2 Lessons from Ta-Nehisi Coates

It is hard to say that something like a MacArthur "Genius Grant" is deserved or undeserved given the breadth of the potential candidates and the relatively small number of grants that can reasonably be awarded. But to the extent that the MacArthur Foundation hopes to fund ongoing work that will have a wide public impact, Ta-Nehisi Coates' award this week seems richly deserved. Two of his Atlantic essays from the last year and a half, "The Case of Reparations" and "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration," by themselves make the case that Coates has the power to reshape long-standing arguments and tell compelling stories of public import. And that is not to speak of his best-selling memoir released this summer, Between the World and Me. Putting your money behind Coates' continued excellence seems like a safe bet.

Here I would like to focus on two issues that Coates' work for The Atlantic raises for how we teach, one about history and the other about writing. The MacArthur Foundation is probably aiming at a broader target than just the high school classroom. However, Coates' essays pose challenges in that specific arena that warrant the study of his work as both history and literature.

1. It's Not Even Past

At first blush, it would seem that the most sensible way to teach history, a discipline devoted to the study of cause and effect, would be chronologically. First this happened, then this, so what are the relationships between those two things? How did one lead to the other? 

The two Coates essays mentioned above, however, suggest that maybe there is a better way to structure our study of history. For if there is one thesis tying together Coates' essay on incarceration with his earlier essay on reparations, it is the old Faulkner line about the past not even being past. 

This argument is clearest in "The Case for Reparations." There, Coates begins with the story of Clyde Ross, a resident of Chicago who suffered considerable financial loss from housing discrimination supported by, and in some cases mandated by, various levels of the U.S. government. This is a bold move. By beginning with Ross's story, Coates immediately draws the issue of reparations out of the seemingly distant history of slavery and into the present. The argument becomes one of precise financial damages done to people who are still alive today, and whose lives could still be changed were they to be awarded recompense for their losses. 

With that framework in place, Coates goes on to sketch in the history of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, and the "milder" forms of discrimination that replaced them. However, the presentist focus never wavers. Thus the debate over reparations, a matter too often cast as a philosophical debate about the nature of guilt for crimes long past, is recast as a matter of current events. That rhetorical move is the genius of the essay.

The same can be said for "The Black Family." Here Coates takes Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 50 year-old argument and simply shows where its effects are still felt today. And, in this case, felt today by people in their teens and twenties in addition to people in their eighties.

Thus in both of Coates' major essays of the last year or so, he makes an implicit case that you can approach history through the present, that you can begin with the current event and work smartly backwards to the history that caused it. Coates structure poses a challenge to chronology as the mainstay of teaching history, and poses a challenge for teachers to work backwards from problem to cause, rather than forward from cause to effect. Once you have seen Coates do that so well on the page, it is hard not to think that this might be a more effective structure in the classroom as well.  

2. Narrative and Solutionism

In his Longform Podcast interview after the release of "The Case for Reparations," Coates returns several times to the idea that narrative is central to the essay form, at least when it is done well. In particular, he singles out James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time" as an essay whose narrative aspect is often overlooked but ultimately crucial to the piece's effect. This emphasis on narrative is part of Coates' argument against what he calls "solutionism," the idea that an essay writer has a responsibility to propose some kind of public policy that would solve the problems she has raised.

Those two ideas, the centrality of narrative and opposition to solutionism, coming from one of the best essayists alive today, ought to give teachers of the essay considerable pause because both run directly counter to how the essay is usually taught. We teach students that an essay should be a series of arguments rather than a story; indeed, every year the AP Literature exam includes at the end of its free-response essay prompt the imperative, "Do not merely summarize the plot." Stories, if they appear at all, are best reserved for a sentence or two at the beginning of the introduction, something extraneous to the argument that we sometimes call the "hook."

Solutionism is probably less universally taught than the non-narrative structure of an essay, but it still plays a prominent role in the way we teach essays on social studies and current events topics. A high school essay on the death penalty, for example, would almost universally be judged lacking if it failed to come down either for or against the death penalty. Stating a position doesn't necessarily mean  advocating a certain policy. Where current events are concerned, though, we usually teach as though it does.

