Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

sure, but in a political context, it's bismarck, no? it's the idea that what one _can_ do is more important to political decision-making than what _should_ do, that the law is whatever you can get away with.

i think i may have been unclear when i proposed "reparations" as a concept "without specific reference to race". i was proposing that they presented disingenuously, that proposals which disproportionately benefit people of color should be presented as ideas that promote the general welfare - turning the history of "color-blind" politics on its head. the expectation is not that white people are so stupid they will not know they are being lied to, but that many of them will prefer the lie and find it more palatable.

People of color is different than black people. When I think of reparations in the US, I think of black people and giving them cash and land to figure out how to use as they want (through whichever all black entity to decide). Sure we can also give them 0% mortgages but really, cash and land.

Why are indigenous people generally not referenced when talking about reparations?

Especially if you're talking about giving land to people

I think that would need to be a different conversation with different quantitations to get to cash and land value but sure.

Quickly googling, at least native americans seem ahead in the reparation game, meaning they have gotten something actually material/tangible.

The native americans often have a treaty basis upon which to sue the US government, while African-Americans have no way to sue for damages, even though they are just as tangible harms.

At this point, I think white men should not be allowed to hold public office for at least 40 years (that threshold I would gladly increase).

jesus christ

He is not white so he would be ok to run if he can manage to get himself resurrected.

my zombie president is a jewish carpenter

Next netflix Making a Murderer/American Vandal parody.

It's posted on the Kanye West thread, but it deserves to be here as well: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/05/im-not-black-im-kanye/559763/

The personal stuff makes me a bit queasy, but hope that he's okay.

leaving the atlantic

good for him

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/ta-nehisi-coates-race-politics-2020-elections.html

Thanks for that!

what a read

https://www.bookforum.com/print/2604/inhuman-bondage-23753

Ouch. Has the novel gotten other negative reviews like that? Haven’t read it yet myself, or much about it.

I've read at least one other negative review. The most depressing part of that write-up, though, is the byline. The idea that someone who writes that poorly is an editor at Simon & Schuster, with other people's manuscripts in their custody, is terrifying.

yeah I just figured I wasn’t smart enough to understand that review

https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/9/24/20879736/water-dancer-review-ta-nehisi-coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates is not quite there yet. He doesn’t have the kind of command over the novel as a medium that will let him meld disparate genres together; he doesn’t seem to care about his characters as people rather than as devices he can use to convey ideas; he doesn’t really understand how to keep a plot moving.

it sounds like he took too long to write the book and it became muddled. he said he spent ten years writing this. no one is the same writer they were ten years ago, least of all someone who, in that time, became one of the nation's most esteemed public intellectuals

i assume he knows how to "keep a plot moving" but faltered a bit as he was trying to synthesize several different versions of the book into one narrative.

i didn't read it, just what it sounds like.

I've read at least one other negative review. The most depressing part of that write-up, though, is the byline. The idea that someone who writes that poorly is an editor at Simon & Schuster, with other people's manuscripts in their custody, is terrifying.

― shared unit of analysis (unperson), Monday, December 2, 2019 8:57 AM (eighteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'm assuming this is a young dude who is like a year or two out of grad school for literature. probably will mellow a bit as he ages.

using "apophatically" and "aporia" in one paragraph tho, bravo lol.

He is not the worlds best comics writer either. I think it's okay to be fantastic at one style, and merely ok at others.

The worst faux pas to me is that he just quotes Cornel West on 'We Were Eight Years in Power', without it seeming that he himself has read it. That's bad work.

i assume he knows how to "keep a plot moving" but faltered a bit as he was trying to synthesize several different versions of the book into one narrative.

I've been editing novels for a few years now on a freelance basis and all the errors of structure and tone called out in the Vox review are extremely familiar to me. I just finished a manuscript the other week where entire chapters were taken up by literal classroom lectures on the author's pet issues, so it's not at all surprising to me that a political essayist (and, yes, sometime comic book writer) would think his Big Novel needed multiple "slavery is bad, mmmkay?" monologues. Or that his protagonist has a sledgehammer-to-the-forehead metaphorical superpower.

i can't fucking believe there's an actual "he's not a great novelist, and that's ok!" in the vox piece

no one should be allowed to write imo

Haven't had a chance to read this yet, tbh, but I got a copy when I went to see him get interviewed about it last month. His thought process and the in-depth research he did make it sound like it could really be interesting, but at the same time I could see how it ends up muddled and disappointing.

