In a discussion of Ta-Nehisi Coates's recent book on apartheid Israel (The Message) Breaking Points commentator Krystal Ball's examples of the persistence of racial horror in the U.S. were pretty under-whelming. Does Trump falsely blaming Haitian immigrants for eating American pets really stand out as worthy of mention in the longstanding U.S. tradition of slavery, lynching, and mass black imprisonment? Realistically, that has to be far down the list of racial priorities in the U.S., where black people still don't have capital four hundred plus years after being wrested from their homelands and brought to the U.S. as slaves.
Forty acres and a mule for all former slaves never happened, and that failure has obvious repercussions down to the present day. Pretending it isn't so solves nothing.
On the other hand, it's easy to give up on Ta-Nehisi Coates, especially after he preposterously claimed that Barack Obama was the only legitimate heir of Malcolm X. Malcolm was a revolutionary, the greatest black revolutionary of the 20th Century, in fact; Obama was what Malcolm called a "House Negro," the Great Half-White Hope of corporate America. Advertising Age gave him an award for the slickness of his 2008 election campaign. When did Malcolm ever win acclaim from corporate America? Never.
It is certainly a blessing that Coates is now bringing to a mass audience the news that Israel is an apartheid state, which is all to the good, albeit a bit late in the day.
Ball's co-presenter Saagar Enjeti is incensed at Coates for quite another reason, specifically that he paints the U.S. as as much of an apartheid state as Israel is, where segregation is codified in law. That is too much for Enjeti, who vehemently denies it.
Actually, Coates's explicit comparison between the two apartheid states is drawn between the Jim Crow south and Israel, and there the comparison is not far-fetched. As much as Palestinian Arabs today blacks in the old south had no rights anyone else needed to respect. Both groups were subjugated and terrorized by overwhelming force.
Any comparison between Israel and the U.S. in the post civil rights era would be more problematic, though not entirely out of bounds. While one would not want to dismiss the immense civilizing influence of the civil rights movement on American society, especially the end of lynching, at the same time we remain deeply segregated fifty-six years after MLK was gunned down for correctly connecting racism in U.S. foreign policy with racism at home, an analysis that has never been allowed to move us to overcome the deep racial divisions that continue to scar American society. In other words, it's far from a simple matter to assess the gains and losses of the civil rights era, and specifically to what degree legal segregation may have been worse than the de facto segregation that succeeded it.
As educator Jonathan Kozol has pointed out for years, photographs of students in American public schools today look remarkably similar to photos taken during the Jim Crow era. Nowhere do large numbers of white children go to school with their black counter-parts, and nowhere do blacks have access to the same level of funding as whites enjoy. Has the U.S. really changed all that much? We may like to think so, but the facts on the ground say we're kidding ourselves.
Every inch of the land of Israel is built over destroyed Palestinian villages, and over ninety percent of it is permanently held in trust for the Jewish people. In the United States black-white relations were founded on sexual violence and wills and trusts deliberately excluded blacks from all but a miniscule portion of the national wealth. Purposive striving by individual blacks will not overcome this problem, which is national, not personal.
Unlike in Israel where apartheid is backed by law, in the U.S. it is the custom of the country, a force stronger than law. In both cases it is a deep and enduring ugliness that mocks all pretensions to civilized existence.
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