There is an obvious way to duck the challenges Coates' writing poses, and that is simply to say that he is not using the word "essay" in the same sense that we use it in high school classrooms. His "essay," one might argue, is the personal essay, the essai in Montaigne's sense of the term rather than the argumentative essay we are meant to teach when preparing students for university.

The problem, though, is that the two Coates essays under discussion here are precisely argumentative essays rather than personal ones. The title "The Case for Reparations" could not make its specific, argumentative nature much clearer. And Coates' chosen topic, reparations for African Americans, is exactly the kind of current events debate for which a public policy solution seems required. It is just that Coates approaches his arguments with narrative at the centre of his structure and with policy proposals left open to debate and discussion. 

Where that leaves us is with the fact that there might be a better way to write an essay than as a series of points arguing for a policy. But what would that look like for a high school student, with few resources and without months to conduct interviews? Where would the stories come from? What structure would you teach? Is it that high school students couldn't do this? Or is it just that it would be harder to do?

Paris Notes 2: Climate Change, Sustainability, and My Role in Stephen Harper's Rise

Much of the appeal of Stephen Harper's years as Prime Minister of Canada has been a kind of stasis. While the United States experienced economic disaster, its banking system teetering for a moment on the brink of collapse, Canada under Harper just hummed along, seemingly affected by neither financial disaster, government shutdown, and political spectacle to its south nor financial disaster and near political dissolution in Europe. Harper's appeal is that, under his firm and boring hand, plain old Canada will keep doing its thing, insulated from the danger that surrounds it in a violent and difficult world. In this sense, Harper has been more philosophically conservative than his American counterparts who, at least since the mid-sixties, have been far more concerned with overturning the status quo than upholding it. Harper's appeal (and this is by no means necessarily a bad thing) lies in his affinity with the average and the boring.

In true Gramscian fashion, though, positions have shifted below Harper's placid surface. These shifts are numerous and seem likely next month to end his tenure as leader of a majority government if not to cost him his job as Prime Minister.

Ten years ago, I played a small role in the election in which Harper first became Prime Minister, serving as both de facto campaign manager and de jure Official Agent for my brother Nigel's campaign on the Green Party ticket. Those were heady days. The campaign stretched a then-longish 60 days through December and January. The Green Party flirted with double digits in national polls and there were high, if unrealistic, hopes that it would win a seat in Parliament. As befits a Green Party campaign with no chance of victory (the Liberal candidate in the riding was the Finance Minister, Ralph Goodale), we ran a low-carbon operation, travelling by bus and foot to events. Despite weather typical of Saskatchewan in December, I rode my bicycle to pick up campaign materials from the Elections Canada office once our petition to be placed on the ballot was accepted. I flatter myself that we were election office favourites for our commitment to principle.

From this distance, one striking aspect of that campaign was the frequency with which we evoked the promise of "sustainability." We uttered the word constantly in conversations and speeches. My most striking memory from the campaign is of Nigel appearing in front of a crowd of a few hundred at a University of Regina all-candidates forum. The NDP candidate touted a Sierra Club report stating that her party had the greenest of all party platforms. Nigel, the dreadlocked outsider candidate, responded directly with a lengthy list of provincial NDP governments' environmental sins, before adding, "And this is the NDP. They're supposed to be the good guys!" He then summed up his position that he had no chance of winning, and the Green Party had no chance of forming government, but someone needed to stand up and point out that if we did not start living sustainably, we were all doomed. This whole election, he concluded, was about sustainability.

Nigel's impassioned speech, one beautifully structured so that it moved from a narrowly partisan attack on the NDP to a philosophical cri de coeur, was very well received. I have surely romanticized this moment of youthful political action, but I recall an ovation that far outstripped anything granted any other candidate that day.

What strikes me today, though, is how quickly the basic message of that speech has become untenable. "Sustainability" as a battle cry has built into it a certain narrative of stasis. There exists, the word implies, a correct balance between human activity and the natural world, and our responsibility is to act only within the boundaries established by that balancing act. Thus we might sustain the earth in its natural state rather than render it changed.

