Is Barack Obama too tough on black Americans?

A spirited exchange between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jonathan Chait shows that the debate over black inequality remains as complex as ever

Obama
(Image credit: (Sean Gallup/Getty Images))

I hope you've been following the past week's most electrifying and important online debate — the one between The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates and New York's Jonathan Chait about "Black Pathology and the Closing of the Progressive Mind." That's the title of Coates' rejoinder to Chait, who was writing in response to an earlier Coates post that took aim at Bill Cosby, Michael Nutter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama for their tendency to highlight the role of culture in fostering black poverty — a tendency Coates says they share with Republican Rep. Paul Ryan.

Coates has taken aim at Obama on this topic before. But he struck a nerve this time by claiming that both black and white progressives look at race in much the same way as conservative Republicans — and that they do so because "it is a message that makes all our uncomfortable truths tolerable." What are those truths? That racism — and its corollary, white supremacy — remain pervasive in the United States, contributing decisively to "a yawning wealth gap, a two-tiered job market, and persistent housing discrimination." Flinching in the face of this racist reality — sensing that fighting it is as futile as "getting angry at the wind or raging against the rain" — public figures of both parties and races prefer to blame the supposedly pathological culture of black men instead.

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Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.