Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

My wife's brother is white, racist as fuck, and the biggest Carson stan I've ever known. Carson is proof to him that racism has been solved and he doesn't have to do a thing or (especially) think about it anymore.

lol at the image of a "Carson stan"

My dad is a big Carson fan for similar reasons. Carson is a mega Christian, has wacky ideas about pyramids and shit, and most importantly, in his mind it supporting Carson shows his even more racist friends that he's not a racist

I didn't see Packer making the argument that "racist whites couldn't possibly support Ben Carson," I see his line about that appearing in a paragraph where he's making the point that lots of other shit was going on in 2016 besides just America being racist as fuck. But I am reading his response with more sympathy than almost everybody else here, I suppose.

lol at the idea that someone has to use a specific fucking word, every time, or their argument can be dismissed out of hand

fwiw coates singled out packer for criticism in his essay, so he's responding to that

Yep. His response amounts to, "But I wrote good stuff about the election too!'

Where you and I differ is that you think Coates is better than his critics. His Reconstruction-era prose makes his ideas seem like much more than they are.

― grawlix (unperson), Saturday, September 16, 2017 8:30 AM (twelve hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is one of the worst posts I've ever read. Not sure if that's your bad prose, bad ideas, or a mixture of the two

I didn't see Packer making the argument that "racist whites couldn't possibly support Ben Carson," I see his line about that appearing in a paragraph where he's making the point that lots of other shit was going on in 2016 besides just America being racist as fuck. But I am reading his response with more sympathy than almost everybody else here, I suppose.

― El Tomboto, Saturday, September 16, 2017 3:48 PM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It really was just America being racist is fuck, which is why white people were the only demographic to go overwhelmingly for trump. If it was sexism why did a majority of white women vote for trump? I mean we've been over this 8million times by now

this is one of the worst posts I've ever read.

You should read more. Like, in general.

From my 'fieldwork' in this area (conversations with my mom, who got all 'no, YOU'RE the racist' when challenged on her dislike of Obama or BLM or whatever) support for Carson was given purely to troll liberals.

It really was just America being racist is fuck, which is why white people were the only demographic to go overwhelmingly for trump. If it was sexism why did a majority of white women vote for trump? I mean we've been over this 8million times by now

in my scientific opinion, it was 55% racism, 20% sexism, 15% xenophobia, 10% south park fans

Women can't be sexist, it's a fact.

xp 12% necrophilia, 89% sexual frustration, 3.23% memes, 42% martian interference, 0.04% pussy hats not ready until week after election, 7% millenials vs boomers thinkpieces, 2% obama party hangover, 100% gravy sauce

The idea that xenophobia and racism aren't overlapping is absurd obv

Likewise the idea that bc more poc voted for trump than Romney means it can't be racism ... that's just bad logic

Packer is a brilliant journalist who is also an old man thinking in an ancient boomer paradigm

i largely agree with packer's response, and i think it explains the reservations i had after reading coates' piece, even though i largely came away agreeing with it. there was a striking lack of humility and cavalierism regarding the logical leaps he was making that were, truthfully, beneath a writer of coates' caliber.

Oh fuck off

I think this discussion is at an impasse. If you point out that TNC's argument is essentialist by pointing out the other factors in the American character, you are effectively eliding the difficult conversation about white privilege as the principal substance of the American character. The issue of white privilege is what has to be tackled first before anything else matters. Pointing out that other things might also matter, no matter how true, is ultimately jejune.

You can attack class issues before tackling race issues, and that's pretty much what we've always done, but the effects don't last. Race always drags us back down. The New Deal was racist as hell and the right wing still wants to get rid of (most of*) what remains from it.

I don't think TNC is at heart an essentialist or an absolutist. I think he writes like one because he feels that if he makes his points any other way then it's not going to get through to people.

*all those dams and power administrations sure do keep the lights on in a lot of red state homes though

i don't think every writer needs to account for everything. coates's subject is racism and he was writing about trump's election as it fits into the long story of american racism. i don't think the "oracular" style packer complains about is necessarily a problem. coates shouldn't have to water down the truth he wants to talk about by name-checking a hundred other true things.

the one thing that is objectionable about the coates piece is the way he deals with writers who had other explanations for trump. attack lilla -- fine -- because lilla is actively trying to sideline BLM from the democratic party, but someone like packer isn't discussing class *in order to* sideline race, he is talking about it because it is another part of the story. the trump election wasn't just about one thing.