This emphasis on sustaining the current state of things is written all over the hegemonic version of environmentalism: the happily cyclic emblem of recycling suggests that all materials can be returned to an earlier state in a never-ending process; household composting returns food to the dirt from which it came so that food might be grown anew; the very idea of renewable energy sources implies wind, tides, and sunlight that can be harvested forever. Where industrial society is headed toward collapse, sustainable development promises a human civilization that can continue in perpetuity.

But what if all of this is built on a fantasy? For the notion that we humans are in some kind of balance with an external nature, and that this balance might be maintained, seems increasingly fantastical. Slavoj Zizek has been making a version of this critique for some time, and it is clear now that many of the facts are on his side. Global climate change is a part of this; whatever balance may have existed in the past, humans have now committed the earth to significant enough change in the oceans and the atmosphere that sustaining a semblance of the status quo for more than a decade or two is impossible. In The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert makes a similar point in the context of species loss; according to her reporting, we are already committed to change so significant it registers in geological time. To the extent that these facts are well established, the idea of sustaining the status quo seems woefully irrelevant.

I argued in an earlier post that climate change in some ways seems to rebut the postmodern notion of the death of metanarratives. Here, though, climate change would seem to push us in the direction of another postmodernist strain: that of contingency and indeterminacy. For if no "sustainable" future is possible, if the climate change and mass extinction die are already cast, then what is left for environmentalism is to make the best of conditions as they change beneath us. That kind of environmentalism could take on the heady, emancipatory swirl theorists like Ernesto Laclau see in the construction of multiple and shifting political coalitions and causes. But it could also look like a late capitalist nightmare of insecurity in an uncertain world. In either case, the old promise of mere stasis cannot be kept.

The battle cry of sustainability is hardly dead. Indeed, headlines about "Sustainable Development Goals" are everywhere in advance of next week's United Nations meeting on the subject, and the Green Party of Canada remains committed to the concept of a "sustainable economy." Stephen Harper may yet hold on to his job on the promise of continued normalcy for the indefinite future. Conditions, though, have shifted underneath the feet of conservatives and environmentalists alike. And those shifting conditions reveal that environmentalists were, in the specific sense outlined here, conservatives all along.

Melodrama, Existentialism, and Gender

In Albert Camus's introduction to Poésies Posthumes by René Leynaud (reprinted in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death), he describes the late poet in the following terms: "But I have never known a single person who, loving him, failed to love him without reservation. This is because he inspired confidence. Insofar as it is possible for a man, he gave himself completely to everything he did. He never bargained about anything, and this is why he was assassinated. As solid as the short, stocky oaks of his Ardèche, he was both physically and morally strapping. Nothing could make the slightest dent in him when he had once made up his mind what was fair. It took a burst of bullets to subjugate him" (48).

What immediately follows this passage is a page break, and then this: "Up to now, I have spoken of Leynaud dryly and, so to speak, in a general way." The disconnect here between Camus's actual prose and his description of that prose is striking. What he describes as dry is, in fact, both emotional and laced with figurative language: love, infallible morality, assassination, and a man as solid as the oak trees of his homeland, a man who, in the final clause, stares down a "burst of bullets" in the name of what is right. Far from a dry description, Camus's prose here verges on melodrama.

I want to suggest that this dichotomy between claims of plain-spoken realism, on the one hand, and a tendency toward melodrama, on the other, is pervasive in existentialism. The claim to realism (and I am using "realism" here in its political sense, as the opposite of idealism) is most obvious amongst atheist existentialists. For them, the heart of the movement is a rejection of the comforting fiction that there is a God up there who cares about us and that there is a moral order that we need only adhere to in order to live a good life. In Camus' own terminology, we live in an "absurd" universe, one defined by the enormous gulf between what humans ask of it emotionally and what the cold, largely empty universe is capable of providing. This stripping away of religious illusions is at the centre of both postwar French existentialism and existentialism's pop cultural incarnations.

