Where There's Smoke, There's Fire

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been making the rounds on his book tour. Prescient as ever, his new book The Message was written before the start of this current iteration of the war between Israel and Palestine, but is primarily about the war between Israel and Palestine. By now, most of us have seen the viral exchange between he and CBS Morning News anchor Tony Dokoupil. As Coates recounted a trip that he took with other journalists to Israel and the West Bank in the Summer of 2023, and analogized the Israeli apartheid regime against Palestinians to America’s Jim Crow regime against African-Americans, Dokoupil likened him to an extremist for daring to provide an unfavorable analysis of Palestinian oppression. In his many attempts at convincing Coates to concede its justification, Dokoupil ultimately weaponized the very concept of resistance in order to place the burden back on the oppressed - “Why is there no agency in this book for the Palestinians? They exist in your narrative merely as victims of the Israelis, as though they were not offered peace at any juncture. As though they don’t have a stake in this as well. What is their role in the lack of a Palestinian state?” Coates responded, “I have a very very very very moral compass about this. And, again, perhaps it’s because of my ancestry. Either apartheid is right or it’s wrong. It’s really really simple.”

Yes, that part is simple, but what many of Coates’s critics want him to do is apply his moral clarity, not only to naming that apartheid is taking place, but to an analysis of the ways in which Palestinians have fought back. If it’s true that apartheid is completely heinous and indefensible, then is it defensible to end it by any means necessary? On this point, Coates is ambivalent. He both maintains that protecting human life is the most important value above all and that Palestinians have a right to defend themselves. If protecting human life costs human life? Well, we’re left to wrestle with that on our own. In a world where we know that countries and “rights” are created and maintained by force, we’re still left wondering how anything but force can check them. The importance of force is, in fact, the central knowing at the heart of this election cycle. Coates’s book - addressed to his students at Howard University - is really a message to black people about how to act when in power. It’s a warning about how the oppressed can turn into oppressors if they’re not careful.

In recent weeks, President Obama, on behalf of Vice President Harris, has also had a message to black people about how to act. A recent NAACP poll showed that one in four black men under 50 support Trump’s candidacy for President. Maybe not enough to sway this election, but definitely enough to know that there’s a problem. This is a bizarre trend because, while it’s common knowledge that black women are the Democratic Party’s most loyal and energized voting bloc, black men have always been regarded as it’s focus and future. Black men have more leadership positions in the Party than any other minority group, including black women who are expected to see the success of black men as interchangeable with their own. After all, Harris is only the candidate because she is the vice president to Obama’s vice president (who had to quit first!). So, in the face of this obstacle, the Harris campaign called on Obama, the Historic Black Man himself, for reinforcement. And, two weeks ago, Obama answered the call by taking black men to task for their reluctance to vote for a Historic Black Woman.

For context, Obama lectured black men all the time when he was in office. He did things like tell a class of black men who had just put in the hard work to graduate from Morehouse College that “nobody cared how tough their upbringing was” and they had “no more time for excuses.” And, with a few exceptions (like Coates back in his blogging days who regularly criticized Obama for chastising black people), he was celebrated for telling it like it was. But now? Now, he’s touched a nerve. Conservatives and liberals alike have unified in their judgment - how dare he assume that “free-thinking” black men are making political decisions based on simple misogyny rather than substantive policy issues? How dare he suggest that black men aren’t operating off well-reasoned disillusionment with the Democratic Party? Well, the answer to both is Obama’s personal experience. Black men overwhelmingly supported him twice despite the fact that, outside of My Brother’s Keeper, a glorified mentorship program, he never offered them anything specific or substantive either. What he offered was the hope that more black men might become the most powerful people on earth by osmosis. And that was enough. However, it’s not working for Harris to the same degree because black men do not see the success of black women as interchangeable with their own in the way that black women do for black men. So, many of these men are voting for Trump instead. And they’re mad that Obama has the unmitigated gall to say why.

At some point, rather than dismissing gender as mere identity politics, people are going to have to get serious about what gender actually is. It is a material interest as formidable as money. It is a substantive issue that not only shapes the way men perceive their economic and social standing in the world, but provides a tangible vehicle for men to improve their economic and social standing in the world. How many black men under 50 need to gain popularity from awful podcasts based on the degradation of black women and profitability of antiblack desire before it’s clear that the phenomenon of misogynoir (i.e. misogyny targeted against black women specifically) is a real and dangerous force? The issue has never been about whether black men are sophisticated political actors who make conscious political calculations. Because, of course they are. The issue is about whether and when black men actually choose to vote on policy versus something that’s of even greater material value to them - in this case, their ability to more effectively wield gender dominance. Trump has campaigned on giving police officers full immunity from prosecution when charged with crimes like murdering black men, but somehow the idea that he represents “freedom from the Democratic plantation” is taken seriously as something other than a cover for those who want access to masculinist violence more than they want access to their own lives.

If the threat of black womanhood provokes increasing numbers of black men to make alliances with white supremacy in the name of preserving black manhood, I’m telling you that we’re going to need a greater force than Obama’s lectures to get us out of it.