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?