There’s another thing that’s relevant, something Ta-Nehisi Coates himself says often: that he’s less concerned with racism than he is concerned with the actual lives of black people. I.e., it’s more important to make sure that black Americans have our needs met — health, safety, economic opportunity — than it is to worry how the rest of the country looks at us or thinks about those things.
One thing I like about the rhetorical shift with gay marriage is that it seems to embrace this philosophy: that it’s more important to meet concrete needs than it is to worry about how the broader public feels about them, whether the nation is adequately “convinced.” This is part of the shift from asking to pushing.
And one of the good things about that is that it does its own work. Once your needs are officially met, it becomes a whole lot easier to convince the public to respect that. Suddenly what you’re asking people to respect is the status quo. You have legal recourse to it. You have the added confidence that you’re claiming a given right, not fighting an injustice. You can see this in terms of the civil rights movement, in which legal and legislative change helped hasten social change, however turbulent and begrudging — and it stands to happen far more so with gay marriage, something Americans routinely line up to vote against, but are often (surprise!) pretty much unaffected by when it happens.
Oh, man, I couldn’t agree more. I feel like one of the most annoying and counterproductive tendencies of many of today’s nominally liberal media figures— Frank Rich, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, for sure, but you can see this manifested pretty much anywhere— is an emphasis on scoring points with fellow believers rather than actually changing anything. I don’t get the sense that such people actually care about what happens to the underprivileged, although I’m willing to concede they probably do; it’s too much fun for them (too lucrative?) to call other people racist homophobic teabaggers. I’m guilty of this kind of thing, too— you should hear how I react to the newspaper every morning!— but unthinking tribalism ultimately serves the current status quo. “Pointing out other people’s racism” should be high on the list of “Stuff White People Like” (we could make it “pointing out the speck in your brother’s eye,” if we want to be bipartisan here), but it often has little to do anymore with making a material difference in people’s lives.
