Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

I feel like everyone is just arguing their own bias and not reading what anyone else is saying, or if they are bothering to read, it's only through the lens of said bias. There's no empathy or perspective being applied. Just points. Everyone gets to be right in the end.

nah. i think i'm arguing w/ a pretty specific ideological stance k3v is (was?) taking, this is of a piece with the wider argument coates' essay is making in the world right now.

like, this is a real ideological point of contention w/in "the left" right now, i dont think its some sort of issue of personal biases out of control or something

I don't care anymore. You and Fred B are ganging up on K3v K. Up is right, south is left, I believe what I believe and so does everyone else.

Funnily enough, kev have offered no proof of why the education gap matters. You just say that it's there and therefore it's mightily important that everyone acknowledges it. Which Coates does, he presents the numbers. Then he points out that the significance of the gap is enormously overplayed, offers examples, offers a brilliant historical thesis for why that would be - probably my favorite part of the essay - and points to the dangers in overplaying this gap. He has done his job.

If you want to argue against him, you have to do the work. You just say that college educated and non college educated whites have different interests, but you give no examples of what that might be. While Coates is very explicit on why their interests in the power of whiteness would be a motivating factor. He has an actual, worked over, thesis, with empirical data, historical quotes, and he presents it brilliantly and thought-provokingly. You have a single finding from an exit poll, no thoughts on what it means, why it matters, and how it helps us. And still you say he is the lazy writer.

here's the hayes clip

http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/coates-in-100-years-people-will-say-we-lost-our-minds-1047922755852

we went to a bar and the 2 american dudes in my program argue about this shit literally until last call lol

this should help move things forward

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/whitesplaining-ta-nehisi-coates_us_59bd669be4b0390a1564de21

el tomboto otm here

Can't believe d40 agrees with d40 this is a gamechanger

love when ilx dudes decide what side they're on based no what side i'm on rather than the actual merits of the conversation

Did u just attribute ilx gender

el tomboto otm here

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Sunday, September 17, 2017 5:37 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what does his post even mean? I'm arguing from my biases?? lol

Seriously, that second part, the historical analysis. Reread it, got chills again. So good. In general, it's weird how nobody ever actually critiques Coates' history writing, seeing as he is not really a historian, and everyone always accuses him of being too historically focuses. Like with Packer: It flattens out history into a single fixed truth, so that an event in 2016 is the same as an event in 1805, the most recent election erases the one before, the Obama years turn into an illusion. It brushes aside policy proposals as distractions, and politics itself as an immoral bargain. Of course, if he did go into the historical part, he would see that Coates writes about the active work being done to turn the US into a racist society in the 18th century, writes that Clinton acknowledged systemic racism in a way that earlier candidates didn't, and that the left gives up on battling white supremacy because it's too hard. Meaning, presumably, that fighting it would actually be possible - and again, Coates has written over and over about Reparations. Coates never says racism can't be defeated, but he is pessimistic because 'Dreamers' as he called them in BTWAM, refuse to acknowledge the problem. Packer just wants it to be easier, less of a problem. Something that would go away without too much hard work.

"This notion—raceless antiracism—marks the modern left, from the New Democrat Bill Clinton to the socialist Bernie Sanders. Few national liberal politicians have shown any recognition that there is something systemic and particular in the relationship between black people and their country that might require specific policy solutions."

again...frederik otm

Ta-nehisi Coates is probably the most misread writer in the world at the moment for some weird reason. It probably has to do with education.

to 'form a more perfect union' this country could use massive $$$ reparations for all african-americans (whether direct and/or in the form of targeted community funding) because we sure have been racist pieces of shit for centuries. isn't that obvious? make the rich pay for it through serious taxes, too, because fuck them

I feel like everyone is just arguing their own bias and not reading what anyone else is saying, or if they are bothering to read, it's only through the lens of said bias. There's no empathy or perspective being applied. Just points. Everyone gets to be right in the end.

