I kind of had Coates pegged as the quintessential Obama-Era liberal consensus thinker. But he’s spitting on Israel in this article
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
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.”
“All states at their core have a reason for existing — a moral story to tell,” he told me. “We certainly do. Does industrialized genocide entitle one to a state? No.” Especially, he said, at the expense of people who had no hand in the genocide.
On the ground in the occupied territories, he saw the segregated roads, the soldiers with their American-made weapons, the surveillance cameras, and the whole archipelago of impoverished ghettos. “I felt a mix of astonishment, betrayal, and anger,” he writes. “The astonishment was for me — for my own ignorance, for my own incuriosity … The betrayal was for my colleagues in journalism — betrayal for the way they reported, for the way they’d laundered ethnic cleansing, for the voices they’d erased. And the anger was for my own past — for Black Bottom, for Rosewood, for Tulsa — which I could not help but feel being evoked here.”
One of his first encounters with the Israeli state is a soldier stopping him on the street to ask him his religion, a confusing question for an atheist. It becomes clear that if he does not give the correct answer — “Jew,” “Christian,” anything but “Muslim” — he will not be allowed to pass. “On that street so far from home,” he writes, “I suddenly felt that I had traveled through time as much as through space. For as sure as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man, Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere.”
In Coates’s eyes, the ghost of Jim Crow is everywhere in the territories. In the soldiers who “stand there and steal our time, the sun glinting off their shades like Georgia sheriffs.” In the water sequestered for Israeli use — evidence that the state had “advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself.”
In the book, he writes of the pain he observed in two of his Israeli companions: “They were raised under the story that the Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been confronted with an incredible truth — that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing.”
“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.”
“What I suspect,” he told me, “is that American media in general thinks of itself as separate from the ends and goals of American power. And I don’t think that’s true.”
“I have a deep-seated fear,” he told me, “that the Black struggle will ultimately, at its root, really just be about narrow Black interest. And I don’t think that is in the tradition of what our most celebrated thinkers have told the world. I don’t think that’s how Martin Luther King thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Du Bois thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Baldwin thought about the Black struggle. Should it turn out that we have our first Black woman president, and our first South Asian president, and we continue to export 2,000-pound bombs to perpetrate a genocide, in defense of a state that is practicing apartheid, I won’t be able to just sit here and shake my head and say, ‘Well, that is unfortunate.’ I’m going to do what I can in the time that remains, and the writing that I have, to not allow that to be, because that is existential death for the Black struggle, and for Black people, as far as I’m concerned.”
He’s starting to understand it seems. Too bad he doesn’t have any real theory enjoyers in his personal circles. He could really use some about now.
Now how does someone get this far reading radical black writers and totally miss the socialist framework? Liberalism is a hell of a drug…
It rhymes with “brass Pinterest”
“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.”
What “dumb shit” are protesters saying if he sees the truth of Israel’s crimes? ‘Palestine will be free’?? He confuses me and I find it hard to trust him even if he is correct in a lot of ways, I don’t know many details of things he’s said though.
The generous reading would be, the worst hot take of any Columbia protester is nothing compared to the whitewashing of genocide the mainstream media with a much louder megaphone are doing.
There were people at protests I attended that used genuinely antisemitic language. I don’t know if they were personally antisemitic, but they have always been taught that Israel=Jews, and not Israel=Zionists. I’m not trying to say it is excusable, but an emotional young person lacking nuance and a deeper understanding of issues is nothing new.
Liberals always have to believe themselves the smartest people in the room. That is the central pillar of their ego.
They can admit to being morally wrong and doing an evil thing, but they can never admit to be intellectually incorrect and stupid. He’s come up with a way to be superior to the evil Zionists AND the stupid protesters. The true Liberal perfect position.
My reading is that he means stuff like “Globalize the Intifada” which he, a liberal, thinks are basically correct but unnecessarily inflammatory
I like how he starts out with anger that everything he believed was a lie and all his colleagues are full of shit and then ends it with the conclusion “but optics! Let me give advice when I just admitted I didn’t have any idea what I was talking about just minutes ago”
The social and cultural ascension of particular type of talented tenth black liberalism is going to send me into Arkham asylum. It’s so frustrating that these types of black liberal are smart of enough to understand what’s going on, but lack the fortitude to step beyond the wards of the liberalism that helped create them. The Obama-era never ended in so many ways.
