Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

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