Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

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.