Americans Believe in the Reality of “Race”

"Americans believe in the reality of ‘race’ as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism—the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them—inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men."

Ta-Nehisi Coates suggests in this passage that the way Americans think about race—and use the concept of race as a biological reality to justify racist acts—is deeply problematic. In Coates’ view, racism is not the product of the existence of race. Rather, the concept of race is the product of racism; that is, it is the product of the need to establish a hierarchy in which those “the people who believe they are white” are at the top. Coates sees the idea that racism is natural and beyond human control as an attempt to avoid responsibility for atrocities like the Middle Passage (the transport of captured Africans across the Atlantic to the West Indies, where they would be sold into enslavement) and the Trail of Tears (the forced relocation of the Indigenous peoples of the southeastern United States to the newly designated “Indian Territory”).

I Had No Sense That Any Just God Was on My Side

"I could not retreat, as did so many, into the church and its mysteries. My parents rejected all dogmas. We spurned the holidays marketed by the people who wanted to be white. We would not stand for their anthems. We would not kneel before their God. And so I had no sense that any just God was on my side. ‘The meek shall inherit the earth’ meant nothing to me. The meek were battered in West Baltimore, stomped out at Walbrook Junction, bashed up on Park Heights, and raped in the showers of the city jail. My understanding of the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box."

Coates, who identifies as an atheist, partially explains his rejection of religion in this passage. Faced with the stark reality of systemic oppression and injustice, Coates feels that believing in a just and moral God does not make sense to him. Moreover, he associates mainstream religion with white supremacy. The phrase, “The meek shall inherit the earth,” comes from the biblical Book of Matthew. Coates regards this promise as plainly false, much as he sees the American Dream as false. Rather than inheriting the earth, the “meek” from his Baltimore neighborhood is sacrificed so that the Dream might flourish for “the people who wanted to be white.” Later, in his discussion of his Howard University classmate Prince Jones’s death, Coates says he felt unable to relate to or participate in the religious aspects of Jones’ funeral, which left him feeling alienated. For Coates, there is no life after death; when an individual's Black body is destroyed, that individual is gone forever—his or her life concludes in a “box” or coffin. Moreover, Black bodies fall disproportionately prey to the “chaos” toward which the “moral arc” of the American universe bends.

Racism Is a Visceral Experience

“But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from...