Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

On Bacevich and Bill Withers:

http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/11/ok_now_im_totally_reaching.php

I mean if you go on his blog right now and just keep reading you don't really run into anything that sucks. I fuckin' love this guy.

otm great dude & ive noticed that he tends to really know what hes talking about when hes posting assertive and be pretty modest when he's on uncertain terrain vs. cocky overconfidence of say a andrew sullivan

yeah he's definitely not from britain

His great article about playing WoW at 30.
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1577502,00.html

Adding to all that, and a lot of his commenters are sharp folks as well (and yeah I've commented there but I wasn't meaning me, dammit).

dig this guy

http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/12/barack_obama_crush_puny_malik_shabazz.php

If you are writing columns on the president-elect of the greatest power in world history, who happens to be black and you can't even bother to crack his memoir, than you are more than Leeroy Jenkins. You do not simply fail in epic manner, but more like Palin, Couric and "all of them," like M.C. Hammer hounded by creditors. You are Plaxico at the bar, shooting yourself with your own gun. And in so doing, you ascend to the 37th chamber--the chamber of intergalactic fail. All bow before the master.

complete and absolute five-point stuck-landing DORK KLANG on all levels

I think tom has a cruuuuush

Btw coates is great--he used to do a lot of stuff for the voice and I remember keeping an eye out for his name

ive seen an older article chronicling crouch-related lols by him as well.

major loss of points for making me read mcardle today, jesus christ how in the world does she still rate a job writing about anything

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/da/Leeroy_Jenkins_Jeopardy_clue.jpg

yeah i love this dude even if he is a cowboys fan.

http://i.imgur.com/OVBos.png

lol dude get over yrself

Needs more context, I presume.

lol you

Enh, dude's just giving himself a spacer before dumping on the dead.

well if you read him, and i am a fan, he just will not stop w/these calls for thoughtfulness which is really something thats better demonstrated than talked about

i mean if you want to take some time to think abt something theres absolutely no need to tweet abt it, except that maybe you think youre making some sort of statement

He's calling for circumspection which is fine, especially in light of the character of the defunct

I mean, it's not like he's _not_ going to unload on the stiff at some point.

Presumably.

if you want to call for circumspection that one thing, a fairly substance free presumptuous thing, but what he was doing is passing off his judgment of the situation as some sort of personal journey, im just gonna go think man, here is me tweeting abt thinking deeply

I read this guy and sometimes he has good things to say, but ice cr?m otm

i love ta-nehisi coates, but twitter is not for everyone

tbf he takes this stance constantly on his blog

which i think is v good except for this thing that is irritating and lame

but i guess isn't the thing that TNC has a bunch of followers who are expecting him to be posting about Breitbart, so he's kind of saying 'yes i know about this but i need to think it through before i write AS SHOULD YOU btw', like, there's an element of i-am-on-top-of-this-news but also i-am-representing-well-reasoned-thought

I think he's whistling at his readers that he knows Brietbart's dead and the reason he hasn't written anything about it yet is 'cause he hasn't gotten the smile off of his face yet.

i am representing well reasoned thought w/o actually demonstrating it is the problem

How much was the retainer?

i mean i know he didnt actually choose the cover image or the tagline but lol dude

http://i.imgur.com/M4Qwi.jpg

but i guess isn't the thing that TNC has a bunch of followers who are expecting him to be posting about Breitbart,

A strange expectation: yet one more liberal writing yet another scabrous obit?

Even granting that it is a pose he likes to strike, most writers in his position, needing to churn out copy at a fantastic rate to appease his readers, fall into characteristic tropes and poses. It is part of being a pundit. Not such a big lol in the scheme of things, but, yeah, it shows a tendency to furrow his brow a bit too obviously.

He is pretty cool. I can cut him some slack for a clunky thing here and there. He hasn't gone full Greenwald just yet.

i think his self-seriousness is inseparable from what's good about his writing when it's good.

naw he is v capable of greater self awareness and is much better in that mode

TNC will end up writing about the lack of ethics in modern poltical propaganda or epistemic closure or how the interwebs have empowered pit-bull journalism or something, but I doubt he will linger much over Brietbart himself all that much.

oh man, maybe it's TNC that is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Sincerity

i think his self-seriousness is inseparable from what's good about his writing when it's good.

― horseshoe, Thursday, March 1, 2012 2:24 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

actually forgive me for not thinking abt this deeper, i do think whats good abt his writing is maybe p closely related to his ponderousness, he does a thing thats p endearing where you can feel him thinking, he s lets you in, which is not easy, but he tends to go off the rails w/it which is maybe not surprising considering what a delicate operation it is

also id like to say that his blog is ime much better than his long form writing but why

eh his problem isn't that he's too sincere, paul krugman is sincere too, his problem is that he spends too much time thinking outloud and being nice

(xp)

he spends too much time thinking outloud

― iatee, Thursday, March 1, 2012 2:30 PM (4 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is his problem, yes. twitter is bad for him, i really think, although now i sound like a crazy person who thinks ta-nehisi coates is her friend. which lol is how i actually think of him tbh. i'm fine with him being nice.

i don't really disagree with anything jho has said, though. i originally typed "ponderousness" instead of "self-seriousness." dude has a lot to say.

i'm making sure i'm putting that waxpapery ring thing on the seat before i take shit in this toilet. #breitbartpocalypse #thoughtfulguy

and he says it slowly. i always am jealous of people who can write like that; i do the opposite.

I am glad I only sporadically read his stuff as I've never come across anything exhibiting the problems/issues you guys are describing (which I half suspect are a pattern that emerges via exposure).

'i think' the thinking out loud part is just the clumsy failed aspect of what he does well when he does it well which then leads to people thinking hes their friend which is a p good trick

to be clear i really like him which is whats lead me to develop this critique of him

instead of tweeting ta-nehisi should just call me up and vent. we are on a first name basis like that.

the funny thing abt tnc on twitter is he spent so long turning his nose up at it and now hes on it all the time basically demonstrating its shortcomings in real time in the manner he previously described

sometimes I wonder - (and again I think he's 'worthy of being a tier 1 blogger' regardless) - how many people use him as their go-to source for 'what a black person thinks' because he is what a lot of people would like black people to be

...

and it's hard to disassociate that w/ the fact that he actually is an interesting writer but I see him celebrated in ways that I don't see w/ many other bloggers, like the way people compliment him out of the blue 'one of the best writers. everyone should be reading him. just great.' etc. is...different

im really glad he has started talking abt the nba and stopped talking abt video games

iatee, the "Is this racist?" thread is over here

I'm not arguing 'tnc is the result of affirmative action' I'm saying 'is it a total coincidence that the most popular africam-american blogger among white people is like the least shrill person on the internet'

africam

fyi, tnc used to kick it on ilm a bit back in the day. i've been following him since he was at the voice doing the press clips column -- he was killer funny. sometimes he can (or could, don't read regularly now) go hella hard, albeit with some dry irony.

what was his usr name

CRW

I'm not arguing 'tnc is the result of affirmative action' I'm saying 'is it a total coincidence that the most popular africam-american blogger among white people is like the least shrill person on the internet'

― iatee, Thursday, March 1, 2012 2:46 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

in this post he talks a lil bit abt his feelings on the topic, tho obvs he doesnt get at the particular explaining black things to white folks angle itatee is talking abt

I consider myself a writer of some merit and talent, who says some interesting things from time to time. That's all very nice. But I understand that if I were in my exact same job, and happened to be just another white dude from an Ivy, I'd attract less interest. Race, as lived by individuals, is biography and people are always interested in biography when it differs from the norm in any field. I have no idea why it should be any different with Lin.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/02/the-jeremy-lin-backlash/253076

i remember him writing about the hip hop cops at the voice

didnt realize that was him, i loved that story

so fn nuts

Of course his background/bio make more people notice him. That question is a textbook example of "begging the question".

My issue is that iatee basically said, "well he's good, but he's not that good, so people must be heaping all of this praise on him because he is the platonic ideal of the good Negro, so much calmer and more pleasant than all those angry black people (although I can't stress enough how talented he is so that someone won't call me on the gross assumptions spilling out in my thoughts)" and, unsurprisingly, the general reaction aside from me was "hmm, makes you think *strokes chin*"

tbf you and i were the only people who reacted at all to his posts and you should know by now that i never stroke my chin while passively condoning racism

I never said 'he's not that good', he is on my rss feed even though I have problems w/ the think out loud stuff. I said the way people praise him and talk about him is 'different' and sometimes kinda awkward and his role as that 'one and only go-to black guy blogger' in the blogosphere might have something to do with how nice he is

I'm glad you could find the secret racism tho, I thought I was hiding it so well

and it's hard to disassociate that w/ the fact that he actually is an interesting writer but I see him celebrated in ways that I don't see w/ many other bloggers, like the way people compliment him out of the blue 'one of the best writers. everyone should be reading him. just great.' etc. is...different

The direct implication here is that you think he's good but he's not THAT good, otherwise it wouldn't be so weird or awkward. Or conversely, these people don't actually think he's that good, but because he's the non-threatening black guy he gets held up as the token example, which both implicitly downplays the quality of his writing and implicitly posits the existence of a slew of equally high-profile black writers who are surly rage demons too edgy for white America to handle but more like what the average black person is like (cf the he is what a lot of people would like black people to be comment).

iatee basically said, "well he's good, but he's not that good, so people must be heaping all of this praise on him because he is the platonic ideal of the good Negro...

