Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

RG: In Between the World and Me, you center much of the discussion on the black body. What compelled you to make this rhetorical choice?

TC: There is tendency in academia and in (some) social justice circles to make that which is oppressive distant and abstract. We use a language, which at times obscures what’s going on -– racial discrimination, racial segregation, racial justice, etc. This sort of language eliminates the actual actions of actual people. It was deeply important to me to situate racism as a done thing: as a thing you actually feel. I should add that in my stripe of atheism, it’s very hard to see beyond the body. There is a tendency to adopt euphemism when confronted with the very real violence that comes with having a foot on your neck.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/the-charge-to-be-fair-ta-nehisi-coates-and-roxane-gay-in-conversation

Read it this afternoon. Best book I've read in a loooong time.

https://mobile.twitter.com/tanehisicoates/status/644146105786212352

owwwwwwwwww

ziiiiiiiiiiing

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/

lol

god that comeback to whitlock is so effortlessly devastating

kapow

have not stopped lolling

boom

A dissenter, published guess where. Has anyone read the Moynihan Report? It's been excerpted so often that I guess I should.

a response: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/thinking-about-crime/406144

ha

now THAT is a zing

haaaaaaaaaaaaa!

i don't get the whitlock thing

If you google Whitlock's name I think you'll get zing pretty quick.

http://deadspin.com/how-jason-whitlock-is-poisoning-espns-black-grantland-1698683962

featuring whitlock's praise of coates, failure to recruit him and absurd failure to even launch

From slave-holding to ethnic cleansing, Christianity has repeatedly been employed to sanctify our most shameful acts. One might counter that Christianity has also been employed to inspire our most honorable acts. But this is a level of complexity that Carson’s ilk do not grant to Islam. To Carson, Islam is terror and nothing else.

http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/09/ben-carson-bigot/406390/

Oh BTW

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/23/books/ta-nehisi-coates-to-write-black-panther-comic-for-marvel.html?_r=0

fuckin A, will buy

(though i maintain it's a little on the nose; really wish they'd sic him on their big gun headliners instead...)

I'm more than slightly guessing this is part of a plan to boost up the character given the next round of movies. Whatever the reasons, all good.

https://twitter.com/tanehisicoates/status/646380413808738305

yeah, i think you're right and that they're positioning Black Panther to BECOME a pop mainstream big gun; maybe join the Avengers in the movie version depending on how well the character is received.

xp, lol
translation of that tweet for non-geeks: https://www.reddit.com/r/theblackpanther/comments/2uy0sy/spoilers_namor_got_what_was_coming_to_him/

Good interview with Coates in Paris:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/be0a6d8c-610e-11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2.html

Whatever the reasons, all good.

Disagree. If TNC really has something to say in the medium, he and it would be better off doing something of his own, rather than servicing IP for a division of Disney that is hostile to creator's rights, and just this month continued its active attack on the direct market with a program of really lame, insulting co-option of 25 years of African-American creativity from a different field.

Let me also note that it's gross (and ill-boding) that none of the reporting on this seems to know whether there's an artist, or if it's Stelfreeze if there is.

If he has something worth saying, he has probably considered the pluses and minuses of writing a book that will sell a copy to 100 dinner parties vs. writing one of the most high-profile black superheroes (or characters) in the medium.

Or maybe he hasn't, and just wants to write a book that was probably quite important to him as a youngster.

well his place in the culture has declined quickly

he's been a comic fanboy and aficionado for a long long time, if he's doing this he's doing it because he wants to and he thinks it will be fun and he believes he can acquit himself well with the character and it's a bucketlist dream.

haha y did i read those comments in the interview

haha yeah that is....precisely what i thought the comments section of a financial times article about TNC would look like

pluses and minuses of writing a book that will sell a copy to 100 dinner parties

dinner parties... in ivory towers, right?

2015 Macarthur Genius recipient

hope he uses that grant money to justify more wicked twitter burns

off to a good start
https://twitter.com/tanehisicoates/status/648801203778899968

maybe he hasn't, and just wants to write a book that was probably quite important to him as a youngster.

p sure I didn't speculate anything about his possible childhood fandom, but that if I had, I would have said that the entire system of creator exploitation, refusal to pay royalties, and decades-long attempts to demolish the DM in the name of market share is only able to be Marvel's ongoing MO because of relying on authors' childhood fandoms

it is tough for me to cast a stone at the guy for getting to play in a corporate toybox that he has some affection for; i would totally draw the avengers if they asked me.
it would look like shit, but i would do it.

I'm kinda w sic on this tbh

well he could always make his own comic with brand new characters and try to get someone to publish it and then get his target audience into it

or he could compromise, write a comic attached to a character that's strongly linked with television and movie properties that are seen by millions and get an audience for his ideas about race and equality who have no idea who he is

itt we give suggestions to the guy who just won a macarthur genius grant about how he should start his comic book writing career

^^^

he got that grant for doing comics?

for his ILX posts

bill clinton was a rhodes scholar, obama a nobel peace prize winner, no second guessing them either

Clinton's run on Power Pack was pretty good though

I'm neither second-guessing TNC's money-earning choices nor casting stones at his personal decisions: I'm disputing the proposition that WFH done for this company is an unalloyed good.

(A pebble cast, but still far more of a general principle: not knowing who your collaborator on a piece of work will be is also not an augur of untouchable quality in the end result.)

My argument about the HHV covers takes in a two-decade* ongoing history of Marvel corporate literally trying to eradicate the DM, and the repugnant, largely-blackface-ing cooption of dozens of non-comics artists' work in a fashion inherently designed to NOT bring light onto them for an audience, let alone a wider or different audience - countering "this one guy probably liked punchy punch books when he was six" - yes, probably! not disputed! - doesn't actually prove that whatever the results, or the motivation of editors responsible, this PR is a shining symbol of "all good."

* (Heroes World was '94, right? I'm on Zing.)

I'm disputing the proposition that WFH done for this company is an unalloyed good.

I'm on your side here, sic, but I'm kind of thinking ilx is not the audience most ignorant of these issues?

what he said. I haven't bought anything from marvel in six years.