Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

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."