― El Tomboto, Sunday, September 17, 2017 6:26 PM (fifty-nine minutes ago)

this is generally what happens, but i have made a pretty concerted effort to make it very clear that i broadly agree with coates' major points while outlining what i feel the shortcomings of his writing are, both in terms of the internal validity as a scholar and the external validity as a crucial part of the larger discussion about the direction our country is headed in. unfortunately there are some people who are unable to grasp this and see any criticism leveled at coates, no matter how mild or technical, as a total repudiation of his central point and everything he stands for. as i said before, it is unfortunate that this sort of splitting -- the need to take sides before actually thinking -- tends to dominate our discourse, but it is what it is.

kev's post is what white privilege looks like.

dan unlike deej and fred i actually have a modicum of respect for you so it's unfortunate that the best you can manage is a drive-by.

i honestly wonder what would happen if the environment were like this in the other disciplines. the fact is coates is too good for most who read him. my only worry is that he's starting to realize that

I mean, I get why Deej and Fred are popular punching bags on here. They are often their own worst enemies. But in this case they are both correct.

lol djp and i just disagree about some rap music mainly but i respect him...speak 4 yourself

xp

to 'form a more perfect union' this country could use massive $$$ reparations for all african-americans (whether direct and/or in the form of targeted community funding) because we sure have been racist pieces of shit for centuries. isn't that obvious? make the rich pay for it through serious taxes, too, because fuck them

― reggie (qualmsley), Sunday, September 17, 2017 7:13 PM (thirty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

So many cities with desiccated neighborhoods and defacto segregation. Even from a practical perspective - centrists will love this - you have more money and more businesses and more taxpayers. The moral imperative for reparations is obvious. Targeted community funding imo is an excellent way to go about it, at least in one aspect.

That's not what he was saying

Xp deej

lol

oh he doesnt have respect for me. .. . . lol whatever

"The problem with this piece by an African-American author written specifically from an African-American perspective is that it doesn't center my concerns as a white person. I mean, he didn't say anything wrong per se but there is something about this that is invalid because I can't turn this into an argument that celebrates me, a white man."

XP:
"Now my feelings are doubly hurt because did not write a thesis explaining how I can mold this argument into something that makes my perspective primary. I really thought we had you trained better, boy, I mean dear friend who I respect."

disagree with tanehisi coates = white supremacist.
You heard it here first, on ilxnews

ok, i think i'm done with this for now. i stand by what i wrote 100%

This thread took a fucked up turn.

Turncoates

Lol

I'll get me coates

I don't think anybody is being fair to one another in this argument. It took me a few days to process how I felt about TNC's original piece, and a while to process how to deal with how I felt about Packer's response. Maybe a lesson here is there's very little anybody can say in the moment about these things that is both valid and constructive.

I should add that I don't think any african american person has any obligation to be "fair" to a white person in this argument.

FWIW Asad Haider is interviewed on this week's Doug Henwood podcast and I found his critique of Coates's piece a little more cogent than what he wrote. I think it was a mistake to do a piece tackling Lilla and Coates at the same time, because they really are not two sides of a coin, and Coates deserves a lot more nuanced analysis than Lilla does.

a Marxist critique of Coates on Counterpunch (yes, I know exactly how this will be received here)

There are seven overlapping, interrelated, and fatal problems with Ta-Nahesi Coates’ critique and, as we shall see, caricature of “the left.” To begin with, Coates’ definition of the “modern left” is absurd. It includes people who aren’t remotely left at all, like the vanguard arch-neoliberal Bill Clinton, “national [neo]liberal politicians” like Obama and Hillary (“proud to have been a Goldwater Girl”) Clinton, and leading neoliberal Democratic pundits and essayists like Nicholas Kristof and George Packer. The radical-leftmost extreme of Coates’ American “left” is the supposed socialist Bernie Sanders, a vaguely social-democrat-ish New Deal Democrat who backs Israel and the F-35 fighter jet boondoggle and who lustily backed Bill Clinton’s criminal bombing of Serbia.

