Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

Jesus Christ

“How can I make a nigger joke about this without using the word ‘nigger’? WAIT I’VE GOT IT”

http://bostonreview.net/race/robin-d-g-kelley-coates-and-west-jackson

robin kelley on coates, the west incident, and why both perspectives have value and are needed. by far the best, most considered essay to come out of this dustup I’ve read

it's good

ultimately Coates quit Twitter because of this so his life will be a lot better for this beef if for no other reason

The Kelley piece is fantastic.

Great perspective but i think his analysis of Obama and liberalism is-not sure if “overly-reductive” is the phrase i’m looking for?

A Twitter thread worth reading (I haven't checked out the YouTube clips yet).

Coates issa trip. So someone tweets Black women's critiques of you and you respond w/ "I did not come for this"? Begs the question of what tf DID you come here for then if THIS is the thing you run away from? 🤔🤔🤔https://t.co/BtT1AGdCov pic.twitter.com/N6LX7ohjil

— William Jamal Richardson (@DecolonialBlack) January 18, 2018

That's a horrible thread.

Anyone else who has read the book? I'm on year seven, and it's predictably amazing. West def didn't read it, btw, that should be quite clear.

It’s not horrible but Twitter certainly is

that tweet is an infuriatingly ungenerous take on what TNC actually said. it seems clear that "i did not come for this" means that he doesn't want to spend his time feuding w/ cornel west, not that he doesn't want to be criticized at all. it also seems clear that west's out-of-nowhere attack on him made TNC something of a target for leftists on twitter and it's understandable that he didn't want to waste his afternoons arguing w/ every single person informing him that he's just a shill for the neoliberal establishment, blah blah blah.

also twitter is a cesspool and the only writers who seem to thrive on it are idiots.

ya i read the TNC quote that way, too

otm, if you watch the YT clip there is really no other way to interpret what Coates says, so kudos to twitter guy for illustrating exactly why a public figure would want nothing to do with twitter

I just started listening to the WTF interview with TNC and... in the intro Maron refers to him as the "young buck."

uh

Lock the gates

I just started listening to the WTF interview with TNC and... in the intro Maron refers to him as the "young buck."

― President Keyes, Monday, January 22, 2018 7:38 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Maron!

https://a1cf74336522e87f135f-2f21ace9a6cf0052456644b80fa06d4f.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/images/characters/p-the-sopranos-steven-van-zandt.jpg

"young buck" is unfortunate, but it does have a non-racist affiliation that refers to the social behavior of deer.

Is maron Irish at all, perfectly normal term here

I'm assuming he's not

Let's be outraged regardless tho

excited to find out if Lou Reed was one of TNC's "guys"

pankaj mishra on tnc in the lrb

I liked this review of same: http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/024_05/action=send/19134

‘My President Was Black’, a 17,000-word profile in the Atlantic, is remarkable for its missing interrogations of the black president for his killings by drones, despoilation of Libya, Yemen and Somalia, mass deportations, and cravenness before the titans of finance who ruined millions of black as well as white lives.

Ffs just stop this bullshit. Over and over and over and over. I like Pankaj Mishra, but he is playing an old song.

yes, we know you are inured to the bloody Chief Executioners' deeds

quotidian murder, soooo boring, you shitbag

The irony is that Mishra several times in that piece accuses Coates of writing stuff that is only true because they are banal. But with foreign policy, 'hey, don't kill other people' is all of a sudden the deepest insight of all.

if it was good enough for Moses...

Moses killed his own nephews because they were sacrificing the wrong kind of incense...

Or something.

13 Moses, Eleazar the priest and all the leaders of the community went to meet them outside the camp. 14 Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle.

15 “Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. 16 “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. 17 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.

Sorry, I'm working my way through the torah at the moment :)

now who's playing an old song

jk frederik I don't really care. I did think the mishra piece was better-written and supported than a lot of the other lefty Coates critiques in this thread

Yeah, I would agree with that. It's definitely worth a read.

https://tenor.com/view/michael-jackson-ilove-this-song-gif-4463897

Here is another old song for just you, Fred:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-42843897

He prevented an economic collapse and neglected t o prosecute those largely responsible for that collapse. He ended state-sanctioned torture but continued the generational war in the Middle East.

hmmm I wonder which writer wrote this in the introduction to his new collection

It's more frustration than anger this time, because the good parts of that review are really good, but then there's paragraph after paragraph that has nothing to do with Coates and could have been a part of any anti 'liberals' piece of the last few years. There's five lines on Coates, then several paragraphs on writers being pro-torture fifteen years ago.

The thing is though, the problem isn't to connect racism with Iraq and 'despoilation of Libya, Yemen and Somalia'. The problem is to take that equation, and then connect it to Rwanda, Srebenica and Syria. Once you've done that, you've got something. And I can't do it, and neither can anyone here, I think.

jesus fucking christ

fred, could you outline a few of the things you mentioned you liked about the piece?

Well, for one he has clearly read the book... His arguments about Coates' place in history is at times almost more perceptive than Coates' own musing on it in We Were Eight Years in Power, the link to Salman Rushdie was great. But then it does seem to do almost every thing it accuses both Coates and his critics of doing once we get to the end - demanding that Coates be everything at all times in his writing, and wallowing in banal truths.

Over lunch at the White House, he assured Coates that Trump’s victory was impossible. Coates felt ‘the same’.

Damning - seven years of learning and this is where we got to? Mishra had to be joking with that last sentence.

The thing is though, the problem isn't to connect racism with Iraq and 'despoilation of Libya, Yemen and Somalia'. The problem is to take that equation, and then connect it to Rwanda, Srebenica and Syria. Once you've done that, you've got something. And I can't do it, and neither can anyone here, I think.

― Frederik B, Wednesday, February 14, 2018 8:07 PM (fifty-two minutes ago)

what the hell does this gibberish even mean

I like that Mishra piece just for reminding of all of the horrible warmongery horseshit proffered in ostensibly liberal spaces back then, moreso than I remember

There's five lines on Coates, then several paragraphs on writers being pro-torture fifteen years ago.

tbf this is kinda the LRB/NYRB form, isn't it

it's called context

<sniff>

to be absolutely fair it's also kinda how I review movies myself.

'The Shape of Water is Benecio del Toros best film since Pans Labyrinth, perhaps even The Devils Collarbone.

Water Monsters have a long history in the seventh art...'

These radical critiques of Ta-Nehisi Coates seem to me to put more on his shoulders than any writer could possibly bear. https://t.co/AnsZFx5vnu

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) February 14, 2018

i have liked pankaj mishra stuff before i think but that piece is really overwritten and sloppy. trying to tie TNC to neocons in really sketchy ways like “Goldberger ... now Coates’ diligent promoter”

goldberg has been his editor at the atlantic for several years now: TNC has several times thanked him as a friend and a mentor

so the link is certainly there (and well known), whether or not not PM fills in the details

when i get a moment -- sadly probably not before the weekend -- i'm going to spell out mishra's argument, now that everyone is piling on (and none of his critics in the thread seem to me at all to be grappling with it)

PM is tying tnc to Obama, who was an elite technocrat that continued neocon policies (that we are still living with now so I don't get "old song", whether you know this stuff or not).

PM clearly likes tnc (highlights that he is a voice that is self-educated, which is very rare to see), thinks his project of self-education is of value (guessing because he has amassed readers and is taking them on a journey) and he wants to see where he goes next.