After a certain level of 'goodness', the great majority of people have no scale by which to measure any further gradations or distinctions. The average person is just as likely as not to heap up mountains of praise on Stephen King or Ann Coulter. At that point you have to examine what their yardstick is, to see what they are measuring. It is not inconceivable that for some of them, iatee has sussed out the mark TNC is meeting. This is not the same as endorsing that measurement.

the point was that I don't see the same 'everyone should be reading him. just so great.' talk in the same manner w/ *any* other blogger and it's awkward in that he's talked about *differently* not that he's talked about *too much*. you can read whatever 'direct implication' you want into that.

fwiw i find him a v good explainer of racism, am wite btw

im not trying to beg the question fyi, just an aside, and as an additional aside i was unaware of the original meaning of beg the question until today, also i think i used it kinda backward there but w/e

The direct implication here is that you think he's good but he's not THAT good

I read that less as a critique of his writing than as a way of marketing him.

would be curious to hear whether he feels like explaining racism to white people has become part of his job or hes just talking abt stuff that interests him and if the whole blog xposting/commenting internet communication/feedback loop has affected how/what he chooses to write on the topic

yep, too nice by far:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/03/on-making-yourself-right/253889/

trying real hard here to follow tnc's example and not accuse certain posters of certain things that aren't true in a somewhat escalated way, but goddamn it would feel good to do so...

(and yeah, tnc's take on sncc is problematic and one-sided, to say the least, i think. but there are ways you talk about that, and there are ways that you absolutely do not talk about that [and tnc's rejection of precisely some of those ways probably informs his take on sncc, in fact])

you have followed his example in more than one way

About half finished. Damn compelling.

man I get emotionally invested in pieces like this

probably why I read so much fantasy

Hey, so does he.

"Stellar piece" understates.

i wasn't sure where exactly to post this article, but i didn't realize T-NC already had his own thread. compelling indeed. and damn long, i'll need to reread it soon...

I heard that she's hot.

yeah, i dug this piece a lot. i think he leans kinda hard on the "google searches for racism" datapoints when he really doesnt need too... otherwise so great.

that was great

I just skipped around quickly, will read the whole thing later. I'm glad he knocks down the "Clinton had it just as bad" theory. I don't expect that 10 years from now, Republicans will have smoothly made the transition to "Obama actually wasn't so bad after all."

that TNC article is really good but I honestly don't remember Obama's comments on Trayvon Martin being a turning point for the racism to pour out, that seems off to me

it definitely was

that and the geraldo hoodie segment both happened on a friday

by monday daily caller had like three "investigations" into martin's twitter/myspace accts

president's comment sure to harden certain hearts even further i'm afraid. this is going to get worse.

― goole, Friday, March 23, 2012 11:21 AM (5 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I had assumed that all that stuff was just unfolding quickly and at the same time, but it does make sense that after Obama's comment, the racist wackos would step up their efforts, because now there was a chance to tarnish Obama with anything negative uncovered (or fabricated) about Martin.

yeah I can see that. this happened pretty quickly, my memory was just that the seething rightwing racism was just bubbling underneath from the start. I'm sure TNC paid closer attention to the chronology than I did tbf.

yeah I don't remember there being any point when there wasn't at least some kind of racist bullshit floating around about the case, but I'm probably hazy

was expecting to see other thread's link to his NYT column about Obama being Cheney perfected.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/opinion/sunday/coates-obamas-perceived-transformation.html?_r=1

why are you humoring him

having the right reasons to loathe Obama at hand is convenient.

so basically your response to a long, well-argued, supported argument about the difficulty of being the black President of a racist country is to say "pshaw at that, what about the article that called him an evil white man, THAT'S the important thing we should be looking at here"

and you really are confused why people have called you a racist? fuck off

I think I missed something...

Morbs, did you even see this:

The political consequences of race extend beyond the domestic. I am, like many liberals, horrified by Obama’s embrace of a secretive drone policy, and particularly the killing of American citizens without any restraints. A president aware of black America’s tenuous hold on citizenship, of how the government has at times secretly conspired against its advancement—a black president with a broad sense of the world—should know better. Except a black president with Obama’s past is the perfect target for right-wing attacks depicting him as weak on terrorism. The president’s inability to speak candidly on race cannot be bracketed off from his inability to speak candidly on every­thing. Race is not simply a portion of the Obama story. It is the lens through which many Americans view all his politics.

But whatever the politics, a total submission to them is a disservice to the country. No one knows this better than Obama himself, who once described patriotism as more than pageantry and the scarfing of hot dogs. “When our laws, our leaders, or our government are out of alignment with our ideals, then the dissent of ordinary Americans may prove to be one of the truest expressions of patriotism,” Obama said in Independence, Missouri, in June 2008. Love of country, like all other forms of love, requires that you tell those you care about not simply what they want to hear but what they need to hear.

now I have

It's been a life-event-crap week, I am not reading long articles.

amazing piece.

xp then don't be glib about them

I'm not sure anyone but you has called me a racist, djp, but it still makes me unhappy.

the parallelism here is stunning:

No criminal charges were ever brought against Carlton Jones, the officer who killed my friend and rendered a little girl fatherless. It was as if society barely blinked. A few months later, I moved to New York. When 9/11 happened, I wanted nothing to do with any kind of patriotism, with the broad national ceremony of mourning. I had no sympathy for the fire­fighters, and something bordering on hatred for the police officers who had died. I lived in a country where my friend—twice as good—could be shot down mere footsteps from his family by agents of the state. God damn America, indeed.

I grew. I became a New Yorker. I came to understand the limits of anger. Watching Barack Obama crisscross the country to roaring white crowds, and then get elected president, I became convinced that the country really had changed—that time and events had altered the nation, and that progress had come in places I’d never imagined it could. When Osama bin Laden was killed, I cheered like everyone else. God damn al‑Qaeda.

"I grew" not particularly supported by the next 4 sentences.

morbz i don't know if you're a racist but if you're going to thoughtlessly kneejerk in regards to a long article about race that you can't even bother to read you might as well be

OK, sorry, off to iron my [redacted]

yeah, i dug this piece a lot. i think he leans kinda hard on the "google searches for racism" datapoints when he really doesnt need too... otherwise so great.
--max

this rly bothered me cause i read the academic paper when someone posted it on here and it was so so awful.

iirc Utah was the 'least racist state'

and he doesnt need to use it, either! like here

The resentment is not confined to Republicans. Earlier this year, West Virginia gave 41 percent of the popular vote during the Democratic primary to Keith Judd, a white incarcerated felon (Judd actually defeated Obama in 10 counties). Joe Manchin, one of West Virginia’s senators, and Earl Ray Tomblin, its governor, are declining to attend this year’s Democratic convention, and will not commit to voting for Obama.

It is often claimed that Obama’s unpopularity in coal-­dependent West Virginia stems from his environmental policies. But recall that no state ranked higher on Seth Stephens-­Davidowitz’s racism scale than West Virginia. Moreover, Obama was unpopular in West Virginia before he became president: even at the tail end of the Democratic primaries in 2008, Hillary Clinton walloped Obama by 41 points. A fifth of West Virginia Democrats openly professed that race played a role in their vote.

why use the garbage google data when w virginians are openly admitting they voted for the white lady over the black guy b/c he was black

yeah for real

judging a state's level of racism by the number of 'racist search terms typed into google' seems problematic

http://observer.com/2013/03/fear-of-a-black-pundit/

he failed 11th grade english?

'he was not a great speller'

lol david carr

why did the Observer write it that way? on page 2 he says race isn't his main subject. it seems weird to write a feature that ignores (dismisses?) what the writer says about his own work. like the article was mostly done and the quotes that came in didn't fit the framing, oh well, put them at the end

I had assumed he'd stay at The Atlantic until the NYT made an offer, so I was most surprised to read that he could've had a regular NYT column and turned it down!

the rumor is that the editorial page editor took him out to dinner and was such a prick that tnc soured on the whole idea

hah - that might explain telling another reporter about saying no to the offer. does this whole observer piece read differently from inside nyc media world than it does outside it? (does anyone outside it pay attention?)

haha i doubt anyone outside that world is reading an observer profile about an atlantic writer!

fwiw i think it's fair to make your own conclusions about what a writer is 'abt' rather than going by what he says. race may not "define" him but it's obviously a recurring motif

he was not a great speller'

Oh and BTW

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/03/how-the-quiet-car-explains-the-world/273885/

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/04/why-accidental-racist-is-actually-just-racist/274826/

Paisley wants to know how he can express his Southern Pride. Here are some ways. He could hold a huge party on Martin Luther King's birthday, to celebrate a Southerner's contribution to the world of democracy. He could rock a T-shirt emblazoned with Faulkner's Light In August, and celebrate the South's immense contribution to American literature. He could preach about the contributions of unknown Southern soldiers like Andrew Jackson Smith. He could tell the world about the original Cassius Clay. He could insist that Tennessee raise a statue to Ida B. Wells.

Every one of these people are Southerners. And every one of them contributed to this great country. But to do that Paisley would have to be more interested in a challenging conversation and less interested in a comforting lecture.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/the-ghetto-is-public-policy/275456/

If only Scalia would read some of the books on Coates linked reading list

Jesus, this writer!

The culture of our world, right now, is crafted by little boys who only recall being stood up on their first date, and nothing they got after. They don't remember the sand they kicked in other people's eyes, only their own injuries. Our art is cynical and bad-ass and made by people who will not be happy until you join them in the church of "everything is fucked up, so throw up your hands." This is art as anesthesia.

Our art is made in cities like New York by people who are running from other places. They feel themselves as misfits who were trapped in dead-end suburbs. They hated high school. Their parents did not understand. They are seeking a better world. And when they realize that the world is wholly a problem, that the whole problem is in them, they make television for other people who are also running, who take voyage in search of a perfect world, then rage at the price of the ticket.

I am not immune. But when I think of Baltimore, I think of Ma and Dad. I think of their new lives. I think of my sisters and brothers and their many mothers. I think of my youngest niece, like a daughter who I will never have. I think of nephews who are like sons to me. I think of high school friends who would have leaped in front of car for me.

I thought I would return to Baltimore. But I was out on the Yard. I was struck--then struck again by you. So it goes.