Christian existentialism, though somewhat more sanguine about our ultimate salvation, often shares this appeal to realism in the face of comforting illusions. For Kierkegaard, there may be a Creator out there, but that fact does not lead to any easy answers: we are still faced with the impossible task of figuring out what morality demands and, more difficult yet, when violation of the moral order is required by the higher call of spiritual demands. In Kierkegaard's most famous title, Either/Or, we are denied even the comforting Hegelian illusion that all dichotomies will be subsumed in a higher stage of dialectical development. For Kierkegaard, theist though he was, it is all choice and no grounds.

Thus both theistic and atheistic existentialism pose themselves as realist antidotes to the illusion of traditional moral and religious teaching. In this sense, they stand on the masculinist (more on that later) grounds of facing facts rather catering to our emotional needs.

At the same time, however, existentialism often poses its arguments, and especially its dramatizations, on melodramatic and therefore, at least as traditional genre distinctions would have it, feminized grounds. (I realize there is one very obvious objection to this characterization, but bear with me for a moment.) Take for example, the most canonical of Sartre's short stories: "The Wall." Here the decision without clear knowledge, the unknowability of consequences, and the absurdity of moral choices are staged in the most emotionally heightened of circumstances: the last hours before the protagonist faces the firing squad. (And not just any firing squad--an enemy firing squad eliminating members of the resistance.) Camus's Les Justes stages its themes on similar terrain, tyrants and the scaffold playing prominent roles in another life-and-death drama. In Camus's letters and essays these figures are, if anything, even more prominent; the title Resistance, Rebellion, and Death tells us much about the tendency toward melodrama to be found within its pages. Throughout the existentialist canon, the ticking clock, the noose, and the bravery of the Resistance figure again and again. Even in Viktor Frankl's relatively upbeat Man's Search for Meaning, the central drama is not the quotidian life of its readers, but the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust.

Now let us turn to the obvious objection to what I have written in the previous paragraph: While the subject matter, as enumerated above, may sound overwrought and melodramatic, these texts do not read as melodramatic. And the reason for that is clear: Sartre and Camus are not overplaying their emotional hand; they are dealing with situations that would seem to be objectively charged with high drama and intense emotion. It is impossible to accuse someone of being melodramatic about the Holocaust because the Holocaust, in its objective reality, demands the most violent of words in its representation. And something similar might be said about the French Resistance, anti-Czarist fighters, and the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War. In every case, the objective conditions justify a highly charged representation.

Melodrama, then, is not highly emotional writing, but unjustifiably emotional writing. It is defined by a relationship between the content of a work and how that content is represented.

With that formula in place, I want to turn to the issue of gender. If the existentialists are excused from the category of melodramatists, this is because the subject matter with which they work reads as dramatic, dangerous, difficult, and infused with the highest moral questions. The subject matter of most melodrama does not. But are we as readers free from bias in that assessment? If Sartre reads as morally serious because he was a great man of philosophy, engaged in the serious business of war, why does Harriet Beecher Stowe, concerned with the serious business of slavery, read as melodramatic? If we saw the life of a 19th-century working-class woman as as dangerous, as filled with mortal risk from both assault and childbirth as it may well have been, would we see writing about those lives as melodramatic? Or would we grant that kind of writing the free pass we give Camus and Sartre? A detailed reading of both the facts of 19th century life and the texts representing it would be required to answer that question. However, it may be that our notion of melodrama has as much to do with our assumptions about what life was like for certain groups of people as it does for how those people are written about.

Postscript: It is perhaps no coincidence that the one academic article indicting an existentialist for melodrama levels that accusation at Simone de Beauvoir, for all intents and purposes the only female existentialist.

Narrating the Postwar World: AP U.S. History and the New Right

Historical survey courses must aim for a sweet spot between two extremes. On the one hand, they need to cover enough territory to map for students a reasonable junk of world history. You cannot make the classic grad student mistake of offering an undergraduate course about your dissertation topic; "Late Progressivism: America from 1910-1914" is unlikely to get many signups and even less likely to benefit many students. But a survey course can miss in the other direction as well, proposing to cover so much territory that only the thinnest narration is possible. This is a problem for world history courses everywhere, and reaches its reductio ad absurdum with the Bill Gates-endorsed "Big History Movement," which purports to cover everything from the formation of the Earth to the present in one curriculum, largely reducing history to geology in the process.

