The latest installment of The Confessions of Saint Ta-Nehisi Coates, appearing yesterday in The Atlantic, takes the form of a jeremiad against the iniquities of Kanye West. Embedded in lengthy autobiographical ruminations that have become his trademark, Coates reflects on his memories of Michael Jackson, and how Jackson “had always been dying—dying to be white. That was what my mother said, that you could see the dying all over his face, the decaying, the thinning, that he was disappearing into something white, desiccating into something white.”
Coates’ essay, “I’m not Black, I’m Kanye,” castigates West for essentially betraying his history, his fans, his culture, and indeed his blackness. “West calls his struggle the right to be a ‘free thinker,’ and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant.” Whiteness as America’s original and irredeemable sin is Coates’ orthodoxy. In his book, We Were Eight Years in Power, Coates avers that the “bloody heirloom” of racism “remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life.” Whiteness, he preaches, is “an existential danger to the country and the world.”
White racism found its apotheosis and embodiment in Donald Trump. ”Whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman,” Coates writes in Eight Years, “Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.” Thomas Chatterton Williams, writing in the New York Times last October, observed that Coates seems to be “glad, relieved even, that Donald Trump was elected president. It is exhibits A through Z of Mr. Coates’s national indictment, proof that the foundations of the United States are anti-black and that the past is not dead — it’s not even past, to echo William Faulkner.”
Coates worships and hates whiteness. It consumes him. Indeed, has anyone captured an idea of the devil so exquisitely and longingly since Milton? Or perhaps it is Coates’ own rage and anguish that Milton’s poetry describes: “the study of revenge, immortal hate, and the courage never to submit or yield.” “Which way shall I fly?” Milton’s Satan asks. “Infinite wrath and infinite despair? Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.”
Williams is not the only commentator to see how Coates fetishizes race, but he is clearer than most in seeing that “the most shocking aspect” is “the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race — specifically the specialness of whiteness — that white supremacist thinkers cherish.” “Both sides,” Williams points out, “mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural.”
Coates seems unable to to purge his demons and unable to talk about anything else. As he ossifies, disturbingly, into an obverse validation of white racialism, Coates’ refrain in his Atlantic essay about “dying to be white” does indeed seem more confession than accusation. In any event, it appears that martyrdom appeals to him, and so he intends, obsessively, to go on dying, and chronicling his agony for as long as liberal magazine editors provide him a cross.