[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRzq9XiRZuY?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=141]
A sad story, and one whose outlines I know all too well.
[gallery] Nathan Salsburg’s fine essay in the Oxford American about Paramount Records.
Extreme people doing things at an extreme level are, believe it or not, often a little extreme. And let’s face it, elite modern football is a deeply unnatural environment, a multi-billion‑pound industry peopled entirely by men dressed in shorts, a glazed and airless place of minor concerns endlessly magnified, and an industry that would simply cease to function if everybody blinked a couple of times, took a breath and decided to be completely sensible about everything. Elite, big-money teams in particular are fascinatingly strange, a conspiracy of cosmopolitan self-interest that still remains somehow coherent, these disparate bands of sporting brothers ferried via chinchilla fur-lined helicopter gunship from hotel to airport to luxury compound, barked and yelped and brayed at twice weekly but still able to leap and fight and run through pain for one another, presenting in the process an oddly stirring example of the indomitable human spirit, even while filtered through the triple-glazed tinted glass of billionaire idiot ball. At the end of which: Yaya wants a cake. Give him a bloody cake.
This issue also invites you to consider the unseen side of the city, the social infrastructure that undergirds it—the web of institutions and systems that make it possible, like the hidden girders and encased skeletons that hold up our skyscrapers. The city isn’t just a mission field, a dense audience for Gospel proclamation; it is also a human cultural creation, born of necessity and desire, a way that humans seek to live together. But such a reality is not magic, nor is it merely “natural;” it is an astounding cultural feat that requires constant maintenance, renewal, and reform, especially in a fallen world. Infrastructure isn’t sexy and doesn’t get much press. Nobody moves to the city for the sewers, sanitation, or the municipal master plan. And yet these invisible skeletons of the city are what sustain its life.… It’s fine to ask, “How can I build community in my neighbourhood through urban gardens?” It’s more difficult to answer the question, “Should Detroit have an emergency city manager? And what should he do? Should he honour pensions or protect the museum’s art collection? Should he open the pools or turn on street lights?” Would you want to make those decisions? If you inhabit a city, somebody is making them for you.
The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.John Conyers’s HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.
The Case for Reparations - The Atlantic.
This essay has been getting a lot of buzz in the weeks before its publication, and now that it’s here I have to say that it’s not very good. Coates tries, I think, to do more than can be done even in the considerable space available to him. Much of the essay is devoted to establishing the (incontrovertible and frankly horrifying) fact that the consequences of slavery are active and pernicious today. We cannot be reminded too strongly of this. Nor can we be reminded too strongly that America simply has not reckoned with this ongoing tragedy.
But that is not all that Coates wants to do. Beyond displaying to us the consequences of our shameful history, he wants to say, as he does in the passage quoted above, that debating the Conyers bill is the way to deal with this manifest injustice. Or is that sufficient? Note that he goes from saying that the public debate is what really matters to saying that the payment of reparations is what really matters. But what does he mean by the payment of reparations? Earlier in the essay he writes, “Reparations — by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences — is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely.” But what would count as such “full acceptance”? Sometimes Coates seems to have something quite specific in mind, other times not so much.
(As for me, I would love to see reparations paid — by me, among others — if I could see some way to figure out who would get them, which is to say, who would not get them. The category of “black Americans” is a notoriously indefinable one, and it’s hard to see how Native Americans could be excluded from such attempts to rectify past injustices. And maybe others.)
Coates’s essay seems torn between two tasks: first, trying to evoke for his readers the brutal history, and for many black people the brutal present, that raises the whole question of how things could be even to some small degree made better; and second, making a case for one specific way to go about the process of rectification. The second task gets short shrift, and I think that weakens the essay considerably. I was disappointed by it.
Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make. The identity they fought so hard to protect has, by virtue of that battle, undergone a change: Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be. I do not think, for example, that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the world-which allows so little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint moral issues in glaring black and white-owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged. It is only now beginning to be borne in on us — very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against our will — that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality. People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.
[gallery] More England 2011 photos (Grasmere, Holy Island, Rievaulx Abbey, Magdalen College Oxford)
[gallery] Pictures I took in England in 2011 (Tintagel, Oxford, Canterbury, London), posted today for no particular reason.
[gallery] houghtonlib:
MacGregor, John, 1825-1892. The ascent of Mont Blanc, a series of four views, printed in oil colours by George Baxter, [1855?]Houghton Library, Harvard University