I winced at the NYC line but I've looked at his page the last couple days trying to figure out which passage from his Paris dispatches most impresses me.

really excellent times piece

loved it

"the culture of our world": *whose* world? whose *world*? Anyway: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/fashion/From-Joan-Didion-to-Andrew-Sullivan-some-writers-leave-behind-letters-when-they-leave-new-york-city.html?_r=0

see quiddities thread

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Books/Pix/pictures/2009/11/18/1258560568547/Writer-Didion-At-Hippie-H-001.jpg
© Ted Streshinsky/Corbis

"Not in New York."

Coates can be great, but think he's giving some aholes too much credit here, on the way to more-to-the point peering at his own struggles, which a lot of people share.

not that the aholes aren't relevant.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/opinion/sunday/coates-in-defense-of-a-loaded-word.html

absolutely fantastic

totes

and perfectly timed for thanksgiving-relative time! u_u

^^^ yes

wow you guys are like a 100% sure youre going to have to discuss the n word at thanksgiving im depressed now

about 90 percent sure

am spending Thanksgiving at the relative at whose house we had a raucous, cheerful debate last June about his disappointment that he couldn't use the n-word.

fuck

team tnc http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/black-pathology-and-the-closing-of-the-progressive-mind/284523/

Good as far as it goes, but the limitation of the late 19th/early 20th Century progressive mindset re residue and social hygiene is a familiar one, and what about the point made by some other African-American commentators, re actual residue:internalized expectations of failure? Also, being "too black" for acceptance by some, "too light/white" by others? He might well deal with such internalization elsewhere, but since he brought up the residue here, seems to beg the question a bit.

a fairly familiar point or topic, I meant.

what is... culture?

A summary, sort of:

http://gawker.com/public-intellectual-deathmatch-ta-nehisi-coates-jona-1554487845

that article is embarrassing ("Lookit what these eggheads are doing!").

ugh it even ends with an 'oh snap' gif

And yet somehow the comments manage to outdo it

Filed to:SHADE

the dumbest motherfuckers in the world file copy for gawker media on the weekends. i don't know if they only pay the weekend warriors w/ hardee's coupons and hence this is the level of talent they attract or what but it's some embarrassing shit.

looking forward to the gawker summation of the Derrida/Searle debate.

balls, you are making me think i could write some shit for gawker, im gonna pitch some ideas brb

Good as far as it goes, but the limitation of the late 19th/early 20th Century progressive mindset re residue and social hygiene is a familiar one, and what about the point made by some other African-American commentators, re actual residue:internalized expectations of failure? Also, being "too black" for acceptance by some, "too light/white" by others? He might well deal with such internalization elsewhere, but since he brought up the residue here, seems to beg the question a bit.

― dow, Sunday, March 30, 2014 12:08 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

eh there's also a point that "internalized expectations" have to do with ppl who aren't black can get away with acting like they deserve things (and then getting those things) but if you look a different way and you try the same shit you get smacked the fuck down

Oppression might well produce a culture of failure. It might also produce a warrior spirit and a deep commitment to attaining the very things which had been so often withheld from you. There is no need for theorizing. The answers are knowable.So this use of "also" had me expecting he was going to talk about both kinds of effect. And "residue" can be residual elements of white oppression's values internalized, so not like he has to reject the word itself as symptom of arrested development progressive sanctimony. I think it's a useful word, a reminder of the way bad shit seeps in and sticks around for the quiet moments. I gotta keep up with his blog, though.

coates debate w/ chait has been pretty fascinating, though admittedly more to read coates' pieces, which are really exceptional. especially coates' most recent one. chait's just aren't that powerful.

and i'm not going to read that gawker piece. gawker's already on my list of 1,000,000,000,000 places to avoid on the internet

If only there were someone on this board who worked at or ran gawker and could elucidate things

Chait can't hide his "I really want Democrats to win" subtext. He's a smarter Chuck Todd.

this:

(Chait goes on, but it's all very substantial and dense and thoughtful and that's not really what we're here for, is it?)

speaks volumes, really (i.e. we don't want to be substantial, dense or thoughtful around these parts)

what if it meant something else tho makes u think

its kinda a shame w this debate that chait is so wrong and operating from such a position of weakness cause he can be often pretty lucid but i feel like he just walked right into coats wheelhouse w/out thinking things through too much, like obvs coats is better anyway

Maybe Chait will learn something from Coates latest response (on the 30th).

Oops, never mind, he did not

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/03/coates-disagrees-with-jonathan-chait-so-do-i.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/black-culture-and-progressivism/360362

Clare Sestanovitch discussion of the Chait and Coates debate and of others who weighed in on it

Damn, this thing had legs
http://www.culturalfront.org/2014/04/the-coverage-of-ta-nehisi-coates-on.html

that's almost funny

Oh, have not read come of those conservative takes

some

max can you please also ban "oh shit," that gif, and any cheeky discussion of a serious debate as though it were a rap battle, particularly one about race?

"Yeah. He went there." Actually just make sure this guy doesn't write anything else for gawker.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/11/a-hammock-in-kentucky/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1

This Krugman v Williamson in NRO article relates

Just read conservative NY Times columnist Ross Douthat re Coates and Chait. What conservatives have learned from the debate, and from the Wiliamson NRO article on Appalachia, is to call all poor unemployed people getting food stamps, no matter their race or ethnic origin, lazy and lacking in morals and ethics.

lol otm. Being part of the shiftless poor is a class thing, not a race thing man.

Take your time. Read it all.

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

wow. really tremendous piece.

co-sign. great read.

yeah, thinking of sending this to a friend from abroad who's just moved to the states and seems a bit befuddled by race-in-america stuff.

I hope this gets a lot of attention. It certainly deserves it.

http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2014/05/so-thats-just-one-of-my-losses/371396/

I hope this gets a lot of attention. It certainly deserves it.

― Survivalist Compound Row (B.L.A.M.), Thursday, May 22, 2014 2:14 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

def blowing up on my twitter fwiw

Andrew Golis ‏@agolis 12s
The chartbeat data on Ta-Nehisi's reparations piece is giving me hope for humanity. Wow.

^atlantic managment

there's so much i like about the piece. the research is thorough, the original reporting is fantastic - i think Coates' case is really compelling. there was one argument in the middle of the piece that i couldn't totally get on board with (about patriotism a la carte), and i thought the piece could've used a more decisive conclusion (i was initially confused about where the rest of the article was - it ended so abruptly), but those are pretty minor quibbles and this is one of my favorite things i've ever read in the Atlantic. i had never heard this story either, so i was grateful that he included it:

Among the Jews of Israel, reparations provoked violent and venomous reactions ranging from denunciation to assassination plots. On January 7, 1952, as the Knesset—the Israeli parliament—convened to discuss the prospect of a reparations agreement with West Germany, Menachem Begin, the future prime minister of Israel, stood in front of a large crowd, inveighing against the country that had plundered the lives, labor, and property of his people. Begin claimed that all Germans were Nazis and guilty of murder. His condemnations then spread to his own young state. He urged the crowd to stop paying taxes and claimed that the nascent Israeli nation characterized the fight over whether or not to accept reparations as a “war to the death.” When alerted that the police watching the gathering were carrying tear gas, allegedly of German manufacture, Begin yelled, “The same gases that asphyxiated our parents!”

is there an "anonymous coates reparations piece comments over stock photos" tumblr yet?

is there anyone responding thoughtfully to the piece yet anywhere or are ppl pretty much still reading/digesting it?

can't wait for NRO's Kevin Williamson's response.

i like that coates attached his argument to an actual piece of passable legislation - Conyers’s HR40

is there anyone responding thoughtfully to the piece yet anywhere or are ppl pretty much still reading/digesting it?

― Mordy, Thursday, May 22, 2014 1:21 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

its so good its like no one is worthy to respond

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BoQchowCYAAEKuW.png

haven't read this yet but intrigued by the idea that something could be so forcefully argued that it can only be fitfully processed in the noise of political discourse.

it's both comprehensively argued and also asks for so little - the passage of a bill to study the issue

can't wait for NRO's Kevin Williamson's response.

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, May 22, 2014 12:33 PM

Maybe I'm not attentive enough, but it seems to me that NRO steers clear of Coates.

don't think they'll be able to avoid this one

I love the way the story of Clyde Ross is woven through this piece. It really becomes something much more than a 'thinkpiece' or an 'article'...I mean, part of me want this to blow up into a book deal. I'd love to read more.

I did feel a bit the same as Mordy w/r/t to the conclusion...I scrolled down looking for another page or something, it was an abrupt conclusion for something so well structured and thoughtful.

otm its more than just an article, the thing that really sets coates apart imo is that while he can do the reporting and argumentation especially as good as anyone he really brings a true personal caring and humanity and humility to his work, an inspiration to us all

http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/05/22/314881767/how-to-tell-if-someones-actually-read-ta-nehisi-coates-essay

yeah but now u can just read that and adjust accoringly

imo coates blog used to be much better than his long form writing but its seems like now hes incorporated a lot of what makes the blog so great into his other pieces

any idea what these guys are talking about?

https://twitter.com/nealcarter/status/469475311868846080

I fucking hate when people throw shade with no link to whatever it is that caused them to throw shade

also fuck Tim Wise

this is apparently the piece he's talking about:

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/04/fear-the-fro/275379/

lol that guy's twitter pic tho

Still not getting what the issue is here. Sounds like some echo chamber bs to me.

hmm SOME PEOPLE itt dont like subtweets it seems

hahaha wait, so Ta-Nehisi Coates writes a short article about a woman's conflicted relationship with her natural hair and that is proof that he hates black women?

idgi

yeah mystified over here too

I think it might be another piece about Lupita Nyong'o being referred to? At least that's what it seemed like in that stream of tweets.

But if they're talking about this, then I even MORE don't get it

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/03/lupita-nyongos-radical-world-changing-style/284274/

Bah, that's not even by Ta-Nehisi.

lol

https://twitter.com/nealcarter/status/469480372518912001

https://twitter.com/nealcarter/status/469492058907230208

https://twitter.com/nealcarter/status/469501346383921152

I think that is the whole of it

TNC dissed Nel Carter?!

ha it is that first one

they are outing TNC for wearing a hair piece and he won't own up to it

but it looks so natural!

