Gay, Black, Liberal, Immigrant Obliterates Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Anti-American Screed

If you wish to be inspired by Jason D. Hill (a self-described, “gay, black, liberal, immigrant”), I highly suggest this piece.  It’s in response to black radical Ta-Nehisi Coates who is famous for his book “Between the World and Me.” In that book, the author ponders how to live as a black man in a country that celebrates the American Dream.

You won’t be surprised to find out that Coates is not a fan of the “American Dream” or Americans in general. That’s why I loved this piece by Hill in Commentary Magazine, which begins:

Dear Ta-Nehisi Coates:

I read your book Between the World and Me, an elegant and poetic elegy written to your son on “the question,” as you put it, “of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the [American] Dream.” In the book, you reflect on your revelatory experiences, from the fears you felt growing up in your neighborhood in Baltimore to attending Howard University to visiting the South Side of Chicago to your relentless study of African history to your reckoning with the meaning of the Civil War. Many of your readers will come to know the often lonely and exilic world in which you, as an individual black man, have lived for many years. But your book, while moving, reads primarily like an American horror story and, I’m sorry to say, a declaration of war against my adopted country.

Now, that’s an opening.  He goes on to describe Coates’s view of America:

Mr. Coates, you write that the American Dream is the enemy of so much that is good: “The Dream thrives on generalizations, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers. The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing.” The pursuit of this Dream saddens you and all the people in America you describe as being lost “in a specious hope.” The Dream, you say, was built on “the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white,” and that progress was built on looting and violence. You write: “‘White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. However it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, ‘white people’ would cease to exist for want of reasons.”

But Hill isn’t buy it:

I am saddened by your conviction that white people wield such a great deal of metaphysical power over the exercise of your own agency. In making an enemy of the Dream that is a constitutive feature of American identity, you have irrevocably alienated yourself from the redemptive hope, the inclusive unity, and the faith and charity that are necessary for America to move ever closer to achieving moral excellence. Sadder still, you have condemned the unyielding confidence in self that the Dream inspires.

Read all of his amazing piece in Commentary Magazine.

I believe, if I sat down with Hill and talked, we’d find in many ways, we disagree on policy.  But on the fundamental truths of the greatness of America, and the American dream… we’re in complete agreement.

Thank you, Jason D. Hill — your piece gives us hope for this nation.

Image Credit: StaticFlickr

h/t Commentary Magazine