As the presidential campaign enters its final days, Black men are back at the heart of the American conversation. They are the focus of intense scrutiny as political consultants, pollsters and pundits debate whether their drift away from the Democratic Party is enough to cost Kamala Harris the presidency. That’s a lot of power. But that scrutiny is playing out at the same time as a media dust-up that takes the exact opposite perspective, perpetuating the notion that Black people are terribly delicate, and only to be handled with extreme care.
The debate revolves around Ta-Nehisi Coates, who went on the “CBS Mornings” program to promote his provocative new book, “The Message,” and was greeted with a series of tough questions from the co-host Tony Dokoupil. As you have already heard, some of Dokoupil’s colleagues complained that his interview had gone too far and he had pushed too hard, and he was summoned to a meeting with the standards team and something called the Race and Culture Unit, which is assigned to monitor “context, tone and intention.” Executives later announced that the interview had not met the network’s editorial standards.
Since then there’s been no end of discussion about journalistic ethics and personal bias. But the outrage and concern generated on Coates’s behalf doesn’t help him. It brutally condescends to him.
The idea that Coates should not have been asked such tough questions reflects a pernicious image of Black people, and Black men in particular, that first gained traction in 2020 and 2021, when antiracist virtue signaling too often transmogrified into an extreme grotesque. In a new book, the scholars Craig Frisby and Robert Maranto describe it as part of a worldview in which “whites are inherently oppressive, and African Americans (and by extension all ‘people of color,’ or POCs) serve only as victims around whom whites must walk on eggshells to avoid triggering deep emotional pain.”
I see signs of this excessive caution, as I wrote here recently, in the University of Pennsylvania’s decision to sanction the law professor Amy Wax for her controversial statements about race — as though one white professor airing her views would act like Kryptonite on smart, ambitious and emotionally resilient Black students.
I hear signs of it, as I have mentioned elsewhere, in an announcer I often hear on the radio — who I, as a linguist, feel confident is Black — who is apparently allowed to mispronounce many words in a way white peers do not.
I read signs of it in the anxious discussions of whether it’s presumptuous for white novelists to write in the voice of Black or brown people.
This kind of thing is not what I grew up thinking it was to join the future on race. My role models were, say, the computer nerd Oliver in the magnificent “Bloom County” comic strip (now available in a complete collection I engage almost every evening). He was so engaged by his interests that he could barely be distracted from his screen long enough to think about the fact that he was smarter than any of the other characters. Or the three (half) Black brothers in the Farrelly brothers movie “Me, Myself and Irene” — down-with-it, recreationally profane, dissing one another in all of their happy vulgarity for not mastering arcane concepts from what we now know as STEM. Or even just the Black culinary students I once saw on the New Jersey PATH train, trading war stories in jolly and often profane Black English about how harshly their teachers had evaluated their toast points, their rémoulades, their skate with brown butter. The students weren’t accusing anyone of racism. They were in after-work mode, describing their training as a competition, laughing about their slightly bruised egos and daring anyone to doubt their eventual success.
If only the CBS employees and their managers had had the same kind of faith in Coates. If it had been a white author in the hot seat that day, I find it impossible to imagine that anyone would have sounded any internal alarms. Certainly no one would have summoned the Race and Culture Unit. But why does the mere fact that the host is white make the interview a racial incident?
As depressing as all this may be, there’s reason for optimism — and evidence that we really have left the era of “peak woke.” The CBS correspondent Jan Crawford had the guts to speak up in defense of Dokoupil, arguing he had done nothing wrong. Shari Redstone, head of CBS’s parent company, said Dokoupil’s censure was a mistake. Even Coates has said that he can take care of himself.
That’s as it should be. Acting as though Black people can’t hold their own in a challenging discussion — as though they can’t speak up for themselves and therefore need others to speak up for them — isn’t antiracist, it’s demeaning. Blackness is not weakness. We need to stop coddling sane, self-sufficient Black people — like Coates — and move on.
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