The push to keep you from thinking of yourself as a sovereign being with free will and dignity

Coleman Hughes has an important read at Quillette today about Ta-Nehisi Coates and reparations.

He says that Coates's position runs into an essential paradox:

ask yourself: How likely is it that a country matching Coates’s description would find itself with major presidential contenders proposing reparations for slavery, and not immediately plummeting in the polls? The challenge for Coates and his admirers, then, is to reconcile the following claims: 

1. America remains a fundamentally white supremacist nation.
2. Presidential contenders are competing for the favor of a good portion of the American electorate partly by signaling how much they care about, and wish to redress, historical racism.

You can say (1) or you can say (2) but you can’t say them both at the same time without surrendering to incoherence. Coates himself has recognized this contradiction, albeit indirectly. “Why do white people like what I write?” he asked (italics in original) in We Were Eight Years in Power. He continued:

The question would eventually overshadow the work, or maybe it would just feel like it did. Either way, there was a lesson in this: God might not save me, but neither would defiance. How do you defy a power that insists on claiming you? What does the story you tell matter, if the world is set upon hearing a different one? [italics mine]

In Coates’s mind, the fact that so many white people love his work suggests that they do not fully understand it, that they are “hearing a different” story to the one he is telling. But a more parsimonious explanation is readily available: white progressives’ reading comprehension is fine and they genuinely love his message. This should be unsurprising since white progressives are now more “woke” than blacks themselves. For example, white progressives are significantly more likelythan black people to agree that “racial discrimination is the main reason why blacks can’t get ahead.”

This presents a problem for Coates. If you believe, as he does, that the political Left “would much rather be talking about the class struggles” that appeal to “the working white masses” than “racist struggles,” then it must be jarring to realize that the very same, allegedly race-averse Left is the reason that your heavily race-themed bookssit atop the New York Times bestseller list week after week. Coates’s ideology, in this sense, falls victim to its own success.

But a pyrrhic victory is a kind of victory nonetheless, and so, partly thanks to Coates, we must have the reparations debate once again.

One sees this in the ever-more excruciatingly purist levels to which identity-politics jackboots insists that one and all adhere. It's how Nancy Pelosi gets branded a white supremicist for calling for a Congressional condemnation of antisemitism. It's how Robert O'Rourke, per the post immediately below, is made to puke all over himself for an innocuous off-the-cuff remark about the division of labor in his household.

A guy like Coates can keep holding the sacred gem of sufficient wokeness just out of reach of the white progressives clamoring for his blessing. He can say, "You still don't get us" and thereby keep the striving revved up.

Hughes makes several other points worth putting front and center in our national discourse.

There's this:

I’m highly skeptical of the blacks-are-unique argument. For one thing, it’s not true that blacks have inherited psychological trauma from historical racism. Though the budding field of epigenetics is sometimes used to justify this claim, a recent New York Times article poured cold water on the hypothesis: “The research in epigenetics falls well short of demonstrating that past human cruelties affect our physiology today.” (For what it’s worth, this accords with my own experience. If there is a heritable psychological injury associated with being the descendant of slaves, I’ve yet to notice it.) 

But more importantly, if humans really carried the burden of history in our psyches, then all of us, regardless of race, would be carrying very heavy burdens indeed. Although American intellectuals speak of slavery as if it were a uniquely American phenomenon, it is actually an institution that was practiced in one form or another by nearly every major society since the dawn of civilization. 

And his concluding point:

At bottom, the reparations debate is a debate about the relationship between history and ethics, between the past and the Good. On one side are those who believe that the Good means using policy to correct for the asymmetric racial power relations that ruled America for most of its history. And on the other side are those who believe that the Good means using policy to increase human flourishing as much as possible, for as many as possible, in the present.

Both visions of the Good—the group-based vision and the individualist vision—require the payment of reparations to individuals (and/or their immediate family members) who themselves suffered atrocities at the hands of the state. I therefore strongly approve of the reparations paid to Holocaust survivors, victims of internment during World War II, and victims of the Tuskegee experiments, to name just a few examples. Where the two visions depart is on the question of whether reparations should be paid to poorly-defined groups containing millions of people whose relationship to the initial crime is several generations removed, and therefore nothing like, say, the relationship of a Holocaust survivor to the Holocaust.

Among the fallacies of the group-based vision is the conceit that we are capable of accurately assessing, and correcting for, the imbalances of history to begin with. If we can’t even manage to consistently serve justice for crimes committed between individuals in the present, it defies belief to think that we can serve justice for crimes committed between entire groups of people before living memory—to think, in other words, that we can look at the past, neatly split humanity into plaintiff groups and defendant groups, and litigate history’s largest crimes in the court of public opinion. 

The phrase I've put in boldface is the core of the leftist enterprise. Leftists are scared to death of individuality. Not for them the notion that all the world's a stage and we all get to play all the parts. No, some groups have to be permanently aggrieved. There have to be victims.

Leftists will not be satisfied until no one would even consider thinking of himself or herself as a sovereign being, with agency and the power of choice.

The truth is the opposite, of course. We are all sovereign beings. And the truth does indeed always eventually make itself plain. But sometimes humankind has to put itself through a lot of misery first.