Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

How bad would a piece making that particular case be for Kevin to say it was bad lol

how many people deciding not to read the chatterson thing don't have a clue that he's black too

chatterton williams. fuck all.

loomis posted a follow-up: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/10/latinos-and-whiteness

Xp don't think it's terrible, but it does make me wonder if TNC has been reading Sam Kriss

― IF (Terrorist) Yes, Explain (Bananaman Begins), 8. oktober 2017 01:33 (eight hours ago) Bookmark Flag PostPermalink

He's been pretty open about his love of comics and fantasy, and it influences the language in this one and the incarceration essay quite significantly.

The Chatterton Williams essay is not hysterical at all, but as with so much of the writing on Coates, it just nips at the margen of his arguments, without wanting to grapple with his central points. The crazy thing is that it's titled: 'How Ta-Nehisi Coates Gives Whiteness Power', as if that's somehow a bad / unintended consequence of Coates' writing. But this is the end of the Trump-essay:

It has long been an axiom among certain black writers and thinkers that while whiteness endangers the bodies of black people in the immediate sense, the larger threat is to white people themselves, the shared country, and even the whole world. There is an impulse to blanch at this sort of grandiosity. When W. E. B. Du Bois claims that slavery was “singularly disastrous for modern civilization” or James Baldwin claims that whites “have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white,” the instinct is to cry exaggeration. But there really is no other way to read the presidency of Donald Trump. The first white president in American history is also the most dangerous president—and he is made more dangerous still by the fact that those charged with analyzing him cannot name his essential nature, because they too are implicated in it.

Not only is it the whole point to show how powerful whiteness is, he also points out he thinks it's dangerous when people minimize the power of whiteness (and I find it hard to imagine Coates hasn't thought about the way his arguments overlap with Spencer's, after all Baldwin grappled a lot with this type of question as well)

It's what I find so infuriating about so many of these 'critiques', they're so shallow as to just be dismissive. Loomis writes: Ultimately, throwing up our hands in the face of hate and white supremacy doesn’t do us any good at all. Coates more or less throws up his hands. Apart from the fact that this isn't true - Reparations, yes, but Coates also says to his son that he should live his life for himself instead of wasting it on bettering white people - who is 'us' in this quote? Why should Coates write to do 'us' any good, rather than to be true to himself and to do himself good?

That twitter thread calls his writing 'useless', but useless for what? Coates can't be recommended for 'Race 101' which would be devastating if his book was called 'Textbook for Race 101', but it's not. It's a letter to his son. And contrary to what the twitter-thread says, I find the passage on Paris in BtWaM to be among the most beautiful passages, in the way it combines his delight at being somewhere where he is not part of the 'equation' as he calls it, part of the racial hierarchy in France the way he is in America, with the realization that the country is still based on a 'Dream' the way America is, and that the people plundered to make that Dream a reality looks a lot like him.

So many of the best parts of the testimonial writing of Baldwin and Coates are in these passages, when they themselves come up against the limits of their arguments. When Baldwin realizes he has nothing to say that could convince people more radical than him, the Nation of Islam in particular, that he is right and they are wrong. In Remember This House, Baldwins almost shameful explanation of why he stayed a 'witness' to the struggle, why he went to France instead of fighting in America, and his almost survivors guilt at having survived while so many others were murdered. The whole wrenching point of Between the World and Me is that Coates can't offer a hopeful message to his crying son, and people expect him to give it to Stephen Colbert? It's not what you get in this writing. You get truths, you get insights. But it's written by Coates and Baldwin, and mostly for Coates and Baldwin. That's the premise.

And since you are all just fp'ing the shit out of me anyways, and since now would probably be as good a time for a break as any, I'm just going to come out and say it: That these critiques of Coates are spread so widely is racist. Each individual critique don't have to be, but the reason they are allowed to proliferate, to come from every newspaper everywhere, even though so much of the critique is answered in the texts themselves, that's racist in two ways.

1) There's an assumption that Coates hasn't thought of it himself. Again, the NYT just presented the freaking point of his last essay as if it was an unintended consequence of his ideas. These critiques almost always do this, they never engage with his thoughts as if they are a well considered argument, where the writer is considering both the strengths and the weaknesses of what he is proposing, and going for what he thinks is best despite it's drawbacks. And, frankly, it so often feels as if these writers just can't think that a black writer is thinking his argument through, instead they write as if he is 'feeling', as if he is just going along and can't realize the consequences.

2) Even though Coates explicitly frames his book as a guide to how son on how to live happiest as a black man, the potential value therein is just dismissed out of hand. It always has to help 'us', to help the US defeat Trump, to offer hope, to guide the worldwide fight against white supremacy. Writing with the intent to improve black lives, and limited to that, is simply not understood as a valid premise. People can discuss the best strategy for battling white supremacy, but it's so ironic that these points based on the inherent value of black lives aren't so much dismissed as just ignored.

And I'm out.

