The Sins of the Fathers

If reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015) is like reading the Book of Jeremiah and watching The Wire on acid, reading J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016) is like reading The Grapes of Wrath and watching Breaking Bad on oxy. I just finished reading both of them back-to-back and my head’s spinning.

In Numbers 14:18, we learn that the LORD punishes children for the sins of their forefathers “unto the third and fourth generation.” If the idea that children are born guilty was central to the doctrine of Original Sin, and the notion of collective guilt was central to Puritan theology, belief in the Curse of Ham was a central feature of the pro-slavery argument. According to this bizarre view, black Africans are the descendants of Ham, Noah’s youngest son, who was cursed for the unpardonable sin of seeing his father’s junk.

Noah got wasted one night and passed out naked in his tent. For walking in on this pathetic Manchester-by-the-Sea scene, Ham was cursed thus: “And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.”

One of modernity’s greatest achievements is the rejection of notions of collective guilt. We hold individuals responsible for their actions, not groups. We punish individuals for their actions, not groups. If Between the World and Me has an overriding message, it’s that we need to revisit the notion of collective guilt.

Coates proudly proclaims his freedom from the religious superstitions of his forefathers, but he’s written a remarkably biblical book. And by biblical I mean Old Testament. Coates believes that white babies in America are born guilty. He believes in collective responsibility, community guilt, and reparations payments. Individuals aren’t individuals in this book (unless they’re Coates or someone close to Coates); they’re group representatives. As Cornel West rightly observed in The Guardian: “Coates fetishizes white supremacy. He makes it almighty, magical and unremovable.”

The upshot of this is that nobody is responsible for anything in Coates’s community. If his father was violent with him, it’s not his fault. He meant well. If a black police officer shoots an unarmed black teenager, it’s not his fault. He’s just a mindless drone acting on behalf of the American white racist majority. By contrast, Vance can see how a fucked-up family and a fucked-up community created his fucked-up mom, but that doesn't mean she’s off the hook for being such a horrible, abusive, heroin-addicted parent.

If Hillbilly Elegy has an overriding message, it’s that there’s something wrong and dysfunctional at the heart of hillbilly culture, something which can’t be blamed on Obama or the mainstream media. The problems of Vance’s people cannot be blamed solely upon outside forces. Coates is preaching a very different message.

The most powerful parts of Between the World and Me (2015) have to do with the everyday vulnerability of the black body (especially the black male body). This is the beating heart of Coates’s fiery epistle. And it’s as riveting as it is horrifying. I have never felt as naked in my own city, my own country, as Coates does on a regular basis.

I might be tempted to write Coates off as paranoid, for all of the most pathetic reasons, if I hadn’t heard the same thing from dozens of others black guys and Mohawks over the years; if I hadn’t lived in Baltimore for a good chunk of my twenties; and if I didn’t know far too much about that nightmare known as American History.

I’m a direct descendant of Maryland slaveholders, which makes me connected to Vance and Coates by blood or history. Maybe both. If Coates’s ancestors were the slaves, and Vance’s were the poor white overseers, my ancestors were the slaveholding planters who owned Coates’s ancestors and used Vance’s ancestors.

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”