We're throwing Ta-Nehisi Coates into the mix because he's one of today's most prominent African American public intellectuals—writes for The Atlantic, won a National Book Award and MacArthur "Genius Grant"—and because he's in some ways an intellectual descendant of people like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael.

Like these earlier thinkers, Coates is ambivalent about Dr. King's worldview and legacy. For example, MLK strongly believed in the ideal of equality. For him, justice required that American (and global) society bring more people, especially Black people, under the umbrella of equality. Everyone gets the same rights and opportunities, and boom, we're basically good.

Coates, by contrast, doesn't really think there's room for Black people under the equality umbrella, because he thinks the ideal is corrupt. Racism, he says, is essential to the very idea of equality:

"The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black," said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. "And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals." And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of [white Americans'] sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below. (Source)

In other words, all the members of Group A get to feel more or less equal to each other because all the members of Group B are automatically considered inferior.

Not okay, Group A. Not okay.

As you might imagine, Ta-Nehisi Coates isn't so hot on "the Dream" from King's "I Have a Dream" speech, either. The Dream, Coates says, is as an illusion of equality that white Americans uphold in order to feel good about themselves and their country. Believing in equality means ignoring inequality, so white America's peace of mind, says Coates, comes at the expense of Black America:

And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option, because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world […] I was sad for my country […]. (Source)

In short, MLK thought Black people were being unfairly excluded from a fundamentally good society—one that chose not to incorporate them but could if it wanted to, to everyone's benefit. Whereas Coates, like the Black Nationalist folks, thinks the very structure of American society is built on antagonism between white and Black interests.

So he isn't exactly optimistic about white people's ability or willingness to fix things.

Who Built the Arc? No One, No One

Another difference between Ta-Nehisi Coates and MLK is that Coates is an atheist. Dr. King famously remarked that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Here's Coates' take on that:

I don't believe the arc of the universe bends towards justice. I don't even believe in an arc. I believe in chaos. I believe powerful people who think they can make Utopia out of chaos should be watched closely. I don't know that it all ends badly. But I think it probably does.

I'm also not a cynic. I think that those of us who reject divinity, who understand that there is no order, there is no arc, that we are night travelers on a great tundra, that stars can't guide us, will understand that the only work that will matter, will be the work done by us. Or perhaps not. Maybe the very myths I decry are necessary for that work. I don't know. (Source)

This is super different from Dr. K's sense that he's doing "God's will" (45.6) and that African Americans will definitely "get to the Promised Land" (45.10). For Coates, things are nowhere near certain. There's no God and there's no Promised Land. There's no promised anything. Just chaos. Social progress might continue, might come to a halt, might even be reversed. Everything could go horribly wrong.

How's anyone supposed to deal with that?

A Bit of the Old Ultra-Violence

As hazardous as it is (especially if you don't believe in an afterlife), Coates doesn't rule out violence:

[…] violence and nonviolence are tools, and […] violence—like nonviolence—sometimes works. […] Taken together, property damage and looting have been the most effective tools of social progress for white people in America.

[…] "Property damage and looting"—perhaps more than nonviolence—has also been a significant tool in black "social progress."

[…] The Civil Rights Bill of 1964 is inseparable from the threat of riots. The housing bill of 1968—the most proactive civil rights legislation on the books—is a direct response to the riots that swept American cities after King was killed. Violence, lingering on the outside, often backed nonviolence during the civil rights movement. "We could go into meetings and say, 'Well, either deal with us or you will have Malcolm X coming into here,'" said SNCC organizer Gloria Richardson. "They would get just hysterical. The police chief would say, 'Oh no!'" (Source)

Coates also points out that people's reverence for nonviolence, especially as embodied by MLK, can be used against them by the government when it wants to suppress legitimate protest:

When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. (Source)

If you've read our take on repetition in "I've Been to the Mountaintop," you'll notice how similar Coates sounds to MLK here. And they do overlap on some issues—reparations, for example. But Coates and King also sound very different. That's because the problems addressed by the Civil Rights Movement, and also the debates about how to solve them, are alive and well today.