Following yesterday's echo chamber thread "discussion"...

Coates... clarifies:

"... I should have made it clear that the direct victims of terrorism are even weaker, and that "weakness," itself, is not noble. In other words, it needs to be clear the victims of white terrorism were not rich white developers, but black people who -- at that time -- existed almost beyond the protections of the state.  

During Chicago's race riots, police often arrested victims instead of offenders, and at times would put up only faint resistance to terrorist action. I think bringing Al Qaeda into this muddies the waters.  

The white terrorists of Chicago were not stateless -- they were often operating on of the same motives and working toward the same ends as people further up the class ladder. Indeed, what is so striking in Hirsch's work is that he demonstrates that the anti-black violence of mid-20th century Chicago was near total. The rioters were not only neighborhood toughs, but old men, working men, women with children."

Hmm...

When once [sic] considers the actions of developers and the actions of office-holders, what is revealed is every sector of the city -- its business interests, its government, its people, and sometimes even its churches -- employing its particular weaponry to effect a single goal: the subjugation of black people.

Every sector...  I suspect he thinks even the nuns teaching in Catholic schools in the "ghetto" were in on it, too.

I wish I could say I was being hyperbolic. Except that I'm in the middle of Beryl Satter's Family Properties, and I am seeing the same thing all again. This is not the talk of Illuminati or the Tri-Lateral Commission. This is rigorous scholarly history. And yet here is Hirsch again...

See, this is the trouble with being uneducated, or undereducated:

Mr. Coates reminds me of a college freshman, taking his daily language lab in French, and then being exposed to what he sees in his sociology readings.  Sometimes it does indeed take a more learned person -- perhaps a professor -- to help one understand what exactly he is reading.

And sometimes it does indeed take four years of study to shake the freshman mindset that one author, one  scholar somehow holds all the answers, and the rest are just rubbish.  At first, you want to double down, perhaps, on seeing what you want to see, as a victim of history.  Next, you want to toss the history books, thinking you hold all the answers yourself --  a self-discoverer of all the wrongs done to your own people.

I hope Coates makes time to finish the Satter book, or even checks out this one:  The Middle Americans (1971, Little Brown), put out by the Atlantic back in the day*.  His mind might expand a little to perhaps consider other conclusions, other viewpoints than those in his familar stomping grounds.

 In the end, though, Coates reveals his career template, and why mess with what's paying the private-school bills?

How is it, after all our study and exploration; after all our theories of differing conscience, of labor, of capitol, of class struggle, of agrarianism, and industrialism, of plutocrats and workers, we end up where we started? How are we, again, employed in this same small talk, on this same damn corner? How can it be that in any serious investigation of American domestic policy, knowing nothing of the specifics, you can walk into a room, yell "White Supremacy," and have a 50/50 shot at being right?

History is absurd.

With what The Atlantic has invested in his career, 

I wish one of his older mentors on the staff might encourage him to go back to school and earn his undergraduate degree.  Being surrounded by a critical mass of others tackling such material for the first time, might aid his critical thinking skills and allow him to consider other diverse viewpoints.

You don't gain much understanding in an echo chamber, afterall.

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ADDED:  Sometimes in these comments threads though, you do see a minority viewpoint push back on the generalized assumptions:

Bill Harshaw 

I shouldn't comment without reading the book, but when I get to it, Prof. Hirsch will have a big job in convincing me there was a "single goal". That's very hard for me to believe of people at any time in our history. Americans having been shouting conspiracy ever since the whites settled on the continent, and very few have proved out.

This is the difference, perhaps, between the intellectual growth of critical reasoning skills between a freshman and a graduating senior.  Read... read... and then read some more...
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*  by Robert Martin Coles, with photos by Jon Erickson.

David Riesman stressed in his evaluation of Coles: "There is one important theme he has contributed: antistereotype. Policemen are not pigs, white Southerners are not rednecks, and African Americans are not all suffering in exotic misery. What he is saying is 'People are more complicated, more varied, more interesting, have more resiliency and more survivability than you might think!"

...

Coles was an enormously prolific writer; by the early 1980s there were more than thirty books and more than five hundred articles. By early 1997, that number climbed to over 53 books. Many of them carried on the same conception and approach. 

They are about miners in Appalachia, children in strife-torn Belfast and apartheid-ridden South Africa, middle Americans, the elderly Spanish-speaking of the Southwest, troubled adolescents. Throughout there is a steady vision of what is wanted, a "method," as Coles was careful to say in quotes.

"Eventually we pull together the words of others and our own observations into what (we can only pray) is a reasonably coherent and suggestive series of portraits, comments, reflections." The technique is by no means new. The books of the anthropologist Oscar Lewis, in the same vein, predated Coles's work by a decade. But Coles's psychiatric background deepened the portraits. And the connection of personal lives to oppressive social conditions was made more explicit. We must not only record how the miners talk about the terrible devastation of "black lung"; we must get rid of black lung. 

As the years went by, Coles came to emphasize more and more his role as a writer, a creative writer, with a particular interest in the life of the spirit as well as the mind. His was a broadly religious outlook, a sense of the Judaic-Christian ethic at work rather than a formal elaboration of a given theology. His many biographies—of the psychiatrist Erik Erikson (1970), of the poet William Carlos Williams (1975), of the writers Flannery O'Connor (1980), James Agee (1985), and Walker Percy (1978)—engaged Coles in this contest, as did the collections of essays, whose titles provide a clue to Coles's central concern: Harvard Diary: Reflections on the Sacred and Secular (1988); A Spectacle unto the World: the Catholic Worker Movement (1973); The Moral Life of Children (1986); The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination (1989), and so on. 

The Moral Intelligence of Children hopes to further the idea that moral development is every bit as important as intellectual and emotional growth. "It's interesting how we make these generalizations about ghetto children and forget the parallels among the privileged. In some privileged precincts of America, you have well-educated parents with plenty of money who give their children toys and travel and credit cards. What they don't offer them is moral attention, a sense of connection to the community. The result can be staggering morally. And teachers are left to pick up the pieces."  

...

 Coles stands out as one of a diminishing group of scholars who refute the destructive and anti-democratic specialization that has nearly eliminated the general intellectual—once found in the hard sciences as well as in the history and English departments of the great universities—from public and political life.