Well, Steve Harvey faked having the freshest line-up in America for damn near a decade. If not him, then who can we trust?

omg dying at the "controversy" there.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations-an-intellectual-autopsy/371125/

And this lobs a point that's right in my wheelhouse

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/05/coming-to-terms-with-difficult-history-japan-china-germany-and-the-united-states/371401/

genuinely considering subscribing to the Atlantic for a year just to give props to that article.

omg dying at the "controversy" there.

― wat is teh waht (s.clover), Thursday, May 22, 2014 5:50 PM (4 hours ago)

this goof on twitter who "started this" (NB i have no idea if anyone has paid attention to his tweets outside of the people itt) has like 2000 followers, i really doubt anyone GAF

What is considered to be a "blue period" on this blog, is considered to be a survey course among academics. Which is not to say everyone, or even mostly everyone, agrees with me in the academy. It is to say that I've yet to engage a historian or sociologist who's requested that I not be such a downer.

o t m

this goof on twitter who "started this" (NB i have no idea if anyone has paid attention to his tweets outside of the people itt) has like 2000 followers, i really doubt anyone GAF

I found out about it from Jamelle Bouie's twitter

thought the abrupt conclusion on the subprime stuff worked, like he's preempting the standard cognitive urge to assign an ending to the story since huge part of his point is that in no way is this history over, it's all one long horrible continuum running unbroken right up to the present.

Coates on Chris Hayes' show tonight.

Yeah I was waiting for him to drop the subprime stuff - when he started mentioning it I figured it was the equivalent of the lights going on at the end of a show xp

http://billmoyers.com/episode/facing-the-truth-the-case-for-reparations/

^^ Interview on Moyers doesn't add much, but I like watching him talk.

PFT Commenter with the closest thing we're going to see to a rebuttal: http://kissingsuzykolber.uproxx.com/2014/05/reparations-http://images.chron.com/blogs/askacat/hatcat.JPG-mark-cuban-essay-race-three-parts.html

aha, my first hatcat, achievement unlocked.

anonanon otm, found the circling back around to (and leaving off in the middle of) flat reportage after the article's emotional climax (but now it wasn't 1790 or 1865 or 1946 or 1980) devastating honestly.

He was interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered last night too

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117869/ta-nehisi-coates-reparations-article-sparks-conservative-outrage

This is about the reaction on 1 conservative talk show when liberal writer Isaac Chotiner (who had written about the Coates article) was invited on to discuss reparations

PFT Commenter with the closest thing we're going to see to a rebuttal

I think I deserve reparations for even starting to read that.

John McWhorter's response.

aaaand Kevin Williamson's, which is measured and civil for a NRO article.

That second piece is pretty interesting, I think, and worth a read, whether one agrees with it or not, and/or distrusts the platform.

Personally looking forward to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in DC ... next year? Is that right? If done right, and I assume it will be, it will not only be a massive success but should also spark debates/discussions like this on a weekly basis. Plus attract/agitate the usual assholes.

http://nmaahc.si.edu/

I would assume, if nothing else, a conservative could take from the TNC article some ammunition for their next article about how the New Deal and FDR were racist.

Well, they kinda were! TNC read Ira Katznelson; his book's pretty great.

And more Reagan love:

Black households saw stronger income growth than did white households during the Reagan boom,

Would like to read more on this with some context

When you're at the bottom, there's nowhere to go but up?

That's how I felt when I finished Williamson.

That there is some question-begging going on there — whether “white supremacy” really describes a significant motive force in American public life —

lol fuck this guy

Williamson, for those who don't remember, fought Jonathan Bernstein over the question of Democratic racism; the guy could not accept that "Democrats" and "liberals" were not synonymous for most of the twentieth century.

that Williamson article is the ultimate "don't read the comments" piece.

Now you tell me...

ha ha yeah, I got to the 2nd one--which was like maybe we should just let black people mug white people to collect their reparations--and I was out.

Doesn't even come close to the wall of shit under this.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/23/the-case-for-reparations?

the huge backlash from racist reactionaries that we're seeing just bolsters coates's argument that the end of slavery and jim crow hardly saw the end to institutional racism in the US.

they are kind of making his argument while trying to rebut his argument

Otoh this is in fact what a conversation about race looks like in America.

I hope TNC doesn't take time refuting a bunch of lame responses--I feel like he should turn this article into a documentary.

agreed

Jun 12, 2014 • 7:00 pm
Just days before the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Ta-Nehisi Coates, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, will sit down with Jeffrey Goldberg to discuss Coates’ provocative June cover story making the case for reparations.

At 6th & I synagogue in DC

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/05/27/coates_reparations_response_free_market_economist_says_discrimination_made.html

Oh Tyler Cowen & your free market libertarian economics

With the caveat that yes, Fredrik DeBoer is, as they say, a gaping asshole, there's a lot of truth here.

I can't decide about that DeBoer piece. I recognize what he's talking about. On the other hand, Coates consciously employs a tragic/poetic voice ... to talk about extremely tragic shit. We're not supposed to be affected by that?

Basically (I swear to god I'm not trolling) isn't this a kind of tone policing? If this supposed reverence for Coates is leading to bad thought, bad writing and bad action, talk about that.

I agree. The feeling I get from reading Coates is like that I get from reading good creative non-fiction, rather than from standard articles I happen to think are otm.

Basically (I swear to god I'm not trolling) isn't this a kind of tone policing?

Kinda, but like you said, the phenomenon is clearly there - the minute Coates publishes anything, even a half-thought-out blog entry, the pundit/journalist community pitches forward on their faces as one, chanting "We're not worthy!" And in a way it keeps people from honestly engaging with what he's talking about; they can just say, "He's a genius - go read what he has to say" and feel no obligation to actually contribute to a discussion themselves.

I don't think Coates is as clear a thinker, or as good a writer, as he's being sold as being. He's very hammer-meet-nail in his thinking (all white supremacy, all the time), and whether I agree with the substance of what he has to say or not, I think John McWhorter is a better prose stylist. And I find Coates' newfound humorlessness (and it is newfound; his blog used to offer pop-cultural digressions, but those are apparently beneath him now; he's too busy shoving America's history under our noses to admit to ever having any fun) tiresome. The temptation to despair at the misery of human existence is always there, and very strong (assuming you give a flying fuck about humanity in the aggregate, which I mostly don't). But you gotta lighten up sometime. I'd like to see The Atlantic assign him a profile of some utterly innocuous celebrity, just to see what he'd do with it.

The cover story was more interesting as history and reporting than an argument for reparations. These days he often treats his blog as a place to post thoughts on the books he's reading, and although he sometimes doesn't finish those reviews he'll often provoke me into rereading. Do you remember when he wrote about Tony Judt's Postwar? When I read it a few years ago I filed it away; TNC made me reread the bits about West Germany and the collapse of Communism. Which is to say: I don't mind the approach! It's what a blog is for, even a blog attached and sponsored by a magazine.

"he's too busy shoving America's history under our noses to admit to ever having any fun" sounds like criticism I've read at NRO

Coates is kind of a hero to me because he's the one journalist I can think of who, rather than complain about inaccessible academics, actually goes out to read them and bring their insights into public debate. I think that's a vital public service.

i think most ppl are saying "read this" and not really engaging w/ the material bc a) coates is obv reading more than 98% of other 'pundits' and therefore b) the chattering class is not educated or well-read enough to respond.

re humourlessness, does the world really need more pop culture speculation? coates is fulfilling a vital function that neither av club nor chait or touching on.

"he's too busy shoving America's history under our noses to admit to ever having any fun"

^ What other writer is doing this, though? It's not like this is getting taught in schools

And it's not like there isn't a point to it either; the whole point is that this is still happening now in the present, which I'm not surprised you missed, Phil

But you gotta lighten up sometime. I'd like to see The Atlantic assign him a profile of some utterly innocuous celebrity, just to see what he'd do with it.

― Humorist (horse) (誤訳侮辱), Wednesday, June 4, 2014 11:20 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh yuck.

i think most ppl are saying "read this" and not really engaging w/ the material bc a) coates is obv reading more than 98% of other 'pundits' and therefore b) the chattering class is not educated or well-read enough to respond.

Exactly. It's almost like he's doing his fucking job.

the uncritical adoration is just a faux-humble backhanded admission of how shitty they are at theirs.

"Humorless" suggests didacticism or hectoring, and TNC's tone is almost too gentle; he's cogitating in print.

Yeah, my first reaction to that blog post was "or maybe people are doing this because TNC is a really, really good writer"

"he's too busy shoving America's history under our noses to admit to ever having any fun" sounds like criticism I've read at NRO

Am I supposed to be cowed by this comparison? I'm just saying, humorless people are fucking boring, whether I agree with them or not. If you can't laugh at human existence, tragic and fucked as it is, I don't understand how your mind works.

Coates is kind of a hero to me because he's the one journalist I can think of who, rather than complain about inaccessible academics, actually goes out to read them and bring their insights into public debate. I think that's a vital public service.

This is absolutely true. The more you read, the better your writing will be.

re humourlessness, does the world really need more pop culture speculation? coates is fulfilling a vital function that neither av club nor chait or touching on.

Agreed, but in this case, the abandonment of lighter, pop-cultural subjects feels like image-burnishing.

the only hyperbole i've seen surrounding coates are suggestions that he's james baldwin's equal which prompts a 'not yet he ain't'. beyond that the hyperbole is understandable, here's a high profile writer who doesn't indulge in bullshit or fluff, whose thinkpieces actually contain and prompt thought, and the rarity of it is going to prompt hyperbole just as the novelty of someone actually taking inequality seriously enough to do the work analysing it has prompted hyperbole about piketty (which even if the book does live up to the hype, i haven't read it - has anyone on ilx? - he's still a social scientist, he's still just an economist). when someone hits for the cycle you can be pretty damn sure it's gonna make sportscenter. seriously think progress live tweets the emmy red carpet, the new republic does celeb journalism, what type of drooling moron thinks we need more of that? that the problem w/ american journalism now is it's too serious and it needs to lighten up? maybe you make that argument if you're a hack pop culture writer for a living and that's what you have to tell yrself so you don't open a vein but plz don't try to sell whatever lousy deal you've made w/ the devil to waste yr life as taking some moral high ground or resisting the temptation to 'despair at the misery of human existence'.

