Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

lol

Hoos otm

lol

which imo...idk y'all, is the revolution gonna solve racism

to attempt an answer to this: anyone who claims perfect knowledge of post-revolutionary (I know, I know) conditions is lying, and certainly any post-capitalist society's character would necessarily be defined in large part by what came before. the optimist's view is that if you remove the material basis for conflict between people - no more struggling for resources with the elimination of artificial scarcity, no competition over wage labour in something like a planned economy, etc - then perhaps systemic racism can at least be significantly attenuated over generations. what I don't think is in question for this same crowd is that current economic arrangements (or slightly altered/cosmetically "improved" iterations thereof) never will.

lol

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Wednesday, December 20, 2017 1:20 AM (twenty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

does this mean you've got more critiques you're sitting on or does this mean you're passive aggressively ignoring my question

like if you're suggesting "people are lifting up his points because he's a black critic" i'd say that belies that he's a good writer with the mind of the law student he is--harvard law forum seemed to think he was worth bringing in. if you don't think his arguments are worth their salt, maybe say that instead.

......lol maybe it doesn't belie but nobody ever said i was a sharp writer

God dammit I wrote a response and it got eaten by the internet

Hold on when I get to a laptop I’ll write it up again, but tbc I wasn’t being glib to be pass agg but bc we had a big argument about RL previously

fair fair ilu sorry i'm salty about my friend

Some good, interesting things in this take:

https://www.theroot.com/from-an-ex-neo-liberal-why-ta-nehisi-coates-keeps-talk-1821429336?utm_source=theroot_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

Came here to post that

The idea that one must address these separate but connected entities is correct at its core, but it is also neoliberal thinking at its highest level.

There's a lot to like in this piece but predictably I take some issue w/ this

I feel like "neoliberal" is being rendered close to meaningless in these discussions. (And in a lot of modern Leftist rhetoric.) It's the new "bourgeois" or "counter-revolutionary" or whatever. It used to have a relatively specific meaning, but now it's just kind of "center-left who isn't left enough for me."

Otm

After reading the last couple links I still can't figure out what Coates wrote that so incensed West other than the banality of the class v. race binary

That plus alleged pessimism/hopelessness/not having a political/economic program. Which I think is true of TNC up to a point, but that's because he's not a political theorist or economist. He's an essayist who uses history to frame and illuminate the racial inequalities of the present. It's not necessarily his job to say "here's how to do community organizing to address these things." And I don't think he's in any way saying DON'T organize or work to address them. It's more like, "Look at all of this goddamn bullshit."

I feel like "neoliberal" is being rendered close to meaningless in these discussions. (And in a lot of modern Leftist rhetoric.) It's the new "bourgeois" or "counter-revolutionary" or whatever. It used to have a relatively specific meaning, but now it's just kind of "center-left who isn't left enough for me."

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Wednesday, December 20, 2017 8:38 AM (twelve minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm x2

i get why coates is open to criticism, but i would never describe his politics as neoliberal.

I feel like "neoliberal" is being rendered close to meaningless in these discussions.

the author seems to argue that any attempt to address interlocking systems of oppression (eg economic systems and racism) is inherently "neoliberal" which is a bizarre argument imo

ya as a guy surrounded by people who yell neoliberal a bunch lemme just register i'm with tipsy & m bison here

I agree that the left too often uses "neoliberal" where "liberal" will do

it's good to see west helpfully define NLism & even root it in Du Bois (Black Reconstruction in America is the most important Long Book I've ever read)

("good to see" just bcz of the relative lack of clarity around the term being alluded to itt)

Yeah except I don't think West's definition of it quoted in that Root piece really applies to Coates in any way. Privatizing and militarizing schools, e.g., is not in any way something you attribute to Coates' worldview. (Or Obama's, for that matter.) That would be Betsy DeVos.

also agree!

idrg where he gets NL from w/r/t coates

guilt by association. coates defends obama, obama is neoliberal, ergo coates is neoliberal.

It seems to me as though from what West perceives as the lack of an actionable structural critique, he extrapolates "neoliberal."

yeah, no place in his guardian piece is 'neoliberal' defined.

I think it's more an accusation that he provides cover for the neoliberal hegemony by not supporting revolution

By Simons definition Baldwin, Morrison, everyone ever who has dared write anything but an anarchists cookbook is a neoliberal...

dude I wasn't agreeing with him

I don't think he's in any way saying DON'T organize or work to address them. It's more like, "Look at all of this goddamn bullshit."

