Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

PK otm, despite the unhinged nature of the questions, I think it's seriously valuable to have that answer get attention

did the interviewer really ask if Palestinians had the right to exist

I thought this was good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0-y0X51Xtw

everything about that adult circumcision article is weird, especially the choice of graphic, but he does mention a few paragraphs in that he was medically circumcised at birth.

Yeah, I don't think it's as bad as it sounds. As I understand it, when it comes to conversions, it's mostly symbolic/minimal/non-invasive. As the dude wrote, he (like most men in America) was already circumcised.

Anyway, weird digression.

no it’s pretty fucking weird!

did the interviewer really ask if Palestinians had the right to exist

― symsymsym, Tuesday, 1 October 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Not out cold but near enough. Around 3:30 is where he is wondering out loud on this: If Israel can't exist, then why do Palestinians or any Muslim countries have the right to exist?

Fella has a taste for nuking Muslims.

Author Ta-Nehisi Coates says #Israel is an "apartheid state." @MSNBC's @chrislhayes on @allinwithchris agrees with him that situation in Hebron is "moral abomination." #Gaza #Lebanon #WestBank #Iran pic.twitter.com/5x2eZvydtt

— CAIR National (@CAIRNational) October 3, 2024

i always like hearing my old village voice colleague speak. just as long as we don't forget that the u.s. is still a WAY bigger morally reprehensible country with intact systems of apartheid. number one, baby!

I think that's something Coates always acknowledges, and helpfully, but only when prompted/pushed by his interlocutor. Like that TV interview just upthread, Coates derides Israel's system of apartheid, and the other guy's response is basically "but what about ... ?!" And Coates patiently pushes back that that *is* bad, too, but it doesn't make Israel's system any more right or moral. That if memory serves has been his useful, and imo powerful, response to past "what about ..." criticisms: America is just as bad, if not sometimes worse, and has been for centuries. Coates is particularly good at laying out clearly the lingering half-life and echoes and other effects of immoral or bad ideas and explaining that just because something is ostensibly over does not mean it is done.

I haven't read it for a while, but iirc that was the/a point of his "Case for Reparations." Here is the situation, here's why and how it exists, what you do with this information is up to you, but whether or not it literally leads to reparations or not, here is the moral case I am making, based on this history and reporting and reminder that we do not live in a vacuum or time capsule, we are part of a continuum based on the successes and failures of the past.

He also specifically said that the reaction to his example of a successful repatriation (Germany paying off Israel) was what led him to start thinking about how Israel’s treatment of Palestinians was like Jim Crow. Weird that anyone thinks he’s totally cool with America.

I didn't watch the MSNBC interview but my understanding is that TNC's go-to comparison is Jim Crow and that that similarity is what struck him so powerfully in the West Bank. So I'm a little baffled at the suggestion he isn't foregrounding the US as not just a comparison but a *model* for Israel. Am I misreading you guys?

xpost

besides, the good news for American-haters is they/we are up to our necks in this genocide & war, so there's no need to adjust your worst countries rankings

(i just wouldn't mind a little more in-depth reporting on what happens here. not as a "but what about.." but just because people here look at what happens in the rest of the world as a horrible faraway abstraction in the "tsk tsk isn't that horrible..." way when it happens all around them. a reminder from time to time. that's all! i do see a little more now on television. stories about immigrants working in slaughterhouses. a teensy more about the horrible conditions and mortality rates and murder of women on reservations. prisons are the tough one though. there are plenty of special reports and documentaries but nobody wants to watch them. because they are too bleak. people love dogs WAY more than they love americans behind bars. well, okay, there are millions of dogs tortured and killed here too but in general people love the idea of dogs more than americans behind bars. also, the abandoned inner cities and the people left to rot there. not something people want to see on their morning shows.
also any reporting on what american business does in other countries is very much appreciated. it doesn't exist. but it would be appreciated.)

i love this! my heart skipped a beat when i read it. gonna steal it for myself somehow:

“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.”

"was like Jim Crow. Weird that anyone thinks he’s totally cool with America"

haha, nobody thinks that. but if you say "jim crow" to most americans they might picture some old bugs bunny cartoon or something. it is such an ancient term. i just think current examples are better for current times. you don't need to go to the past is all i'm saying. you can just go to a prison in alabama. or new jersey. or anywhere.

Yeah, I do think it's useful to remind ourselves sometimes that for millions of young people "the 90s" was a long time ago (never mind the 1890s). Whereas for a lot of us it feels like just a few years ago.

it is such an ancient term.

not in the South it isn't

in a nutshell: people love handwringing/moral condemnation of other countries because it takes the heat of their own horrible country. it makes people think other countries/people are somehow more inhuman. which obviously isn't the case with gaza being example number one of why that isn't the case. maybe, hopefully, gaza and the palestinians and the u.s. involvement there will make people think more about what their government does on all levels all over the world. you never know! but if 20 years of american slaughter in iraq and afghanistan wasn't going to do it...but you never know! hope springs eternal.