Ha, so journalists who don't do what Coates does are wasting their lives, now? And if Coates' writing prompts exactly zero real-world change (which is the effect I predict), has he too wasted his life?

For a sec I thought Phil was going to be arguing in good faith but I guess this is where I check out

I'm just saying, humorless people are fucking boring, whether I agree with them or not. If you can't laugh at human existence, tragic and fucked as it is, I don't understand how your mind works.

I've had quite a few macabre chuckles reading the quotes by racists and bureaucrats and TNC's transitions, so I don't know what you're talking about. The last thing a black man writing about the realities of black life since Reconstruction needs to be told by non-black writers is that he needs to laugh at human existence more often or write about Parquet Courts.

but DO go on.

Yeah Phil you're basically saying "I want to be able to laugh at the ongoing discrimination and abjection faced by black America, not have to actually learn about it"

I mean I guess it's nice being able to want to laugh at something you don't have to go through on a daily basis, eh?

Ha, so journalists who don't do what Coates does are wasting their lives, now? yes

And if Coates' writing prompts exactly zero real-world change (which is the effect I predict), has he too wasted his life? no

it would be one thing if coates was just churning out article after article about identity + social justice issues - then it would make sense to tell him to chill. but he's writing about actual structural inequalities that impact real human beings (and not fake twitterppl). anyway doesn't humorless perfectly sum up freddie?

Wow you never stop grinding that axe huh

it's important to point out what matters. i think phil might be confusing the worthlessness of 'why i date white women' w/ the immense value provided by thoroughly examining redlining in american real estate history and explaining it for a broad audience

are there any other ilx hacks who've not only declared that the celeb fluff journalism is not only as valid as serious journalism but in fact matters more, that mary hart > if stone? there's lex and now phil and i'm just gonna feel safe assuming perpetua feels this way. who else? jsarge maybe? seriously phil go back to porn, you were serving humanity more doing a2m in the back of a van.

balls otm

Yeah Phil you're basically saying "I want to be able to laugh at the ongoing discrimination and abjection faced by black America, not have to actually learn about it"

this right here. it's not his job to entertain anyone. he's trying to write critically about difficult social issues and the idea that the piece is 'humorless' and would better serve its purpose if it was 'entertaining' to any audience is pretty offensive/dismissive.

i mean, the idea that he should cater to some external taste or soften his rhetoric to appeal to a wider audience pretty well validates a lot of his themes.

Coates has written for years about sports, about Wu-Tang, about all kinds of things; just because he currently is not addressing such subjects (and is responding to David Frum and to others re his cover story) hardly turns him into a humorless boring person

In my opinion, Coates's prose at it's worst delves into a sort of portentious cliche with phrases like "national reckoning" and "spiritual renewal." I think the strength of his case ends up overstated by many and his thinking at its fuzziest when he points out that the Department of Justice brought action against Wells Fargo in 2010, eliding the difference between private actors and public ones. That's an example, overall though I agree with the sentiment that the article was more interesting as history than as an actual case for reparations.

Nonetheless, obviously, Coates is a very good writer. It's not that reactions to him seem too solemn or that Coates himself is too solemn. It's just that much of his white audience seems to get an unseemly thrill out of the whole thing. Like they get this tingly feeling inside when he exposes them to injustices they've been blind to and that experience proves to be more cathartic than motivating. They read him for a fix they crave. And once the fix is acquired, nothing more is needed. Recognizing Coates and responding in that way is enough to make them good people, the right kind of people, and nothing more is necessary. So on twitter, they invite their other white friends to get their fix, and so on. And people just feel good about themselves.

the uncritical adoration is just a faux-humble backhanded admission of how shitty they are at theirs.

― ryan, Wednesday, June 4, 2014 9:42 AM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

feel a bit of this posting a link with 'yes' on fb, as a not-writer who wishes he knew enough to talk all the white people he knows past 'i was poor too'.

speaking of which, is there a good treatment of how the cotton economy shaped or affected the west? we have this pioneer mythos that wants to bypass and exempt itself from slavery but 1) didn't slavery some kind of originating tonal or psychological effect on migration at the very least, maybe more vis-a-vis the economy and 2) it obviously has the effect today of doing its part to help the whole country ignore the problem.

what i'd really like to read is a historical treatment of pioneerism that looks past the trope of rugged individualism.

xp on the contrary, i think the awkwardness comes out of "here's a strong voice telling the truth in an era where it's getting harder and harder to pat ourselves on the back" and "what have we done about it? nothing".

It's just that much of his white audience seems to get an unseemly thrill out of the whole thing. Like they get this tingly feeling inside when he exposes them to injustices they've been blind to and that experience proves to be more cathartic than motivating. They read him for a fix they crave. And once the fix is acquired, nothing more is needed. Recognizing Coates and responding in that way is enough to make them good people, the right kind of people, and nothing more is necessary. So on twitter, they invite their other white friends to get their fix, and so on. And people just feel good about themselves.

jfc, presuming much? you sure seem to know a lot about this large group of people

white people read the internet like THIS

You're not willing to concede that there may be at the least a grain of truth in what he's saying?

I don't think it has anything in particular to do with Coates' writing, v little of what's written on the internet actually motivates anybody to do anything

+ you gotta get a lot less vague if you want to move past 'projection' to 'grain of truth'

I already knew quite a bit about redlining because it happened to the (grand)parents of Jewish classmates, and I knew there were a handful of sundown towns near where I grew up, but until the TNC essay I had not a clue about contract sales. My reasons for sharing the piece were a) 'if I didn't know that, then neither did you' and b) this is VERY informative and perhaps it will produce even a small change in the opinions of people who are basically pretty lazy when it comes to engaging with inequality.

i took real estate classes once upon a time and all we got was "redlining is illegal, and a keyword."

speaking of which, is there a good treatment of how the cotton economy shaped or affected the west? we have this pioneer mythos that wants to bypass and exempt itself from slavery but 1) didn't slavery some kind of originating tonal or psychological effect on migration at the very least, maybe more vis-a-vis the economy and 2) it obviously has the effect today of doing its part to help the whole country ignore the problem.

iirc Stammp touches on this in The Peculiar Institution, but it's definitely not the central focus. he also considers western migration to include slavery west of the 13 colonies so alabama, mississippi, and tennessee are included. it also pops up in ways you might not expect, i.e. planters abandoning debts and moving west with their slaves to try and rebuild after business failures in eastern states.

I knew about redlining from following the subprime crisis but didn't know how far back it went.

ty! xp

I'd like to engage constructively and don't mean to offend anyone. People were talking about reactions to Coates's writing and describing it as overly solemn. I don't agree that "solemn" is the right word for it. Maybe it's a failure to communicate on my part. Or maybe solemn is the right word for what amounts to uncritical adulation. I don't really want to argue over what's in other people's minds.

iirc upton sinclair writes about this kind of predatory contract lending in the jungle. still even knowing about redlining and restrictive covenants i didn't have a clear picture of how extensively it occurred, and particularly the role of the FHA in establishing it. i was struck by the role government played as opposed to just independent actors committing fraud and theft against fellow citizens.

I'm shocked to find out that the government of a country where slavery is literally written into the Constitution would have been involved with these practices

wow really

i agree w/ balls -- TNC isn't james baldwin but he's writing at a level of seriousness and intellectual engagement that really makes him stand out from the rest of the atlantic writers (some of whom i like a lot). he really only seems 'humorless' in the context of bloggers who feel compelled to make a dumb pop-culture reference every other paragraph.

i think there is a bitter irony to a lot of that article, which is a kind of humor

xps - i read beryl satter's family properties for a course a while back and it really stuck with me. i keep trying to recommend it to people but it's kind of a hard sell - it seems super dry when i recommend a book about predatory lending practices and redlining and the insitutional racism that supports it, but it's a great read!

i read that too. this book is about redlining and blockbusting, but shorter http://www.amazon.com/Not-My-Neighborhood-Bigotry-American/dp/1566638437

Thought deBoer kind of oversold an otherwise valid point that there's a type of praise TNC seems to inspire that is so over the top it becomes pompous, bathetic, even a little creepy, almost like getting into Magical Negro territory. I mean, this example he gave

I wish that I could articulate how this article reverberated in my soul. Better, I wish that you, TNC could feel that reverberation, and I could read how you described it.

yikes

speaking of which, is there a good treatment of how the cotton economy shaped or affected the west? we have this pioneer mythos that wants to bypass and exempt itself from slavery but 1) didn't slavery some kind of originating tonal or psychological effect on migration at the very least, maybe more vis-a-vis the economy and 2) it obviously has the effect today of doing its part to help the whole country ignore the problem.

Colin Woodard's American Nations gets into this, I think, in terms of tracking how waves of immigration filled in the Mountain West with people paid by mineral interests to live there and extract everything it had.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0143122029

I wish that I could articulate how this article reverberated in my soul. Better, I wish that you, TNC could feel that reverberation, and I could read how you described it.

lol if you actually go and look at the comment history for that commenter, turns out they're a middle-aged black woman who went to howard university...

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-american-history/371723/

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/the-radical-practicality-of-reparations/372114/

speaking of which, is there a good treatment of how the cotton economy shaped or affected the west? we have this pioneer mythos that wants to bypass and exempt itself from slavery but 1) didn't slavery some kind of originating tonal or psychological effect on migration at the very least, maybe more vis-a-vis the economy and 2) it obviously has the effect today of doing its part to help the whole country ignore the problem.

what i'd really like to read is a historical treatment of pioneerism that looks past the trope of rugged individualism.

