Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

*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.

Frederik may turn the board into a ghost town yet

Daneness

I *am* a Marxist

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Tuesday, September 19, 2017 11:28 AM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

Je suis un ILXist

Oh, fuck, I meant essayism. On the other hand, it got unperson to tap out, so mission accomplished.

always happy to distribute lols according to need

On the other hand, it got unperson to tap out, so mission accomplished.

Oh, I'll still engage with sane people, just not you, you ESL bonehead.

it's not like the rest of us are going to forget that you said this stupid ass shit:

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

x-post: You write that as if that isn't still a big plus for me. Do you really think anyone here wants to 'engage' with you?

Fred it generally doesn't end well when you start into a rage spiral like this and make it personal and I'm being friendly here mayne

Anyways, back to Coates. Remember how he wrote about the 'Dreamers' in BTWAM? The policeman who killed his friend, he was black. It's not a purely black/white thing, it's who buys into the dream of whiteness, and who does not. And he constantly shows how part of buying into whiteness is obscuring the power of whiteness. That's one of the things Paul Street gets wrong, he just mentions stuff white people has does, as if that was enough. He never questions if it has put a dent in the power of whiteness (it clearly has not) because that is not important to him. White power isn't. White people is. And while that might seem humanistic, Coates looks at it in reverse, because white power is what allows for black people to be killed with no repercussions. Because, as Coates convincingly shows, 'whiteness' is constructed in opposition to blackness, and therefore requires the subjugation of blackness.

a great historical injustice xp

― I Love You, Fancybear (symsymsym),

alright, so that's not what i was saying. i don't care if me or k3v or unperson -- who doesn't like me -- is attacked. but i think that the demand for totally uncritical acquiescence to coates' writing is kind of like a demand for non-engagement and i find it.... odd and somewhat condescending toward coates, whose wriitng i often enjoy

i don't know what's behind it. i don't think coates' writing necessarily supports some kind of "status quo" moralistic politics, making it popular among non-radicals, as the counterpunch article suggests. i don't think that. but i don't really get it. there is no writer who i would try to protect from analysis the way people seem to do with coates.

like either fred or deej ctr+f'd the packer response for the word "intersectional" and said that since that word didn't appear he could be safely dismissed. what kind of a way to read is that

It was me, except it wasn't what I said. At all.

And come on, you seriously don't have any idea what the dynamic is here? No clue? Care to make a guess?