I don’t think Coates is dumb nor do I think he is untalented. I read his Black Panther and Captain America runs, there was okay to fine. Dude can write, but the walls of liberalism enclose his imagination like so many people. When I see Coates, I see the black thought crashes into the wall of Neoliberalism. That black thought is either subsumed by Neoliberalism or it overcomes it, there is not synthesis as Neoliberalism can only consume not create.
My issue with Coates and those like him he buys into the sort of liberalism end of history myth. He sorts of sees everything as fine in general just bad actors or some bad outcomes, but never really looks at bad systems that create bad actors or bad outcomes. The machine itself is working to people like Coates, we need to flip some switches and twist some knobs and this machine will be even better. Move the evil slider from “MAXIMUM EVIL” to “MINIMUM EVIL” and such. As Dr Cornel West so rightly said, “Ta-Nehisi Coates is the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle”. Which I don’t even take as a dig at Coates, more a dig at the worldview of Coates and people like him.
The existing neoliberal order will never
free Palestine , as the existing order has no solutions to offer. Neoliberalism can’t solve the problems it created. Hell Neo-liberalism didn’t solve Jim Crow, it just exported it from the market to the police industrial complex and changed the name.Coates and other liberal thinkers who aren’t utterly heartless vampires are the saddest liberals to me. They understand the world sucks ass in some way (sometimes it’s for the LGBT++ folks, sometimes it’s a racial group, sometimes it’s some other undeserved group) by their very ideology gives them nothing to solve their issues. They can say people need to be less -ist or -phobic but their thinking doesn’t allow to really question the relationships or dynamics of power in the world they live in. They think we live in the best possible world with some flaws that can be solved without changing the nature of the world in anyway way.
At least leftists of any stripe some have solutions. Even if they aren’t perfect, they are at least better than doing nothing and feeling bad about it.
GOOD post
I don’t think Coates is that radical (obviously), nor is he at the peak of his clout, but, insofar as he’s a thought vanguardist for the liberal bien pensant, this should be a good indicator of a shift in polite opinion. Good.
bien pensant
The what? What about bean peasants?
As a non-meme answer, it means “right thinking” (i.e. conservative) in the language of the cursed peoples (French). He’s at the bleeding edge of what conservative liberals are willing to consider as “moral”.
Ah that makes sense now. Pensant, i should have known that word from those educational harry potter books. of course, pensieve!!
It actually means “beanis penis”, derived from the ancient Greek notion that men who exhibit virtues such as wisdom and a modest temperament have a little thing.
en passant pun
Holy hell
gesundheit
I thought they shut that place down!
Very critical support to Mr Coates’ realization, but he is still the dude that wrote “The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda” arc of Black Panther - more Marvel slop, IOW.
Coates is very problematic (Afropessimism is right wing), but he’s been good on Palestine for a long time.
Coates’ problem is that he’s a race essentialist that sees white people as intrinsically racist and that the best they can do is loudly self-flagette themselves for it.
“But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.”
Seems like he has a pretty good understanding of whiteness to me
people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white
If they’ve been “brought up” to this effect then it’s not “intrinsic” to their character
Yes, that’s what he’s saying. I’m disagreeing with his characterization in the original comment.
sorry I thought you were quoting someone else lol
Perfect for hexbear
he’s a race essentialist that sees white people as intrinsically racist and that the best they can do is loudly self-flagette themselves for it
If what you’re saying is true, then he’s conflating white people with white liberals who think they’re morally superior to everyone else. Easy mistake to make. I guess that’s what no theory does though.
I mean…
We should be fighting against racial chauvinists of Marcus Garvey’s ilk, not going “haha . . . unless”.
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critical support
Is he mid face turn or just at Step 1 of a new grift?
He’s thinking “I need to get even more woke and identity politicking to defeat zionism”
He has a history of being pro-Palestine, this isn’t new
Whew
Worth the read. Not sure how much it will move the needle.