― mattresslessness, Wednesday, June 4, 2014 12:40 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://www.amazon.com/Search-Racial-Frontier-Americans-1528-1990/dp/0393318893#

but as far as the moral affect of slavery on the west du bois' biography of john brown is incredible.

historically the key element is probably the mexican american war, which was initiated basically as a way to preserve the power of the slave states.

this has some good stuff on it: http://www.amazon.com/Impending-Crisis-1848-1861-David-Potter/dp/0061319295/

and i'm told this does but haven't looked at it: http://www.amazon.com/Slavery-American-West-Eclipse-Manifest/dp/0807847968

making a library trip today. thank you.

idk abt culturally/morally but obvs as the western territories became states they were major pieces in the political struggle between the slave and free states and were a crucial cause of the civil war

just saw him talk about the article at sixth and i (thanks for the heads up, ilx!) it was awesome. the interviewer and several audience members kept pressing him on, "when you say reparations, don't you really just mean a National Conversation about Racism?" and he was really hilariously deadpannily like, no, i'm talking about cutting Clyde Ross a check. again, it was awesome. he got a standing ovation at the end.

eh his problem isn't that he's too sincere, paul krugman is sincere too, his problem is that he spends too much time thinking outloud and being nice

― iatee, Thursday, March 1, 2012 2:30 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol at one point he was struggling as to how to articulate an answer and he said, slightly performatively, "how to be nice?" which got a laugh. he was not particularly nice at all in his argumentation which was part of what made the evening so awesome.

ah i wish i had gone to that too. i love hearing him talk and catching those little vestiges of a Baltimore accent.

there is a very nice interview with him on longform, & yeah he has such a nice cadence.

sounds awesome btw horseshoe

I caught him at a talk together with Barbara Fields last year - great experience

eh his problem isn't that he's too sincere, paul krugman is sincere too, his problem is that he spends too much time thinking outloud and being nice

― iatee, Thursday, March 1, 2012 2:30 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

these may be my two favorite of his qualities

whenever I see this thread title now, I get the few snippets I've seen of The Cider House Rules stuck in my head, only with every part played by Ta-Nehisi Coates

i seem around pretty often, he has a visiting professorship where i work, it's pretty rad. his office is like 100 ft from mine. been to a seminar or two where he moderates. super nice guy.

http://i.imgur.com/m5ElskA.png

tnc good on the longform podcast btw

v sad when taco bell took the white supremely off the menu

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/with-atlantic-article-on-reparations-ta-nehisi-coates-sees-payoff-for-years-of-struggle/2014/06/18/6a2bd10e-f636-11e3-a3a5-42be35962a52_story.html

profile piece on him

i'm feeling anxious/cynical about this. something is gonna happen to tear coates down at this rate. you can't have somebody saying this stuff and going increasingly in this direction and also increasing in prominence nationally. he's either going to start pulling back what he says or he's going to be yanked down by some bullshit scandal, that's what they always do to ppl like him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_Illustrated_cover_jinx

Also, related:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madden_cover_jinx

idk about a scandal. he'll probably just become another bogeyman for the right wing like Ward Churchill.

His reporting's pretty airtight -- nobody but Kevin Williamson has really attempted a rebuttal that I know of. Emotional/ad hom attacks against Coates personally just give him and his argument more oxygen, so I think they're just trying to ignore him and wish him away. Unfortunately, ignoring reality pretty much works.

i'm not sure he's being ignored as a tactic. he picked a very provocative policy question (reparations) to organize a history of racism around - even if the policy itself was only incidental (and the exact law he was promoting was only to study the issue) it was always going to be a hard sell (which is how t-nc pitched it to the atlantic - "Are you at all interested in a piece that makes the case for reparations? This is totally pie in the sky, but it's my take on the Atlantic as a journal of "Big Ideas.""). i can't imagine he was hoping the article would stir up a popular movement in favor of reparations - he was using reparations as a gateway to make a broader impact of consciousness in the united states about crimes committed against black people. this isn't like ignoring climate change (which is truly 'ignoring reality').

i think what i'm trying to say is that the potential impact of this piece was always going to be subtle + hard to measure, and would not be measurable by the success of reparations-related legislation (tho obv reparations legislation would serve as evidence of its impact)

idk about a scandal. he'll probably just become another bogeyman for the right wing like Ward Churchill.

― relentlessly pecking at peace (President Keyes), Friday, June 20, 2014 6:24 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah about that, they ginned up an academic misconduct investigation against churchill, got him fired, and now he's considered basically toxic by most liberal press because of the "controversy" and furthermore he isn't holding an academic post anywhere anymore and has been tied up in legal battles with u of colorado for years, so... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill_academic_misconduct_investigation

I don't know, Mordy, he seemed pretty invested in persuading people to join a reparations movement when I saw him speak.

even Kevin Williamson acknowledged his good faith, which is a huge concession from that loon.

Lots of folks are probably still not even aware of the article--even with the attention it has gotten.

everybody knows reparations is 100% toxic in the realm of actual politics (where 'let's not take stuff away from poor people' is a goal that takes effort to accomplish and giving dying people health care is controversial) and nobody wants to be the guy who argues w/ coates over something that's not gonna happen so

like the best argument against it is probably 'if this issue were to even enter the realm of tv politics the end result would be a world that is worse for poor black people and nobody would benefit more than republicans'

Brutal truth

Yup

I agree with all of that. The value of the article won't be in any near-term political or policy shifts. It will only be in some possible long-term influence on the intelligentsia. Like Piketty's book (I guess -- I have not read it), it puts some hard historical data behind arguments that tend to be waged on moral rather than quantitative grounds. You can't expect an Atlantic cover story to change the world. But I wouldn't underestimate its potential influence on how at least some people talk and think about the world.

imagining the clusterfuck that would occur should eric holder (much less obama) put his full weight behind reparations. huge swaths of people in this country believe that african-americans are lazy good-for-nothings (oh, except for my handy man cedric, he's OK) and that they are already leeching off of the state at everyone else's expense. broach a program that aims to give them more of our tax dollars and people's heads will explode from rage.

i also imagine a smallish but vocal chunk of the black UMC coming out against this, just as they have come out against affirmative action, etc. imagine Bill Cosby giving a speech at the RNC.

i hate this country.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations-a-narrative-bibliography/372000/

well this guy likes comics huh

this dude tweets an awful lot for someone who's supposed to be speaking only french for the summer

haha yeah i was surprised by how much his tweets are about comic books

he used to write a lot abt comic books and video games, its better now that he doesnt so much, not that theres anything wrong with that

New piece http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/08/acting-french/375743/

he used to write a lot abt comic books and video games, its better now that he doesnt so much, not that theres anything wrong with that

His comic book criticism is why I pay attention. I should care more about his other writing, but I don’t. I tried reading the reparations essay but I was bored and felt dumb so I never finished it. I feel terrible.

(Nonetheless, Middlebury Language Schools are amazing. I'll probably read his latest essay.)

reparations article worth sticking with and not at all hard to make sense of

reparations article def easier than learning a language

Will have to read this long piece later. He did lots of music criticism pieces when he was a Washington City Paper staff writer back in the 90s.

piers morgan, everybody

https://twitter.com/piersmorgan/status/531964234410627072

i liked this one https://twitter.com/piersmorgan/status/531938818933280768

flamethrower 18pts on 7 shots

a good thing the pelicans tv guys do is try to talk themselves into austin rivers any time he touches the ball

ta-nehisi 13 pts, 12 boards at the half.

oops lol

i was looking at the nba thread like where tf my posts go

Any point asking what gross things Morgan wrote about or am I better off not knowing?

in his opinion the n word is bad

possible

tressie mc @tressiemcphd · 16m 16 minutes ago
Piers is #literally trolling black twitter for profit. As in, he isn't even pretending he's real. You know like how Trump goads POTUS.

tressie mc @tressiemcphd · 16m 16 minutes ago
Ok, y'all to unpack: that fool deliberately wrote an article about THE racial slur; tagged black twitter power nodes; is hashtagging BT

#literally

hey, if you want to keep track of people being literal on twitter, there's no better hashtag

I spent parts of 2006 and 2007 following Bill Cosby around the country. He was then in the midst of giving a series of "call-outs" in which he upbraided the decline of morality in the black community. Our current organic black conservative moment largely springs from these efforts....

I observed several of these call-outs. Again, unlike typical black Republicans, Cosby spoke directly to black people. He did not go on Fox News to complain about the threat of the New Black Panther Party. He did not pen columns insisting the black family was better off under slavery. He was not speaking as a man sent to assure a group that racism did not exist, but as a man who sincerely believed that black people, through the ethic of "twice as good," could overcome. That is the core of respectability politics. Its appeal is broad in both black and white America, and everywhere Cosby went he was greeted with rapturous applause.

I published a reported essay in 2008, in this magazine, on these call-outs. In that essay, there is a brief and limp mention of the accusations against Cosby. Despite my opinions on Cosby suffusing the piece, there was no opinion offered on the rape accusations. This is not because I did not have an opinion. I felt at the time that I was taking on Cosby's moralizing and wanted to stand on those things that I could definitively prove. Lacking physical evidence, adjudicating rape accusations is a murky business for journalists. But believing Bill Cosby does not require you to take one person's word over another—it requires you take one person's word over 15 others.

At the time I wrote the piece, it was 13 peoples’ word—and I believed them. Put differently, I believed that Bill Cosby was a rapist.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/11/the-cosby-show/382891/?single_page=true

Shelby Steele And Ta-Nehisi Coates Debate: Reparations Or Bootstraps?

I missed this debate on Sunday on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopolis show...

Charles Pierce included an excerpt a couple hours ago.

twitter feed was full of screencaps of coats giving steele side eye for a couple hours as is the current practice

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a33278/what-are-the-gobshites-saying-these-days-2-23-15/

Steele is on Ny-Quil.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/the-myth-of-police-reform/390057/

Peel back the layers of most of the recent police shootings that have captured attention and you will find a broad societal problem that we have looked at, thrown our hands up, and said to the criminal-justice system, "You deal with this."

