Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGg2xtzdzK0

xp

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

― Frederik B, Tuesday, September 19, 2017 10:02 AM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

new ilm board description

unperson, you can say that the piece considers what Coates is saying, or you can say that it doesn't and that that is okay, but you can't say both. And I will not participate in your pathetic attempt to change the subject from what Coates is saying any more.

How about we move this over to "Ta-Nehisi Coates Makes Some Strong And Valid Points But Blows Past A Lot Of Really Important Shit In The Process, The Thread," then?

Phil, you question TNC's motivations yet Paul Street includes the following paragraph:

(Here, at the risk of sounding self-promotional, let me mention that the second and third books I – a Marxist since age 19 – ever published dealt very specifically with racism and racial oppression. They did so in ways that allowed abundant space for race as a problem in and of itself but never required me to drop my socialist critique of class disparity and class rule: Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era [2004] and Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History [2007]).

"Here are some books of mine you can buy, and, by the way, I've been doing this since Coates was a teen afraid to walk down the street for being of getting beaten to death."

i think the depredations of coates' motives in that piece were low but i also think that coates mischaracterized packer among others in his article and set up an unhelpful "class vs. race" binary that wasn't really "intersectional" at all. i agree with coates' powerful assessment of how race factored into the election but i don't think that writers looking at other crucial factors are necessarily doing so to detract from the issue of race.

Guys have any of ye not just considered asking TNC what he meant

more aimed at shoring up Coates' own position in the media elite than offering any serious critique of American society as it actually exists

wtf

Why do people who levy criticisms that TNC focuses too much on race usually look like this?

https://www.paulstreet.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/26165_110931552273519_110931475606860_109199_4076506_n1.jpg

yeah shut up everyone who look like that

Well, yeah.

srsly why do i continue be astonished at this schoolyard shit

come armageddon

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

After reading Street's essay a second time, I realized he and Coates have much in common, which is why he's so upset. Or maybe he wants a Macarthur Grant too.

Phil, you question TNC's motivations yet Paul Street includes the following paragraph:

Yes, he does. There is a lot about Street's piece I don't like. (I am, after all, not a Marxist.) But it's a fact that Coates lives in Elitemedialand now. He's written for The Atlantic about how uncomfortable that used to make him, and about learning the rules of that world. He's clearly learned them now - the people he cites, and the people he views as worth arguing with, all come from that world. So having someone shout "You ain't hardcore!" at him from the back of the crowd seems valid, and broadly supportable, to me. Even though, again, I think a lot of what Coates has to say is true.

is there another writer who is this difficult to disagree with without being shouted down or worse?

worse?

Instead of this shit again, can't we discuss the great things that Coates actually writes, and then have Morbs and Kevin move their shit to unperson's thread?

https://frinkiac.com/meme/S05E05/650565.jpg?b64lines=SSBMRUFWRQogTVlTRUxGIE9QRU4gVE8gV0VER0lFUywKIFdFVCBXSUxMSUVTLCBPUiBFVkVOIFRIRQogRFJFQURFRCBSRUFSIEFETUlSQUwu

why don't you choke on your shit, lobotomized DarRYL

Treeship, when a writer constructs an argument, and you just say 'I don't think' then don't complain if the only response you get is being shouted down. You bring nothing to the table.

worse?

― I Love You, Fancybear (symsymsym), Tuesday, September 19, 2017 1:20 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i guess nothing "worse" happens, but criticisms of coates are prone to extraordinarily uncharitable interpretations in ilxland

How about this great paragraph?

"The focus on one subsector of Trump voters—the white working class—is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump’s presidency is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony—even after a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life. The idea of acceptance frustrates the left. The left would much rather have a discussion about class struggles, which might entice the white working masses, instead of about the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been the agents and beneficiaries of. Moreover, to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world. But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firefighters and evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, can be dismissed. Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential reckoning is required."

Note the use of 'whiteness'. Crucial abstraction, he is not blaming 'all white people' he is blaming 'an entire whiteness'. The way this distinction is being elided is really telling. I've seen a apt criticism, that this is an abstraction, but that is basically failing to understand the genre Coates is working in - literary criticism. And you can of course say that you dislike that kind of writing, but it does not make him wrong.

a great historical injustice xp

I *am* a Marxist but I didn't like the personal attack angle of some of that piece (several xps)

Took til September but ilx is starting to hum again

It's what it isn't humming that matters

Hi5

but that is basically failing to understand the genre Coates is working in - literary criticism.

That's not what Coates is working in.

that is basically failing to understand the genre Coates is working in - literary criticism.

Oh, for fuck's sake. I'm tapping out.