Since the end of Jim Crow, authors who have asserted that white America is not just misguided but actively wicked in its dealings with black America have tended to grow hazy when it comes to what benefit, exactly, white America derives from this villainy. Here we see why: Generally it is the least plausible link in an already tenuous logical chain. In Baldwin’s case, one can only say that if there was a conspiracy to make diligent worker bees of black urban males, it has not gone to plan. In the annals of cui bono, this ranks with the time the head of SNCC said we were in Vietnam “for the rice supplies.”

With [Ta-Nehisi Coates], the central weakness of his argument is that everything always comes back to the violence of “the streets.” School, to him, is just a meaningless hurdle designed to furnish a pretext for white indifference to that violence. The “daily everyday violence that folks live under” puts the April 2015 riots in Baltimore beyond condemnation. What “daily everyday” violence, and at whose hands? That the perpetrators are mostly young and black can be surmised from the list of little violence-avoiding choices that, Coates says, tyrannized his mental life as a child—what to wear, where to sit at lunch, what route to take to and from school, with what friends from what neighborhoods.

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If you ever want to send a chill up your own spine, replace “black people” with “the working class” in one of Coates’s angrier effusions. “The Dream rests on the worker’s back, the bedding made from our bodies … The Dreamers accept this as the cost of doing business, accept the bodies of the working class as currency … The worker is naked before the elements of the world, and this nakedness is not an error but the correct and intended result of policy.” It is no coincidence, comrade! This is why the adulation Coates receives from the mainstream press is so disturbing: not because a fashionable pundit is being praised out of proportion to his talent—that happens all the time—but because it proves we have lost our collective antibodies to the most destructive ideology of the twentieth century. Have theAtlantic readers who find “plunder” such an interesting concept never heard the lyrics to “Solidarity Forever”? (“They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn …”) Do they not remember how that story ends? …

Read the article “Whose to Blame for Black-on-Black Violence? Ta-Nehisi Coates Thinks He Knows” on kirkcenter.org.