Was just reading the above piece last night, and his new one. Baltimore-raised Coates weighs in

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/nonviolence-as-compliance/391640/

that last paragraph

A friend of mine has pointed out that opponents of the protest are conflating "peaceful" and "calm" with non-violent resistance strategy, which miss-characterizes the full range of non-violent resistance. And that TNC is kind of ceding that ground and using the term "nonviolence" in the way his enemies use it, instead of pushing against their definition.

ya good point

yeah i hadnt thought of it that way

She is a very smart friend. :)

Whenever I saw cops in riot gear at the Occupy marches, the thing I most wanted was a stick. And to be able to run faster.

instead of pushing against their definition.

I see where you/your friend are coming from here, but to me this isn't so clear - "When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of police brutality" (emphasis added) to me reads as: here, in this case, we are not really talking about nonviolent resistance strategies. So he's calling out the conflation, not necessarily conceding it.

Race in America Forum at Johns Hopkins
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/61723764

he was on the Slate Political Gabfest for a long segment on Friday

the hopkins forum was real good

atlantic put up a transcript

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/ta-nehisi-coates-johns-hopkins-baltimore/391904/

Just announced -- new book, Between the World and Me:

https://twitter.com/tanehisicoates/status/598256180570550272

http://i.imgur.com/DEz687m.png

lmao

Michiko Kakatuni's review of his book is pretty unfortunate: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/books/review-in-between-the-world-and-me-ta-nehisi-coates-delivers-a-desperate-dispatch-to-his-son.html

Sometimes Mr. Coates can sound as though he’s ignoring changes that have taken place over the decades, telling his son that “you and I” belong to “that ‘below’ ” in the racial hierarchy of American society: “That was true in 1776. It is true today.” He writes that “the plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return.”

Such assertions skate over the very real — and still dismally insufficient — progress that has been made. After all, America has twice elected a black president.

Uh huh.

wake up, black America!

A better note:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/07/ta-nehisi-coates-between-the-world-and-me.html

[url=http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/07/13/aimer-ce-nest-pas-se-regarder-lun-lautre-cest-regarder-ensemble-dans-la-meme-direction/]A mild demurral[url] by our friend. He's right about some of the wooly, unexamined comparisons some writers have lavished on TNC but this part pissed me off

The way people talk about Coates has always seemed like reciting the catechism, to me, and I’m not Catholic. Me, I like writing. And Coates is a good writer — practiced, perceptive, frequently quite funny. Like a lot of strong writers, he tends to stay in a particular register, and I often wish that he would branch out a little more, that he’d subvert the style that has won him the audience that discusses him in such sacramental tones. But if you’ve got a good horse, you might as well ride.

Why would he expect TNC (or any writer) to "subvert the style"? How do you "subvert" a style?

woops

I’ll read Between the World and Me, with interest, and with the kind of sympathetic dedication that I try to bring to every book I read. I imagine I’ll like it. If I think it’s good, I’m going to say that it’s good, with enthusiasm. What I won’t do is try to outdo others with my praise.

* frowns, crosses arms, sits down *

Yeah that seems like a dumb/meaningless criticism and I usually like frederik the bore as some call him.

I agree with his critique of the praisers, but TNC is under no obligation to mess with his style for the sake of it

he could've just said "TNC is OK and sometimes very good."

DeBoer often seems unduly anxious about what he thinks other people think he's supposed to think, like with his recent post on the tyranny of poptimism.

Why would he expect TNC (or any writer) to "subvert the style"? How do you "subvert" a style?

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, July 13, 2015 12:36 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Seems like the writing workshop criticism the jealous student gives the talented one: "Sure she's great at writing in that
style, but why doesn't she try writing in a different style?"

I’ll read Between the World and Me, with interest, and with the kind of sympathetic dedication that I try to bring to every book I read. I imagine I’ll like it. If I think it’s good, I’m going to say that it’s good, with enthusiasm. What I won’t do is try to outdo others with my praise.

wow this guy sounds really excellent at reading, I'm impressed

It's okay!

i've been making the coates/baldwin comparison for some time now. not so much about quality or whatever as just in terms of genre and desired effect. essayistic, personal, embodied meditation on race as lived and felt. there's a very small set of writers in that register and shooting to do that thing, so the baldwin comparison feels very natural. especially so in the nature of what he's packing into the book as opposed to his more purely-historical writing.

Just heard a little bit of Terry Gross on "Fresh Air" interviewing him on NPR about the book. She was just asking him about his West Baltimore middle school days and the rules he followed then (re walking with a group and never by himself to school; never let yourself be disrespected or yelled at without responding, even by a schoolteacher...)

some of my best friends presidents are black

DeBoer often seems unduly anxious about what he thinks other people think he's supposed to think, like with his recent post on the tyranny of poptimism.

― Treeship, Monday, July 13, 2015 5:00 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i've found this to be common among leftists working in universities

I thin he's responding (poorly) to my least favorite thing about contemporary culture: the pressurized atmosphere in which we feel compelled (through a constant exposure to opinions about things) to strengthen/defend/explain our own. that's why it feels so Zen these days to allow yourself to not form an opinion or "take" on things.

like, we can't even just read and enjoy or discuss Coates' writing. now we have to decide if he's the new Baldwin. everything goes to 11 instantly! feeling old I guess.

basically all culture has become sports talk radio.

Nah. He just doesn't like this thing as much as some other people like this thing and needs to develop a sophisticated conspiracy theory about why different people don't have his precise tastes.

when and why did deBoer become a thing? I realize I posted something he wrote, so I'm part of the problem.

xxp I hear you caller

i first came across him via internecine hot take warfare blog posts, have been mystified that he's gotten wider traction, but Not Ever Shutting Up appears to have helped make that happen

relentlessly staking out contrarian opinions helps too.

right, Not Ever Shutting Up That Everyone Else is Wrong is click gold

He's smart sometimes but other times speaks from a place of total ignorance but I think that is actually helping him because the incentives are currently geared toward constant production. Better to turn in lots of takes, some of which are otm, than picking and choosing from what you know.

def a call everything neo-liberalism or late-capitalism guy

his big subject seems to be the grating nature of so much "left" discourse on the internet. i think the things he has to say about this are good and i appreciate the term "critique drift."

sometimes i wonder what the stakes are in that stuff though. like, was there a time when most people involved in political discussion didn't wield their ideology as an accessory, making the same banal points over and over and looking for places to grind their axe? twitter might just be like the house/cocktail parties of old, except now we're all locked in there forever.

he is a grating leftist on the internet tho i mean

hes if anything more grating than most online leftists

matt bruenig >>> freddie imo

Here's an example of a worthwhile subject that he reduces to banality.

he deserves his own thread or another thread. Let's stop discussing him here.

instead of endlessly & pointlessly dissecting their own culture and occasionally raising some vague strawman of neoliberals to strawman more leftists should just ignore all other leftists & argue with economists and liberals to their right straight up. way more entertaining & elucidating than the nth performance of a white dude in a LA grad program wondering if intersectionality is hindering "worker power" or whatever. also they should stop arguing with libertarians so much imo, that's my 1 prob with matt bruenig. like its ok to poke fun at them sometimes but their presence on twitter is disproportionate

i heard TNC on npr yesterday, i love listening to him speak so much. there was one seemingly awkward moment where terry gross asked him "did you hit your children" but i guess thats in the book and what he had to say about it was super interesting

admittedly I had to look up "intersectionality"

Neoliberalism is conservatism with a gay pride face.

xp- just now?

Yeah. It's one of those terms whose definition I can guess from how the world looks.

he deserves his own thread or another thread. Let's stop discussing him here.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, July 14, 2015 4:11 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i really don't think he does, but yes

instead of endlessly & pointlessly dissecting their own culture and occasionally raising some vague strawman of neoliberals to strawman more leftists should just ignore all other leftists & argue with economists and liberals to their right straight up.

― flopson, Tuesday, July 14, 2015 5:14 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

having to fight w economists all day is def the appropriate punishment

lol

his big subject seems to be the grating nature of so much "left" discourse on the internet. i think the things he has to say about this are good and i appreciate the term "critique drift."

― Treeship, Tuesday, July 14, 2015 8:57 PM (1 hour ago)

sometimes i'll read something of his and go "yeah, that's true" but i also kind of feel like he inflates the problem way way beyond its importance. i mean snotty clickbait-y "left" takes on everything are annoying, but the percentage of the u.s. population that actually pays attention to that stuff has to be beyond miniscule. i don't even think most self-described liberals care about the kind of infighting FDB seems to obsess over.

Yeah idk. I hear a lot of liberal discussions on the internet and irl that feel like people are reading off a script and it makes me uncomfortable, even when I largely agree with them. But absent the language of internet social justice culture, these people would probably just adopt other cliches.

cliches are... the ultimate truth a glimpse inside my twitter drafts

sometimes i'll read something of his and go "yeah, that's true" but i also kind of feel like he inflates the problem way way beyond its importance. i mean snotty clickbait-y "left" takes on everything are annoying, but the percentage of the u.s. population that actually pays attention to that stuff has to be beyond miniscule. i don't even think most self-described liberals care about the kind of infighting FDB seems to obsess over.

Don't forget he's also a TA and professional grad student, so the joke about academia applies 100% - "the battles are so fierce because the stakes are so low."

admittedly I had to look up "intersectionality"

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 14 July 2015 21:17 (Yesterday) Permalink

wow

Gender studies and social theory aren't my specialties, and then there's my well-documented suspicion of jargon.