Second, Coates’ badly mangles the actual left critique of the neoliberal Democratic Party. He describes this critique as the charge that “the Democratic Party lost its way when it abandoned everyday economic issues like job creation for the softer fare of social justice.” That’s way off-base. The actual left analysis holds that the always capitalist Democratic Party “lost its way,” so to speak (turned further to the right), when it more completely abandoned economic and social justice (centrally including racial justice and equality), labor rights, the poor, minorities, and environmental sanity in pursuit of an ever-closer alliance with corporate America, Wall Street, and the elite professional class....

From Sanders and on to his more radical portside, the actual U.S. left and progressive program has long been and remains directed at addressing both (a) the specific discrimination and oppression faced by Black and other non-white Americans and (b) the economic/class inequality that oppresses the broad multi-racial working-class majority while it falls especially hard (thanks to racism, deeply understood) on the non-white poor. The longstanding legitimately Left progressive agenda addresses both race and class at one and the time. It does not accept Coates’ false dichotomy between class and race.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/15/race-v-class-more-brilliant-bourgeois-bullshit-from-ta-nahesi-coates/

This reads to me as saying "he's not addressing the true left", which is not what I think he was shooting for. I think his critique was aimed at a broader group, but I could be wrong. But yes, #notallleftists.

false dichotomy between class and race.

oh good, i know i can ignore the shit out of this

it's a testament to TNC's power as a writer that such a large part of the left has that reaction to seeing the word "class" now

i think it's reasonable to push back against what packer refers to as the view that all white behavior is undifferentiated; it's probably less helpful to define the_left, as counterpunch writer does, so narrowly as to more or less make TNC's point for him

In all I've read of Coates I've never ever encountered the view that 'all white behaviour is undifferentiated' and I think it's far more reasonable to question why so many (mostly white) writers still push back so forcefully against that imagined position.

But I'd much rather just ignore that counterpunch as it's basically the same discussion we had just a few days ago, and it mostly never engages with what Coates is actually trying to say and instead just chastises him for not saying what they want to hear. It's obfuscation, diversion.

it mostly never engages with what Coates is actually trying to say

I think it does - the trouble (for you) is that he comes to the conclusion that what Coates is actually trying to say is simplistic/binary (the statistics about which nonwhite groups voted for Trump appear nowhere in Coates' piece), historically ignorant, and more aimed at shoring up Coates' own position in the media elite than offering any serious critique of American society as it actually exists. The concluding paragraph is crucial here (and ties into discussion earlier in the piece about why he pays more attention to what George Packer et al. have to say than to the work of much more hard-left critics):

You don’t get to hold a privileged perch at the neoliberal-capitalist Atlantic and get “Genius Grants” from the corporate-globalist MacArthur Foundation by being a Marxist who takes seriously the problem of class rule and its dialectically inseparable relationship with racial oppression. Going down that seriously radical path costs you money and prestige. It comes with a price. Serving the bourgeoisie and becoming part of the Russo-phobic ruling-class Neoliberal Democrats’ recent coordinated hit job on progressives (see this and this for other examples) in their right-wing party’s ranks is a much better-paying gig. Brilliant.

I see we've become adept at reading (and caring about) every one of TNC's motivations, including why he writes. I had no idea he wrote for the sake of getting invited to cocktail parties with Chris Hayes. All we need is a Nixonian allusion to Georgetown cocktail parties.

The Counterpunch article has some strong counterstrikes, nevertheless.

*no

I love that unperson claims to engage with something Coates is saying, then immediately uses as proof the fact that Coates didn't say something he should have said.

If you'd listened to as much Miles Davis as I have, you'd know that the notes someone doesn't play are as important as the ones they do. The things Coates chooses to leave out of his arguments are crucial, and significant.

I kinda don't give a fuck how much Miles Davis you have heard.