Back, as an afterthought, to the assorted reflections of Ta-Nehisi Coates …
I am of the instinctive as well as anthropological opinion that I am a racist, just as Coates is a racist. We are are both but the latest links in a short chain of humanity that only recently crawled out of the muck and from its caves, which is to say, we're tribal to the core. In this formulation of my opinion, there is no value judgment implied. We are racists in that we are the natural products of a not unreasonably wary species that sees "others" — those outside the tribe — as a potential peril; as fellow savages who may very well be hellbent on grabbing our turf, stealing our women and enslaving our children. As NYU professor of philosophy and law Kwame Anthony Appiah put it in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs (and whose essay is, for some reason, unavailable online, otherwise I'd link to it):
Essentialism — the idea that human groups have core properties in common that explain not just their shared superficial appearances but also the deep tendencies of their moral and cultural lives — [is] not new. In fact, it is nearly universal, because the inclination to suppose that people who look alike have deep properties in common is built into human cognition, appearing early in life without much prompting [emphasis mine]…. It can be found as far back as Herodotus' Histories or the Hebrew Bible, which portrayed Ethiopians, Persians, and scores of other peoples as fundamentally other.
Thus the human condition — by now, the human scourge — of racism is a hard-wired one; it's an evolutionary holdover that will be a long time atrophying. Lord knows that our racial demagogues foolishly feed it, but recognizing that a certain and indeed innocent degree of racism is, like the appendix, only natural, rather helps to cope with it, or so it seems to me. Posters of protest that demand we "End Racism Now!" strike me as well meaning, of course, but also naïve. They demand that we suppress our primitive urges in toto, even though those very urges are what make us human.
Perhaps I'm too clinical, or even dangerously dismissive. But in Mr. Coates, I find excessive moralizing — and that, to my mind, is the worse intellectual sin. As a species we are what we are, and in some instances what we are cannot be changed — not overnight. Thundering sermons, personal superiority lectures and morality tales don't help. Not to my mind. But I also admit I find talk of social "morality" rather offputting; I lean toward Eastern philosophies of personal ethics instead. So there's that, too, and maybe that's what really gripes me about Mr. Coates.