GL: So Coates's historical account is a lie. It tells only one part of the story. It erases the responsibility that African Americans have for our own condition. I refuse to accept that we don’t have responsibility for our condition. I refuse to accept that we're not free-acting agents able to determine our own future.
Ironically, he imputes more agency and more capacity for judgments to white people in his argumentation than he does to black people. Black people are merely puppets at the end of the string that whites are pulling in his narrative.
SI: I realize part of your concern is that by reducing African Americans to historical props, we rob them of their agency. I take your point. But aren’t we all products of history, of antecedent causes over which we had no control? Where you’re born, when you’re born, to whom you’re born — these facts determine our lives to a great degree.
How can we talk about the concrete effects of these historical and material factors without absolving African Americans — or anyone else, for that matter — of their agency? I understand your philosophical position, but I don’t want to deny empirical realities simply because accepting them leads us into a philosophical cul-de-sac.
GL: That's a very difficult question. I see the conflict between the heavy hand of history that lies upon all of us. I didn't choose my parents, for example. If I didn't get read to or exposed to a wider vocabulary when my brain was forming, my linguistic acuity might be damaged forever — there's no undoing that. Neither can we undo the stigma of race that comes to us from the 18th and 19th centuries.
We are conditioned by our environment and our genetic inheritance and our social context, and yet there's no possibility for morality unless we presume the possibility of agency. ... We have to assume that people, despite being socially conditioned, nevertheless exercise free will, albeit within constraints.
Then it becomes a practical question whether single-parent families, in which 70 percent of African-American children live, is rightly thought of as a social phenomenon over which we have control if it's thought of as the inheritance of Jim Crow slavery and American racism. Are the structures of African-American social life the derivative consequences of the political and economic history of African Americans, or are they subject to being reshaped and reformed and remade in an image that we will for ourselves and our progeny? The latter is the stance I'm taking. The alternative is a bleak moral landscape for me.