Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

I think the concept embodied in the word "reparations" strongly implies it is an act sanctioned by society and backed by the force of law. I'm all for it. The big questions would still be the most basic ones: how to distribute it correctly and what form should it take? Individual charitable donations to institutions in the black community may be a great thing, but don't qualify as reparations to my mind.

the essential element to me is reparations is that it needs to be restorative, not just on an individual level, but on a societal level. i think how it's done is definitely important as well, because if it's done wrong it has the potential to further entrench systemic inequities.

i do think there are some local trials of the concept going on now, right? i think that's good. i don't want to sound like a technocrat pragmatist but i do think measurable outcomes are kind of essential.

I did misread your first post? I couldn't tell if you were saying white people who advocated for reparations on a systemic, organized level didn't themselves individually want to contribute towards reparations? I see now you were differentiating between praising and outright advocating for it.

And when I talk about reparations, I am discussing cash and land ownership, this seems to be the aim of most advocates.

i think we have to be really careful when talking about land redistribution. i guess we can see what happens in south africa, but it did _not_ work out in zimbabwe.

what i'm wondering is - since americans live in a country that has adopted a plethora of effectively racist policies that lack explicit reference to race, can america adopt anti-racist policies such as "reparation" using the same fig leaf? should we? i think there's a good possible argument to be made.

We already did reparations without specific reference to race. It was called the New Deal.

Except for the parts of the New Deal that specifically excluded African-Americans at the behest of southern democrats.

I think most people who favor reparations know that they would be a much easier political sale to close if they are enclosed in an envelope of broader help-the-poor programs. But the social and economic damage done to African-Americans has been very targeted at them as a group, so 'making them whole' is a well-founded legal concept.

It's somewhat paradoxical that the very fact that the injustices done to them were so prolonged, so widespread and so clearly socially-sanctioned is also what makes it so difficult to address politically now. First, the debt is too enormous to repay properly, and second, structural racism is so embedded in society that it is viewed as simply "how it is", like capitalism or automobile dependence.

I think your first sentence is specifically what DJP is referring to.

Sorry. It always confuses me when people say the exact opposite of what they hope to convey.

Rush, the US government wouldn't have to "redistribute" land. They could buy land and buy or build houses for Black Americans. The US government could help build the wealth of Black Americans and invest in Black communities.

The way a couple posters are using "pragmatism" is driving me crazy. iirc, technocracy is a meritocratic idea that people with technological and scientific expertise should have power and make decisions. In philosophy, pragmatism is an idea that m/l says people make meaning together, that knowledge and truth aren't accessible outside of this activity of people trying to accomplish their goals. It's an anti-technocratic idea and it's not a synonym for some kind of utilitarianism.

(In linguistics, it's the study of what people mean in a social, interpersonal context, and colloquially obviously it means something like "what's practical, functional, and workable.")

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