Right. Forcefully prioritizing one thing can sound like essentialism, but it isn't.

I figure Packer got singled out because he was the sharpest of the bunch writing "What Would the White Working Class Do" pieces prior to the election.

the problem arises when that prioritization causes him to mold all the available evidence to fit his thesis (which packer, and everyone in this discussion, is on board with), while dismissing out of hand anything that might complicate it. his questionable readings of packer's (in particular) writing and tendentious use of statistics should give any thinking reader pause, even if it doesn't necessarily change our assessment of his conclusion. maybe this is a hangup i have coming from a mostly medical science background rather than the humanities, but the methods of making an argument matter, and the evidence one chooses (and chooses to exclude) affect my view of the validity of the conclusion. the carelessness with which coates steamrolls over nuance would be more objectionable if the writing weren't so clear and powerful, not to mention necessary.

i would also caution people against becoming so enamored of a particular writer that the ability to think for oneself is lost. avoid thinking of public intellectuals like coates or packer as part of this zero-sum game where any criticism of a particular thinker implies rejection of what they stand for. this is how this tends to work on twitter, but we can be better than that if we choose to be

I read the original Packer piece: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/hillary-clinton-and-the-populist-revolt In all honesty, Coates was pretty mild in his criticism of it.

avoid thinking of public intellectuals like coates or packer as part of this zero-sum game where any criticism of a particular thinker implies rejection of what they stand for

Absolutely. The challenge in spaces like the Internet, which is a campus classroom, a public square, and a middle school cafeteria all at once, is that it becomes almost impossible to discern when people are using shorthand, when people are being earnestly dense, and when people are trying to engage, while accommodating for the times when people with kids and day jobs don't have the time to say much more than their feelings (i.e. "Packer's argument is not without merit" = "TNC is wrong about America" -> "oh fuck off")

or to put it more succinctly

i love ta-nehisi coates, but twitter is not for everyone

― horseshoe, Thursday, March 1, 2012 2:16 PM (five years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't get how you can claim that Packer agrees with Coates' thesis, kevin, when he pretty explicitly states, both in the original piece and in his response, that he does not agree. He writes in his response: 'I wrote about white working-class voters because their political behavior is increasingly different from that of well-educated, professional whites, in ways that paint the current map of America red.' One of the things that Coates doesn't get into is that this idea, of a 'widening divide between a self-segregated white upper class and an emerging white lower class' is one that Packer seemingly takes from Charles fucking Murray... Coates points out that that is untrue, that in fact Trump won every group of white voter, that white voters are becoming less different from one another. As he puts it: 'though much has been written about the distance between elites and “Real America,” the existence of a class-transcending, mutually dependent tribe of white people is evident.' That's a pretty big difference, and it's one where honestly the empirical data seems pretty clearly to be with Coates.

you make conscious decisions to be irritating every day

it's not really clear what the statement (nb i haven't read the TNC piece but what Packer--i suspect not entirely accurately--attributes to him) that "Trump winning was uniquely caused by racism" even means. does it mean: if you held Trump's racism constant, but turned him into an Open Borders, pro-choice feminist, that he still would have won? obviously not. does it mean: if Trump were not racist (or at least, not more racist than any other GOP candidate) (i.e, hold everything else constant but turn off trump's racist appeal) that he would have won? possibly, but we could probably also say that about several of his other qualities; a non-nativist Trump might not have won, ditto a non-islamophobic trump, maybe even a non-chauvinist Trump. there's also obviously some 'greater than the sum of its parts' stuff going on, where Trump's unashamedly racist-xenophobic-misogynist package signalled something to his supporters more important to them than just: i will enact racist, xenophobic and misogynistic policies. without specifying what "Trump was uniquely caused by racism" (again, i doubt Coates ever says this explicitly in the piece) means, the whole argument is meaningless. this is part of a general gripe i have with historians (and people making historical arguments) not seriously grappling with causality and counterfactuals making large parts of their their discourse incoherent

i do miss TNC's blog

gah that should read

if Trump were not racist (or at least, not more racist than any other GOP candidate) (i.e, hold everything else constant but turn off trump's racist appeal) that he would NOT have won?

