Yes, Ta-Nehisi Coates, it's good to be right

The Twittersphere -- at least, my Twittersphere -- is widely commending Ta-Nehisi Coates' tribute to Andrew Sullivan.  I can sort of see why -- it captures what Andrew himself has often presented as his core virtue -- but it also seems to me to be based on a perverse premise.

Back when I started blogging, there was an annoying premium on "public smartness" and "being right" among pundits, journalists, and writers. Likely, there is still one today. The need to be publicly smart and constantly right originates both in the writer's ego and in the expectation of incurious readers. The writer gets the psychic reward of praise—"Such and such is really smart" or "Such and such was 'right' on Libya." And the incurious reader gets to believe that there is some order in the world, that there is a stable of learned (mostly) men who will decipher the words of God for them. The incurious readers is not so much looking for writers, as prophets.

Does Obama subject African Americans to "targeted scorn"?

Yesterday I put up some thoughts about Obama's commencement speech at Morehouse College, in blithe and admittedly self-imposed ignorance of what others had said about it (I plead lack of time, fatigue and eagerness to get my thoughts down -- and will also cop to not wanting to complicate that quick-stream).  I thought it was an awesome speech, in the pre-colloquial sense of awesome, as in awe-inspiring.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, however, greets the speech (and a parallel commencement address by Michelle) with a powerful indictment. In response to a passage in which Obama admonishes the Morehouse Men, "there's no longer any room for excuses" -- e.g., being held back by racism, Coates writes:

This clearly is a message that only a particular president can offer. Perhaps not the "president of black America," but certainly a president who sees holding African Americans to a standard of individual responsibility as part of his job. This is not a role Barack Obama undertakes with other communities.

Taking the full measure of the Obama presidency thus far, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this White House has one way of addressing the social ills that afflict black people -- and particularly black youth -- and another way of addressing everyone else. I would have a hard time imagining the president telling the women of Barnard that "there's no longer room for any excuses" -- as though they were in the business of making them. Barack Obama is, indeed, the president of "all America," but he also is singularly the scold of "black America."

There is undoubtedly a lot of truth to this. As Fallows notes in response, though, Obama has to walk a razor-thin tightrope when addressing African Americans directly or matters of race generally -- or, better, as Fallows put it, "a tiny, little rope suspended across a Grand Canyon." By way of additional mitigation, Fallows notes,  "We all take a different tone in setting expectations for "our own."

I would add three further mitigating thoughts. First, in his admonishments throughout the speech, Obama was channeling the historic messages of Morehouse itself -- including in the passage Coates focused on:

Epistemic closure: the prequel

Thanks to the Lincoln movie and Ta-Nehisi Coates, I've been reading This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War by James M. MacPherson just as our current tax/spending battles reach their Little Round Top.  One essay, "Long-Legged Yankee Lies: The Lost Cause Textbook Crusade" recounts how self-appointed guardians of historical truth in the postwar South inculcated the mythology of the Lost Cause -- a noble, benevolent, freedom-loving southern society crushed by the aggression and fanaticism of Lincoln's north. That news from 1919 gave a deja-vu quality to my absorption of  statements by GOP leaders this week:

"It’s not a gun problem; it’s a people problem."

Washington doesn't have a revenue problem—it has a spending problem!  

"I've become convinced the president is unwilling to stand up to his own party on the big issues that face our country."

In Spielberg's Lincoln, don't underestimate Thaddeus Stevens

There is a legitimate criticism to be made that Steven Spielberg's Lincoln underplays the role of African Americans in their own liberation. The charge holds, notwithstanding that the opening battle sequence prominently spotlights black soldiers in a battle tableau of intense horror, immediately followed by a powerful scene in which a young black soldier, present at that battle, challenges Lincoln with the nation's failure to live up to the lofty sentiments expressed in the Gettysburg address. Kate Masur makes a convincing case  that  "it’s disappointing that in a movie devoted to explaining the abolition of slavery in the United States, African-American characters do almost nothing but passively wait for white men to liberate them." Masur's complaint that the film renders passive two African American White House servants who were in fact effective activists seems to me inarguable.

Less legitimate, it seems to me, are complaints that the film glorifies political compromise (as opposed to inviting us to assent to ethically compromised political machinations, which it does do) - or that in valorizing Lincoln's pragmatic maneuvering, it correspondingly devalues the unalloyed abolitionism and racial egalitarianism of the radical Republicans, led by Thaddeus Stevens. So argues Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Coates: of arms and Obama he sings

After a bout of fussing and fret, this post by Ta-Nehisi Coates broke something loose in me:

OK, I'm tired of this. Someone--who shall remain nameless--just asked me if I was "nervous" about Obama. FTDS. I don't believe in black cats. I don't toss salt over my shoulder. I step under ladders whenever the mood strikes me. I break mirrors in my spare time. I've made a hobby out of splitting poles. Thirteen is my favorite number. So fuck it, I'm gonna say it--Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States.

The exorcism works because Coates nails Obama's achievement:

This [presidential politics] is a war, and you don't lose wars because of abstract principles, but because of hard immovable facts. Is your army bigger than theirs? Are you attracting more recruits? Are you deploying in the right places? Who has more resources? Who has the technology edge? These are the reasons I voted Obama in the primary. I didn't think he was "more principled" than Clinton, nor did I really care. I thought she was tough, but I knew he was tougher. I thought her campaign was smart, but I thought his was smarter. I thought one person was talking about being a fighter, and another was out there actually being a fighter. The general is bearing all of this out, because right now, Barack Hussein Obama is beating John McCain like he stole something--from Toot, no less.

Read the whole thing - or rather view it -- the poster art is even better than the post.

My only caveat: I think that Obama was more principled than both Clinton and McCain - and that that's a major source of his firepower.