Xps i did know TCW was black

Frederik otm. The 'important and necessary critique/takedown of TNC' industry, and the chorus of signal boosting by hashtag resistance types and Frum-ass conservatives is total racist reaction from the billionaire's media

Imagine accusing Coates of mirroring white supremacist arguments having written this line https://t.co/d1cz4sz3Yr pic.twitter.com/bj7ngClTm7

— Almaqah (@_Almaqah) October 8, 2017

yikes tbh

Here's another yikes for you bud

And hopefully my last tweet about Nazis for day: Thomas Chatterton Williams got his pat on head from Richard Spencer. Hope it was worth it pic.twitter.com/d6woygjCJ5

— Joel D. Anderson (@byjoelanderson) October 8, 2017

yeah i don't really care about guilt by association stuff but what he wrote in that book 7 years ago gives me some pause for sure. he obviously has some complicated personal and family experiences with race and it's not really my place to say whether that is valid but...yeah. that said the NYT essay wasn't nearly as objectionable but maybe i'll go read it again with a more careful eye

i guess someone should respond to the critique of TNC advanced in that professor fleming thread quoted by unperson, but it's coming from such an absolute hard-left stance that i can't help but feel it's unfair to single out TNC for failing to live up to standards that almost anybody else would fail, myself included. (i have a friend who constantly retweets her stuff; for perspective, fleming supported jill stein and refers to barack obama as "unhinged with narcissism, bloodlust and thirst for power.")

No one with any shred of credibility would support Jill Stein

I'm not a Stein fan but I wouldn't begrudge anyone who can't bring themselves to vote D

i would tbh

depends where the person lives! and how they vote on other races. and and and

whoa buddy who said anything about voting on other races, yeesh

read the room

White American disregards other races film at 11

La La Land?

gbx can't tell if thats a joke or not but to be clear i meant downballot races...

bud

cmon

i am honestly confused

joeks bruv

lol ok lol @ me

xps but I am pretty sure Richard Spencer is just starting trouble and doesn't actually appreciate the TCW article. There was plenty in the article one could object to from an left/antiracist standpoint but I'm fairly certain it didn't call for a white ethno state.

Spencer and the alt right try to inflame inter-left conflicts as a wedge to drive people over to their side. That's literally why the Mercers gave millions of dollars to Milo Yiannapolous. Caricaturing one's centrist or leftist opponents as "basically Nazis" both 1.) plays into this strategy and 2.) diminishes the toxicity of the actual alt right, who are very much a part of our political landscape right now unfortunately.

the article was blatantly, on its face terrible. that you guys would defend it speaks to how shallow your understanding of this conversation is

http://www.sfchronicle.com/books/article/We-Were-Eight-Years-in-Power-by-Ta-Nehisi-12258991.php

I was happy to hear TNC more or less reject "great president" rhetoric on Intercepted

Tremendous but woefully short interview:

http://www.theroot.com/ta-nehisi-coates-talks-race-trump-and-what-s-really-sc-1820422279

The Root: In your book We Were Eight Years in Power, you bring up this concept of “plunder” (to be robbed or taken advantage of by a large group). That the United States is “plunder,” that to be African American in this country is to be plundered. To be white is to be the plunderer. If this is true, does this essentially make the American experiment irredeemable?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: No, no; here’s why ... why can’t America admit to its crimes the way Germany deals with its conscience? Well, Germany killed—good God, a number of Jews in order to get to that point. What is redeemable? I think human society is a mess. They’re always a mess. And this is our mess.

The Reich’s twelve million actual slaves have not been dealt with by Germany's conscience in the slightest, though.

*7.6 million

I’m still struggling with his argument — in this clip — that white fans of hip-hop don’t have the right to rap the n-word along with the music. I get not using a powerful, hurtful word in casual conversation, but saying that in the context of an artwork, the white listener is incapable of sharing the black artist’s experience, even in the limited space of a song — that it’s an act of white plunder rather than empathy — seems to me profoundly divisive, even toxic.

yeah.........no, just a hard no on that one

What about a white listener singing along with Peter Tosh or Fela Kuti? Is singing along in Fela's pidgin English a racist act?

you know you can just rap along with it in the privacy of your own home and no one's gonna be the wiser. unless Alexa really is spying on us all.

I read (generously, because TNC) his verbal ellipses there as an acknowledgement that the true number is unknowable, like the true number of slaves and natives we killed over the centuries to build this country. Round up or down or use more or fewer decimal places, it’s not even the order of magnitude, it’s the fact it’s greater than 0.

wow much xpost

dinnerboat if you cannot understand the point he is trying to make because it’s inconvenient for you then I’m sorry, you’re not going to find any help here. He lays it out about as Big Bird as possible.

And yes fake patois is kind of racist, dude

yeah i just don’t get the urge to say it tbh, or why i should have the right to. seems like a pretty easy concept to me

that said...i was a little surprised at how easily he let “b****” and “f******” fly in his examples of words he couldn’t use

xp thks

I’m still struggling with his argument — in this clip — that white fans of hip-hop don’t have the right to rap the n-word along with the music. I get not using a powerful, hurtful word in casual conversation, but saying that in the context of an artwork, the white listener is incapable of sharing the black artist’s experience, even in the limited space of a song — that it’s an act of white plunder rather than empathy — seems to me profoundly divisive, even toxic.

― dinnerboat, Wednesday, November 15, 2017 7:19 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you are an irredeemable dullard

I move we use "dinnerboat" as our own ILX-centric version of Milkshake Duck

oh no TNC is being divisive about white people who use the n word!! lol tf

I’m still struggling with his argument — in this clip — that white fans of hip-hop don’t have the right to rap the n-word along with the music.

yeah, this is like saying I don't have the right to hump the seat in front of me when I watch porn on an airplane

the struggle is real

what

what about frequent fliers