"not in the South it isn't"

come one you know what i mean. go outside and ask someone what ANY term/name/place/thing was from 60 or 70 years ago here and you will see a land of blank stares.

Just feel like it was a weird sentiment to drop in response to a writer who has spent his career up to now critiquing the evils of America when he happens to write about Israel for once.

i don't think its weird. he wrote about a country dehumanizing people and apartheid! my mind immediately goes to where i live.

… And he used examples directly pertinent to his own personal history of things that happened (and still happen) here.

President Keyes otm

Hey, it's cool that you're writing about Israel, as long as you remember that America is worse. Yes, that is a weird thing to write about Ta-Nehisi Coates.

and he talks about this country too in the new book. and history. i'm just sick of history talk. i want more present talk. i want the Democratic party to say the words "poor" and "homeless" and "systemic abuse of poor people and people of color behind bars" in a speech. but they won't do it. because they have to win the middle class first. THEN they will fix it all...

sorry, you guys. just sick of this place. but i got nowhere else to go.

TNC wrote an entire book about police brutality, and he is not the Democratic party. this is not a one-size-fits-all take

nah i know. like i said. just sick of this place. he's fighting the good fight. and he's a fine writer. and people read him! and seemingly he is doing well under that pressure. that's a lot of pressure.

Like I posted a couple days ago, just the coolness and grace with which he sits there, aware that the entire American corporate media apparatus finds his views at the very least appalling, without wanting to pound these hacks into the sand.

i'd like to find a long recent interview. i'll look. i did like the jon stewart one.

Here's the full Chris Hayes interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLzKy2N4s2M

i watched that last night. that was good too.

are you guys aware that one of the three chapters in coates’s book that contains the palestine essay is a dispatch from…america? I’m no literary scholar but my sense is that was an intentional choice…

got my copy yesterday but haven’t had a chance to read any yet because work has been too busy. but anyway I’m glad he’s done with video games or whatever silly stuff he was doing before

The America question comes up in the Hayes interview in the context of our willingness to abet the genocide with weaponry.

I don't care about video games but idk if TNC wants to write about matters less world-historic I'm fine -- especially if doing so keeps polishing his prose

^^^he's a great writer and should go wherever his pen takes him

are you guys aware that one of the three chapters in coates’s book that contains the palestine essay is a dispatch from…america? I’m no literary scholar but my sense is that was an intentional choice…

― brony james (k3vin k.), Thursday, October 3, 2024 11:34 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

And that my mom’s in it!!!

hearing more and more about Heez's mom these days

i don't think its weird. he wrote about a country dehumanizing people and apartheid! my mind immediately goes to where i live.

Okay, but you get that this sounds like a parodic "I considered thinking and talking about other countries, but the opportunity to think about the USA was there, so I took it"? Not to single you out, it's an old complaint from the non-US parts of the board.

have some bad news about the US and a little thing called hegemony

I haven't watched the Hayes interview yet, because Hayes, but meanwhile I think "Jim Crow" is an apt mention, because complicity and enabling, US/West and Israel (also of course, the Shah and Saddam were our boys for a long long time, Saudi Arabia is an honored whatever it is, along w other govs). C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow traces the de-Reconstruction complicity of Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats, among others in both and other regions, as introduced by OxFord University Press's page on their commemorative edition:

...The Strange Career of Jim Crow is one of the great works of Southern history. Indeed, the book actually helped shape that history. Published in 1955, a year after the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education ordered schools desegregated, Strange Career was cited so often to counter arguments for segregation that Martin Luther King, Jr. called it "the historical Bible of the civil rights movement." The book offers a clear and illuminating analysis of the history of Jim Crow laws, presenting evidence that segregation in the South dated only to the 1890s. Woodward convincingly shows that, even under slavery, the two races had not been divided as they were under the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s. In fact, during Reconstruction, there was considerable economic and political mixing of the races. The segregating of the races was a relative newcomer to the region.

Dad loaned me his copy (which he hadn’t yet read). Only at the beginning of the Africa chapter, but already GRIPPED.

I haven't watched the Hayes interview yet, because Hayes,

Hayes is just about the only American reporter/anchor who believes in the Palestinian cause.

The Woodward book is terrific. It reminds me how Hitler greatly admired America for Jim Crow and killing its indigenous peoples.

Something about Hayes as an anchor, a talker, even, tunes me out, like my attention span has never made it all the way through a Taylor Swift track. But since you say that, I'll try again, starting with the Coates interview. There are several forthright foreign correspondents on CNN.com, occasionally seen on cable, a few on broadcast news, seems like. Where's Maddow in all this? I don't really keep up w TV news/commentary all that well, duh.

Amy Goodman's syndicated public radio-streaming-transcripted Democracy Now! is still a great and harrowing source, frequently interviewing medical personnel in Gaza and targeted areas of Lebanon, also correspondents making their way through.

Maddow avoids talking about Gaza afaict

you could probably just read the book instead of critiquing the various hosts of his book tour