Who On The Right Is A Racist And Celebrated The Way Ta Nehisi Coates Is Celebrated On The Left

5/15/18

I say Ta Nehisi Coates is a black racist. That’s reinforced by his latest on Kanye West saying he loves Trump.

I asked a friend, who said the left can name the same types on the right, to find an intellectual racist on the right who gets the same adulation Coates does.

R: .... Tough assignment since I don't read Coates or anyone else.  I guess I would head for talk radio, which of course does not get the coverage he does.  Limbaugh has 14.000.000 listeners.  Coates a few intellectuals....

Me: ... Limbaugh is a good mention but Coates, take it from me, is a black racist. He hates on whites and whiteness. He thinks most American whites are pigs, coterminous and continuous with the official pigs, the cops. Limbaugh for all his bombast and culturally incendiary rants says 0 remotely close to what Coates says.  And Limbaugh makes no appeal to the pointy headed among us, the way Coates does...

R: .... But who listens to Coates?  This goes back to Marcus Garvey.  There has always been a furious group of black men who loathe whites for the obvious reasons.  Like Palestinians loathe Israelis who render them powerless.  No matter the current reality, they live with history, like some white Southerners.

My current theory about the academic business is that one's choice is to cave before the women (and those who trail in their wake) or become the macho prick.  Take your pick, they give you no choice.  That's civilization now.  You can no on about principle all you want but the male profs caved out of fear of female moral authority, regardless of the principles.  And you would have, like me, soon realized it was a losing battle and not worth sacrificing one's time to.  A few brave souls continued on with SAFS but that's about it.  No-one said, just suck it up and you'll catch up soon enough.  It's not the army....

Me: (Coup de grace?) ..... For sure you can locate Coates’s racist screeds within a certain American tradition. But I can’t think of anyone in that tradition who has been celebrated, cheered, idealized, feted, and adopted by so many whites as has Coates. Not even Malcolm X, who was a black racist as a Black Muslim before at the end he broke with Elijah Muhammad and started to move away from Black Muslim virulence and who had his moments of cultural glory before his assassination. 

None of them were pinnacle journalists at a mainstream or really any “white” journal like the Atlantic where Coates is seen and treated as a star and huge feather in the magazine’s cap. 

When Malcom X had his moment of glory, racial disparity and tensions in the U.S. overshadowed those of of today

And while Coates right this moment is unabated in his racism, Malcom X was slowly coming off his, a big source of aggravation to Elijah Muhammad.

And this is the same Atlantic, btw, which in a matter of a few days fired Kevin Williamson after he began writing for it. The ostensible reason: he had written and said maybe 3 putatively unlovely things out of 100,000s of words written  and 100,000s of words said. Williamson doesn’t have a racist bone in his body. His sin: he’s unabashedly heterodox. And the real reason: Goldberg and the deciders at the Atlantic couldn’t take the woke heat as the outraged left unofficially organized to have Williamson dumped. And they won. The contrast between Williamson and Coates couldn’t be brighter. 

Coates has won a National Book Award,  and a McArthur “genius” grant and a PEN award for his racist rants put into high flown, purple prose. There’s not a left leaning white person or non white left leaning person who doesn’t swear by Coates except maybe one or two like Cornel West who doesn’t think Coates is radical enough and sees him, with some justification, as toadying up to the whites who pay him.

Here’s the best short take on Coates’s invidiousness: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/the-toxic-world-view-of-ta-nehisi-coates-120512

And here’s another that the New Yorker wouldn’t publish because it cut against the narrative: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n23/thomas-chatterton-williams/loaded-dice

That’s who listens to/reads Coates. 

Limbaugh “can’t touch this” as MC Hammer sang.