Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

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