Me, I like writing

yeah, i know, that's why all your posts are 8000 words long

admittedly I had to look up "intersectionality"

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 14 July 2015 21:17 (Yesterday) Permalink

wow

― supreme problematics (D-40), Tuesday, July 14, 2015 10:12 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

obvs not a big consumer of social justice social networking

or… ilx… somehow

who is social justice -- have I met him

It's hard not to, v outgoing

Btw I actually hear "intersectional" is on the way out

what's it being replaced with? the return of baggy pants?

the best way out of an intersection is to exit the vehicle on foot and toss the keys to a beaming child

people who drive are savages imo

privilege speaking

more leftists should just ignore all other leftists & argue with economists and liberals to their right straight up

actually talked about this with a socialist poli sci prof over the weekend & he suggested that while arguing with liberals is fun af its "as much a fool's errand as arguing with anyone to the right of clinton"

it cant be more of a fools errand than arguing with leftists

http://gawker.com/making-peace-with-the-chaos-an-interview-with-ta-nehis-1717839272

someone talk to me abt why ppl are saying "bodies" as in "black bodies" instead of "people"

history of objectification

it seems like just another hopelessly awkward academic construct?

the the only time its used is in the context of oppression you dont need to shoehorn odd shorthand for the oppression in there when youre already talking about the thing

also clearly oppressors throughout the ages have been very interested in their targets as psychological beings too as thats one of the many tools of oppression

^all this, but also, it's a stylistic affectation

resonates w/ abhorrence at control of women's bodies, highlights unsavory implications wrt slavery and male violence, slight creepfactor

the mainstreaming of academic language is one of the worst things about online

http://i.imgur.com/P9JnBBP.png

good convo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl1dc2cEJfs

just bought the book maybe i will read it even

someone talk to me abt why ppl are saying "bodies" as in "black bodies" instead of "people"

― lag∞n, Wednesday, July 15, 2015 3:28 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

also seen this as "trans bodies," "queer bodies," etc--was explained to me that "bodies" *centers* the dehumanization of the subject

"female bodies"

i think this approach doesnt really "get" how language works but i cld be wrong

i know you already saw it since you linked to the article, but

Q:There are two terms invoked constantly throughout the book: “body” and “plunder.” There is a physicality to both, a totality in each when you use them, that is terrifying. I’m interested in this idea of choosing the word “black body” as opposed to saying, “the black mind” or “the black soul.”

A: I think the body is the ultimate thing. The soul and mind are part of the body. I don’t think there is anything outside of that. Your physical self is who you are. Some people feel that that is reductionist, but I don’t think it is. It’s just true.

Q: It’s your vessel.

A: But not even your vessel. It’s the thing. The body is the mind. The mind is housed, as far as we know, within an organ—the brain. The brain is part of the body. And when people speak about the soul, they are speaking about certain sensations that they feel as a result of nerves and other organ systems within the body. For me specifically, not really coming out of a religious tradition, that’s how I understand black people. It very much clarifies for me the idea of physical violence. There is a tradition within black America, that I quarrel with, that says: They can do things to our body, but they can’t really trap our minds. I disagree with that. Every assault upon the body is, in fact, also an assault upon the mind. I don’t think there is any way to get away from that.

Freddie ‏@freddiedeboer 2h2 hours ago

Please, inform me: what level of overwrought hagiography am I meant to achieve in order to properly signal my moral character?

I'mm violating my own advice by de boring is hard to resist

xxp yes that's another note to the academic rhetoric too: 'bodies' stands in for references to the worst that can be done because in that context there's nothing worse to be done than something done to a body

i know you already saw it since you linked to the article, but

― 1992 ball boy (Karl Malone), Wednesday, July 15, 2015 12:05 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol i didnt get that far

A: But not even your vessel. It’s the thing. The body is the mind. The mind is housed, as far as we know, within an organ—the brain. The brain is part of the body. And when people speak about the soul, they are speaking about certain sensations that they feel as a result of nerves and other organ systems within the body.

basically redefining body to mean person

i think using "bodies" instead of "people" or "subjects" is one of those things that attempts to reflect dehumanization but ends up seeming to enact it, at least for me. TNC's idea that it's about grounding the subject in materiality to call attention to the urgency of political struggle makes sense, but i think other writers who use it are less deliberate about their ontological positions. i guess also i am resistant to framing oppression as being at the core of identity: it's something that happens to people, and shapes them, but doesn't produce their subjectivity in some ultimate way, as postmodernists, i think, will sometimes claim as a challenge to the cartesian subject. so maybe i disagree with TNC's materialist ontology too

basically redefining body to mean person

why would anybody do this

"bodies" will always remind of flattened out art/dance/poetry criticism that reduced humans to objects in a landscape (i.e. "Bodies moving through space")

"the body" was a term of critical fascination in lit studies, idk, 15-20 years ago?

heyo

https://granta.com/issues/granta-39-the-body-3/

xp to get rid of this nonsense about souls and bodies as vessels for something else

i think it's foucault's fault

There is a tradition within black America, that I quarrel with, that says: They can do things to our body, but they can’t really trap our minds.

This same dualism has historically been used to justify slavery by suggesting that the harm of slavery "only" happens to the body. From Seneca:

It is a mistake to think that slavery goes all the way down into a man. The better part of him remains outside it. The body belongs to the master and is subject to him, but the soul is autonomous, and is so free that it cannot be held by any prison....It is the body that luck has given over to the master; this he buys and sells; that interior part cannot be handed over as property.

Yeah but phenomenologically we don't experience ourselves as just bodies, even if we believe only our body is ultimately real, ya know? Also casting off the soul is nice and all, but I don't understand the necessity of this for emancipatory struggle. It's a huge paradigm shift but what's the payoff? How will this understanding help people fight injustice? It seems just as likely to do the opposite

Ah sorry, xp to flappy bird

think i've seen that use of 'bodies' traced back to douglass, as foregrounding certain things about the specific embodiedness of african-american experience and the constitution of blackness, i could be wrong w/ that vague detail but it certainly long predates postmodernism in some guise

I think there's some foucaultian biopolitics stuff in its genealogy too

Xp jmm, interesting passage. But materialist monism could also be used to justify slavery, e.g. people are just their social condition, there is no inherent right to freedom that society should acknowledge. The whole doctrine of human rights is founded on an implicit dualism, or an idea of an inherent value or dignity in human nature that makes things like slavery abominable. It's just hard for me to see either position as inherently progressive.

Or inherently regressive. The relationship between these kinds of questions and politics always seems obscure and indirect to me

i think using "bodies" instead of "people" or "subjects" is one of those things that attempts to reflect dehumanization but ends up seeming to enact it, at least for me.

Agree with this. Also, I don't think they're connected, but it links up in my mind with dudes who refer to women as "females," something that's always creeped me out.

xp yeah of course and i think douglass discusses how in even a lot of the white pro-african american discourse during and shortly after slavery (and beyond in different ways) is about how ~interesting~ it is that african/afrodiasporic culture didn't fit in the bounds of european/american rationality. so, yes, it is complicated

xps i don't think stoic philosophy has historically been used to justify slavery...?
more like the opposite if anything
provided techniques & language for humans to think of/ experience themselves as not slaves to another, subject to another's will, but masters of themselves, sovereign subjects
a way for the powerless to find/create/claim for themselves a space of autonomy (even if only in "the mind")
epictetus was a slave

i think using "bodies" instead of "people" or "subjects" is one of those things that attempts to reflect dehumanization but ends up seeming to enact it, at least for me. TNC's idea that it's about grounding the subject in materiality to call attention to the urgency of political struggle makes sense, but i think other writers who use it are less deliberate about their ontological positions. i guess also i am resistant to framing oppression as being at the core of identity: it's something that happens to people, and shapes them, but doesn't produce their subjectivity in some ultimate way, as postmodernists, i think, will sometimes claim as a challenge to the cartesian subject. so maybe i disagree with TNC's materialist ontology too

― Treeship, Wednesday, 15 July 2015 16:19 (24 minutes ago) Perm

My approximation of how black studies would respond to this is that the slave class--which is contiguous with the system now referred to as blackness--is denied a subjectivity; the Cartesian subject is a white subject. The structures of race are themselves ontological

i don't think deciding bodies have inalienable rights is any more of a leap of faith or any less defensible than deciding whatever spooky stuff you think is inside the body has them

my body is full of ghosts

http://www.incognegro.org/afro_pessimism.html

"Accumulation" is replacing "intersectionality" I am told

updates xls

...how?

Oops I mean "assembledge"--I just read accumulation in that piece I linked

lagOOOoooOOOoon

Idk man because sometimes the conceptual focus in critical theory changes over time?

the ghosts demand new words to feast on

I believe it's a deleuze/guattari deal

lagOOOoooOOOoon

― Trap Queenius (wins), Wednesday, July 15, 2015 1:03 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://38.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_macgdfyqFW1rwmb58.gif

https://sequelsprequels.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/tumblr_inline_n4pmyequek1svujri.gif

http://i.imgur.com/cPkwGfA.png

freddie backlash in full swing

I also misspelled "assemblage"--sorry working from my phone

ah ok

is it supposed to be in french pronunciation like "differance"

xps treeship otm upthread re tnc's anti-cartesian materialist ontology
i understand tnc's reasons for using this language, identifying person/self = body
but ultimately that reductive equation is no less metaphorical in its way, no less a philosophical fiction, than cartesian metaphors
yes it may be philosophically (or politically) clarifying in certain context, & powerful, used for deliberate reasons as tnc does,
but as pervasive locution--
imo maybe confused/confusing, maybe ultimately counterproductive

xps i don't think stoic philosophy has historically been used to justify slavery...?

Yeah, I plucked this passage out of a Bernard Williams essay without knowing its proper context. Looking it up, it's not exactly a justification. Seneca's arguing that slave and slaveowner are, in their essence, equivalent beings and that there are limits to what a slaveowner can "own" in a slave. The slaveowner can't compel crimes or treason since the slave is his/her own moral being. So you could say he's cordoning off what can justifiably be done to slaves from what can't, not justifying the practice as such. I'm not sure if he thinks it needs justification as such.

Roman slavery was p different from colonial-era slavery in some obvious ways