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Wednesday, December 20, 2017 2:50 PM (thirty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean in a lotta interviews i can recall reading he's expressed general pessimism about the usefulness of efforts to dislodge inequities, which for me is the root of critiques that his pessimism can be an action inhibitor especially among people predisposed to do nothing already

yknow marshall ganz talks about emotions that are action inhibitors or action motivators, and surely its clear that coates as an essayist is more interested in examination & consideration than action motivation--and i'd never hold his personal emotional pessimism against him obviously--but it seems to me that in the interests of thoroughness we (if not TNC himself) ought to consider the social effects of one of the most widely read authors on a subject leaving his readers in a place of action inhibition, and whether that helps or hurts efforts to do something about the things he illuminates so well.

I guess? Some of these critiques of Coates are predicated on presumptions about how people respond to his writings -- white people in particular -- that I'm not sure have any clear basis. If there's a notion that TNC is giving some kind of comfort to white people, I don't know what it is -- he's emphatically NOT a comfort-giving writer. If the accusation is that he's allowing people to substitute reading his books for actual action, I mean, you can basically say that about anything (including people cosigning or retweeting a Cornel West column).

yeah i'd not at all argue he gives people "comfort," on the contrary i guess my concern is the broad effect of leaving readers in a place of agitated hopelessness

tipsy extremely otm throughout this thread recently

"i guess my concern is the broad effect of leaving readers in a place of agitated hopelessness"

white people love this feeling. #breakingbad

he's emphatically NOT a comfort-giving writer

from the side of an idealist of whatever stripe, this can readily serve as a substitute 'satisfaction' for real/radical change of the underlying discomfort

Yeah I get that but it can also be a prod to action. Depends on the person. Like, how many people are more open to the idea of reparations than they were before reading TNC's essay on it? It's some number greater than zero. He says himself in that essay that he understands it's a huge political boulder to roll, but he wants to start to change the dialogue around it. That in itself sounds like political activism to me.

agreed, he totally changed the dialogue on reparations & that kind of impact is imo absolutely a powerful political act

dude I wasn't agreeing with him

― Simon H., 20. december 2017 16:30 (forty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sorry, didn't mean to imply that, wrote that wrong.

Coates, at least in BTWAM, writes about 'The Mecca' as the thing to engage in. Which is again metaphorical, for him it's HBCU's and his writing, for someone else it might be political activism. He writes that everyone should find their Mecca to keep themselves alive, and specifically warns his son to spend his life on trying to convince white people of anything. I don't think there's anything in that book that specifically goes against political activism? It's just not what Coates himself does.

just want to raise my anecdotal experience that plenty of white readers resent Coates for making them feel bad about themselves, just to throw that on the pile. not sure it makes sense to hold Coates accountable for the stuff white readers may or may not project onto his writing. tipsy already said this, so I’m just amplifying.

West’s critique was in bad faith in places inasmuch as he deliberately misread Coates. West and Coates have substantive differences which West is, of course, well within his rights to discuss. His critique, though, read to me as in the spirit of academic culture wars in terms of his rhetorical strategies. In all the worst ways.

It seems to me (disclaimer: ignore me) that one of the key points in discussing Coates visa vis “neo liberalism vs the left” is his underlining of the historical fact that efforts to bring about equality which aren’t explicitly anti-racist won’t help black people, and will probably hurt them more. If you want to paint that as being pessimistic because of the general chances of a plan that starts “Step 1: fix racism” then that’s reasonable, but I think he’d consider that a better idea than one starting “Step 1: fix everything else”

an example of what I mean by West’s bad faith:

God knows my politics are closer to West's and I owe him a lot re: my personal development, but come on man, what the hell pic.twitter.com/lwTkDeAVmY

— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) December 17, 2017

Andrew Farrell otm (and tipsy & horseshoe & the people saying “neoliberal” is becoming a buzzword /signal w no real meaning)

The idea that one must address these separate but connected entities is correct at its core, but it is also neoliberal thinking at its highest level.

This is a peculiar sentence. It seems to be saying that something that is objectively correct is also inherently wrong, not because it is wrong in any particular, but because it can be labeled "neoliberal".

And again the notion that it is inherently "neoliberal" to take this line of attack is outright bizarre

i can't wait for boomers to die everyone who can remember the 2016 primary to die, then we can be free

Neoliberal has a precise meaning. It means you support policies that let loose the creative destruction of the market, at the expense of systems that have been put in place to shield certain workers from volatility. Ta Nehisi Coates is not a neoliberal and neither, really, was Obama because he wasn’t trying to accelerate the process of privatization (as Bill Clinton did.) He also didn’t try to overturn this trend either — he wasn’t talking like Sanders about going back to a New Deal era thinking.