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  • Ceding the Future
  • Derik Smith (bio)

Michelle Alexander rose to the status of public intellectual on the strength of her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010). Her treatise was not a trailblazing work of novel scholarship and innovative policy recommendations. Rather, it was an altered arrangement of ideas that had been circulating in activist circles, in the pages of left-leaning criminology journals, and in the lyrics of popular hip-hop artists for more than two decades. No less important because it was a reconception of existing arguments, it would seem that Alexander carried out the labor expected of the successful public intellectual: She helped shift the public discourse on policy regarding the criminal justice system, a keystone institution of American political economy. It is not likely that Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me will have a similar impact on public discourse. Although it has garnered its author notable accolades, such as the 2015 National Book Award and the MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and has certified his status as a major public intellectual, few policy recommendations or reform initiatives will be developed from his memoir. In her ambivalent review of the book, Alexander responds to its apparent lack of actionable advice by concluding that Coates “hasn’t yet discovered for himself the answers to the questions he poses.” But close reading of the text actually suggests that Coates has answered the principal question he sets for himself, which is “How do I live free in this black body?” (12). His surprising and troubling answer is “With hopelessness and privatized black nationalism.”

Coates’s new answer to an old question is perhaps incomprehensible to Alexander because it represents a profound departure from the tradition of black intellectualism in which Alexander herself works. Described simply, in this tradition the intellectual educates, admonishes, and entreats her audience in hope of hastening the kinds of transformations of publics, policies, and society that have potential for ameliorating the conditions of black life in America. Cast in the form of a letter to his son, and ostensibly addressing both a black audience and secondary nonblack [End Page 183] audience, Coates seeks to educate, admonish, and entreat, but abandons the reformatory structures of black public intellectuals before him. In The New Jim Crow, Alexander did recognizable Promethean work, rearranging the furniture of ideas in the house of reform so that a critical mass might be invited in and political change might issue forth. Coates’s text does something quite different, taking planks from the old house of reform to build a new cabin haunted by Sisyphus, wherein the individual might read, study, and bide his time before the apocalypse.

Between the World is fashioned from well-known elements—it is an African American form of what Henry Louis Gates and Michael Awkward have called “autocritography” (7); it is the self-declared progeny of literary forefathers like James Baldwin and Richard Wright; and it summons the black nationalist spirit of Malcolm X. But from these recognizable materials Coates assembles a text that makes a series of unusual interventions in the black intellectual tradition: Seeming to obey a hard-nosed reality principle, it quashes the salvific narratives of history and freedom dreams that have long animated black religious, secular, and civic thought; it recommends “struggle over hope” (71), but is most interested in the struggle of individual vocation and personal “study” (115–16); and in declaring that “the birth of a better world is not ultimately up to you” (71), its narrator appears to steer the individual reader away from politics of social transformation. If black autobiographers from Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells to W. E. B. Du Bois and Malcolm X have framed learning as an instrumentality, Coates’s narrator seems to make learning an end in itself. And if black nationalism was a component of political strategy for public intellectuals from Martin Delany to Marcus Garvey to Amiri Baraka, for the speaker in the Coates text it is primarily a source of personal solace.

Troubled by Coates’s departures from established modes of black public intellectualism, Alexander in her review makes a charitable gesture by looking beyond...

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