How Ta-Nehisi Coates gives Whiteness Power

Ideas have consequences.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ idea is that our basic unit of human identity resides in the pigmentation of our skin.  Our identity thus lies in the group that shares it.

This is the fundamental premise of many in the Black Lives Matter movement.  It is used as a wedge to further the Cultural Marxist agenda of levelling society to the ground.

By implicitly rejecting individual personhood – the category Martin Luther King took to be true – Ta-Nehisi thereby rejects the idea of a common human nature, and hence leaves no possibility of healing the grievances and ills of life.

This is the counsel of despair.

Ta-Nehisi’s idea ironically employs, as the author of this article observes, the same odious premise that motivates the white supremacist movement.

Worse still: the charge of ‘racism’ is also a slur used to silence critics, including those that reject Ta-Nehisi’s superficial premises of ‘race’ as a fundamental category of human identity and see it as a means of entrenching racism, and curdling the public square still further until there can be no solution besides violence.

Worst of all, it is a Pharisaic category that invites us to judge on appearances, which will not permit any just judgment.

The content of one’s character and the acts done in accordance with it are, in one fell swoop, rendered irrelevant.

The character of Ta-Nehisi’s argument needs to be rejected, and a proper understanding of human identity in personhood needs to be vigorously asserted.

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