surprised VOX writer didn't say, "Hey, Baldwin's novels were blah too!"

that vox review is just flat out embarrassing

i mean apart from gushing over how "beautiful" the sentences are (not really a good sign in most novels tbh), there's literally a paragraph where the reviewer suggests that the novel would be better if it were MORE LIKE AN AARON SORKIN SHOW

gushing over how "beautiful" the sentences are (not really a good sign in most novels tbh)

Not the greatest example, either; I was already editing that one sentence in my head, and it definitely didn't make me want to read 400 more pages.

https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/arts/article/21135953/city-lights-join-tanehisi-coates-and-natalie-hopkinson-for-a-discussion-of-gogo-history

12 noon eastern time Facebook live chat w/ Natalie Hopkinson on his 2000 article on history of dc go-go, and he as a rap fan coming to gogo, plus more. Live on Make gogo forever page plus will be archived by DC Public Library gogo Archives

They may talk about more than go-go per the poster

what else is there to talk about

i thought it was really cool of him to show up in my parents town, where my mom taught, to support a teacher who was reprimanded for teaching "between the world and me" to a high school AP class. my mom got a chance to talk to him and called me immediately afterward like she was on cloud 9

That’s awesome!

I wish he’d write another polemic - not a novel, not a comic book, not an opera, nor a screenplay, not a poetry collection. (But I get that he wants to try other stuff, etc.)

“You can’t behold evil and then return and not speak on it.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks about how an experience in Palestine illuminated the connections between the African American and Palestinian liberation struggles, and the moral responsibility to speak out. pic.twitter.com/y0HrXibUJz

— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) November 2, 2023

This time, he lays forth the case that the Israeli occupation is a moral crime, one that has been all but covered up by the West. He writes, “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel.” https://t.co/oMU9ZAXoBx

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) September 23, 2024

The reaction to this will be interesting.

Ha I was about to post the exact same thing

Well.

But he had been told, by journalists he trusted and respected, that Israel was a democracy — “the only democracy in the Middle East.” He had also been told that the conflict was “complicated,” its history tortuous and contested, and, as he writes, “that a body of knowledge akin to computational mathematics was needed to comprehend it.” He was astonished by the plain truth of what he saw: the walls, checkpoints, and guns that everywhere hemmed in the lives of Palestinians; the clear tiers of citizenship between the first-class Jews and the second-class Palestinians; and the undisguised contempt with which the Israeli state treated the subjugated other. For Coates, the parallels with the Jim Crow South were obvious and immediate: Here, he writes, was a “world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy.” And this world was made possible by his own country: “The pushing of Palestinians out of their homes had the specific imprimatur of the United States of America. Which means that it had my imprimatur.”
That it was complicated, he now understood, was “horseshit.” “Complicated” was how people had described slavery and then segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”

He talked about this a bit a few months ago in his final appearance on the now-defunct Longform podcast:
https://longform.org/posts/longform-podcast-584-ta-nehisi-coates

(I don't remember where in the episode it is, but the whole thing's a good listen if you like TNC.)

“It’s not like Arthur Sulzberger is rubbing his hands together” and dictating pro-Israeli coverage, Coates continued, noting that the Times had recently published a mammoth investigation into how Jewish extremists had taken over the Israeli state. It’s that in the total coverage, in all of the talk of experts and the sound bites of politicians and the dispatches of credentialed reporters, a sense of ambiguity is allowed to prevail. “The fact of the matter is,” he said, “that kid up at Columbia, whatever dumb shit they’re saying, whatever slogan I would not say that they would use, they are more morally correct than some motherfuckers that have won Pulitzer Prizes and National Magazine Awards and are the most decorated and powerful journalists.”

great article, even if ILX is never mentioned in it

Our work itself is the reward.

chait’s gotta be fuming

The woman who yelled at TNC is on twitter.

Wow, it turns out I played a role in pushing Ta-Nehisi Coates to look more deeply into Palestine.

I was the woman who yelled on the mic about Palestine and got shouted down at his event with Jeffrey Goldberg, it was at the Sixth & I synagogue in DC I think in 2014.

That was… pic.twitter.com/RcESBIbzNW

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) September 24, 2024