Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Myth of Black Fragility

As the presidential campaign enters its final days, Black men are back at the heart of the American conversation. They are the focus of intense scrutiny as political consultants, pollsters and pundits debate whether their drift away from the Democratic Party is enough to cost Kamala Harris the presidency. That’s a lot of power. But that scrutiny is playing out at the same time as a media dust-up that takes the exact opposite perspective, perpetuating the notion that Black people are terribly delicate, and only to be handled with extreme care.

The debate revolves around Ta-Nehisi Coates, who went on the “CBS Mornings” program to promote his provocative new book, “The Message,” and was greeted with a series of tough questions from the co-host Tony Dokoupil. As you have already heard, some of Dokoupil’s colleagues complained that his interview had gone too far and he had pushed too hard, and he was summoned to a meeting with the standards team and something called the Race and Culture Unit, which is assigned to monitor “context, tone and intention.” Executives later announced that the interview had not met the network’s editorial standards.

Since then there’s been no end of discussion about journalistic ethics and personal bias. But the outrage and concern generated on Coates’s behalf doesn’t help him. It brutally condescends to him.

The idea that Coates should not have been asked such tough questions reflects a pernicious image of Black people, and Black men in particular, that first gained traction in 2020 and 2021, when antiracist virtue signaling too often transmogrified into an extreme grotesque. In a new book, the scholars Craig Frisby and Robert Maranto describe it as part of a worldview in which “whites are inherently oppressive, and African Americans (and by extension all ‘people of color,’ or POCs) serve only as victims around whom whites must walk on eggshells to avoid triggering deep emotional pain.”

I see signs of this excessive caution, as I wrote here recently, in the University of Pennsylvania’s decision to sanction the law professor Amy Wax for her controversial statements about race — as though one white professor airing her views would act like Kryptonite on smart, ambitious and emotionally resilient Black students.

I hear signs of it, as I have mentioned elsewhere, in an announcer I often hear on the radio — who I, as a linguist, feel confident is Black — who is apparently allowed to mispronounce many words in a way white peers do not.

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