Advanced Placement U.S. History often threads this needle quite nicely, but when it errs, it errs in the direction of covering too much. The course provides high school students with a much needed framework in which to place later study of American history and it also weaves in "Document-Based Questions" that ask students to form interpretations of historical issues based on primary sources. The exam itself, in addition to a multiple-choice portion, includes a variety of essay questions asking students to demonstrate several different forms of synthesis and analysis.

All of this is to the good. However, in aiming for comprehensive coverage, AP US History also spreads itself thin, a thinness that can result in a certain kind of narrowness as well. The current curriculum asks teachers and students to sift through American history from 1491 to present in a single year; a sample pacing guide from College Board suggests devoting a scant five hours of instructional time to the period between 1491 (and presumably here "1491" is functioning as a synecdoche for "all Native American history prior to European contact") and 1607. The result of this frantic pace can be kind of capsule history of American periods. Any competent APUSH student can give you a 3-sentence Reader's Digest version of the Progressive Era: abuse of workers; industrial reforms; Teddy Roosevelt. Great teachers can find room for interpretive disputes and historical revision. But in a course that needs to clip along at AP's prescribed pace, there is only so much that can fit. Situating the Progressive Era in its postcolonial (or, if you prefer, emerging American colonial) context is not much on the agenda; queer history is even less likely to get a hearing. Spending time debating the merits of these different historiographical emphases is all but impossible.

Because of their reach into thousands of American and international high schools, these brief summaries will frame American history for tens of thousands of students. And from that fact derives the importance of last spring's AP US History exam which, in the 50th anniversary year of the Voting Rights Act, devoted its Document Based Question not to the Civil Rights Movement, but to "a new conservatism" that "rose to prominence in the United States between 1960 and 1989."

This is a signal shift in how we narrate the postwar world for high school students, a shift away from the postwar era as the triumph of progressive causes and toward it as the triumph of conservative reaction.

At least as an intellectual exercise, this reframing is in some ways long overdue. As Lisa McGirr argues in her brilliant rethinking of the sixties, Suburban Warriors, the conservative movement has been largely ignored in histories of the sixties because it has been “overshadowed by the more flamboyant Left and its movement culture.  Images of Martin Luther King proclaiming ‘Let freedom ring’ on the Washington Mall, students burning draft cards at federal induction centers, and flower children gathering in Haight-Ashbury for the ‘summer of love’” dominate our collective memory of the decade (McGirr 6). McGirr refocuses us on the quieter moments in coffee klatches and PTA meetings that, over the sixteen years from Goldwater's disastrous presidential campaign to Reagan's election, would remake America at the deepest political levels. A number of other academic historians, joined notably by Rick Perlstein's popular histories of the New Right, have made similar arguments over the last decade or so. 

But if this shift in narrating postwar America is intellectually interesting, it is also tempting to see it as politically troubling. If we want the high school students of America to remember three sentences of the postwar world, surely we would rather they remember Martin Luther King, Jr. at the pulpit or Abby Hoffman defiant in a Chicago courtroom than William F. Buckley pontificating in The National Review or George Wallace on the campaign trail. With limited instructional time, the appearance of the New Right in the AP US History curriculum cannot help but crowd out the more traditional heroes of the period.

The solution to this problem is obvious if difficult: moving away from the survey model and toward narrower content coverage. A course that took on less would have time to do more with it. In this specific case, that "more" could involve some real historiographical work for students: which reading of the postwar world, the rise of the New Left or the rise of the New Right, is more valid? What criteria would we use to choose? Is there a way to synthesize the two readings into something that grasps more of the contradictions of the period? Who gains and who loses when one of these interpretations dominates? Those are real and difficult questions. Getting at them would be great. But it would demand jettisoning a lot else--losing, say, 1491-1607 in favour of a deeper look at 1960-1989.