different from our own.
P.J. Sullivan is a journalist and theater artist residing in Washington, D.C.