the way coates elides the differences between whites with and without a college degree is troubling, not only because those differences are so demonstrably apparent but because it calls into question the sobriety with which he approaches data that do not fit his narrative. trump is thought to have won white voters with college degrees by something like 3 points, versus those without college degrees by almost 40. obviously, a 50/50 split in the former group is still unacceptable and evidence that racism pervades every aspect of society and afflicts even the supposedly comfortable and enlightened among them (us, speaking personally). but the fact is that there is a 50/50 chance (maybe less, maybe more, given the imprecision of polling data) that a white person with a college degree will be a trump supporter, and something like a 70/30 chance that a white person without a college degree will be. this gap has steadily increased for several presidential election cycles now. to treat these two groups of people as a homogenous population instead of two populations with different interests is to make a serious and careless intellectual error.

this is not to say that racism does not shape virtually every aspect of american life, or that it was not the primary driver of support for trump. it does and it was, and it should not be apologized for. but, as packer explains, the increasingly disparate voting interests of upper- and working-class whites plays a crucial role in distorting the political map, and if we would like to start winning elections again, we are going to need to figure out how to get some of those votes back without yielding on our commitment to racial justice. it is a fraught, complicated subject that deserves better than what coates offered in this piece

But Coates cites those exact numbers in the piece? He elides nothing.

this is part of a general gripe i have with historians (and people making historical arguments) not seriously grappling with causality and counterfactuals making large parts of their their discourse incoherent

this is a great point, and i agree, though you still get an F for not reading the primary source. don't be part of the problem!

if we would like to start winning elections again, we are going to need to figure out how to get some of those votes back without yielding on our commitment to racial justice

this isn't true though. last week: Unofficial election results from Tuesday's election show Democrat Jacob Rosecrants won 60 percent of the vote over Republican Darin Chambers for the House District 46 seat in west Norman, despite a nearly 3,000 voter-registration advantage for the GOP there.

actually I call bullshit on myself. I should say it IS true and it's more readily doable than we think. Rosencrants won on local issues that matter to everyone.

Also, it's not the subject of Coates' piece. It doesn't 'deserve' anything out of Coates.

fred, the issue is that coates' discussion of the data is incomplete. he notes that all major subgroups of white voters went for trump. he conveniently skips over the implications of the split based on educational attainment, what its causes might be, and its impact on electoral politics (not to mention general discourse). because upper-class white voters being significantly less likely to vote for trump complicates his (still probably mostly correct) thesis that intra-racial divisions are an artificial construct created by the ruling class to pacify poor whites, he declines to discuss it.

xp tom, i'm not trying to be snarky, but i genuinely don't know how to respond to that. i'm not sure how that either supports or contradicts my point you quoted
xxp lol ok

this is a great point, and i agree, though you still get an F for not reading the primary source. don't be part of the problem!

― k3vin k., Sunday, September 17, 2017 3:13 PM (twenty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i only read text screenshotted in tweets and c/p'd into ilx threads

i only read text screenshotted in tweets and c/p'd into ilx threads

― flopson, Sunday, September 17, 2017 2:41 PM (one minute ago)

Kevin, his whole point is that the split is overstated. And since all data shows that both groups are solidly republican, I'd argue that he is right. The idea that, as you write, to treat these two groups of people as a homogenous population instead of two populations with different interests is to make a serious and careless intellectual error. I think that's self-evidently really overdoing it. Again, both groups are solidly Republican.

one was literally 50/50

That is literally not the right numbers.

As you said, Trump won the group +3. And it has voted Republican for decades. The swing of them towards Democrats was also smaller than the corresponding swing of white without a college degree towards GOP. And subsequent efforts to turn them towards Dems has failed (Hi Jon Ossof).

A state that went for the GOP by 3 points would not be considered "solidly Republican"

Bit it would be "colossally stupid"

Several of the 'Blue Wall' states had elections that were much closer. And yeah, that's saying that people have called groups like that 'solid' while they probably shouldn't. So who knows, perhaps college educated whites will some day switch. They haven't yet, though.

frederik b is ... otm

kevin, think about what ideological work your urgent need to dice white ppl up into lil class groups is doing...

if working class ppl of color overwhelmingly vote against trump, and white working class ppl vote for him, doesn't that entirely undercut the 'class matters more than race' theory

for the love of god

so the question is not about whether class "matters more" than race or vice versa.

like what does that even mean?