Ta-Nehisi Coates and the reductionist theory of everything bad that ever happened to black people
First, a disclaimer: I have not read T-Nehisi Coates’ new book entitled Between the World and Me. I’ve only read summaries or reviews of it, although I’m familiar with his thought from reading many of his articles for The Atlantic and other periodicals.
Why am I writing about the book? It seems to be an important statement, not only about Coates’ point of view but mostly because it’s been widely praised and is being widely read. Right now it’s number nine on Amazon’s best-seller list as well as number one on the NY Times nonfiction list.
So that’s an influential book with a whole lot of readers. It’s been called “brilliant” by the WaPo, and Coates has been anointed as James Baldwin’s successor by Toni Morrison, who considers the book “revelatory” and “required reading.” That gives you just a small idea of the reception it has gotten.
Reading Scott Johnson’s review of the book in City Journal reveals that at the beating heart of Between the World and Me lies a reductionist rage that collapses everything bad that ever happened to black people in America—and is still happening to black people in America—at the door of white racism. An excerpt from Johnson:
Coates aspires to Baldwin’s literary quality in overwrought prose that makes the book almost unreadable. He is both verbose and repetitious. He must speak of the “breaking” of the black “body” more than 100 times. The text of the book begins on page 5 (“Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body” – a question that remains unanswered at book’s end). By page 12, I felt a bit like a broken man myself. According to Coates, “people who believe themselves to be white” have constructed the concept of race and subjugated blacks from the beginning of American history through the breaking of the black body. “People who believe they are white” are those who see the United States as an exceptional nation and believe in the American Dream. Coates calls them Dreamers and, unlike President Obama’s DREAMers, they are not to be indulged but resisted.
There’s more, much much more; read the whole thing if you’re interested. Johnson also offers several lengthy quotes from Coates, but this one is especially telling:
“Black on black” crime is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the [restrictive property] covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return.
The killing fields of Chicago, of Baltimore, of Detroit, were created by the policy of Dreamers, but their weight, their shame, rests solely on those who are dying in them. There is a great deception in this. To yell “black-on-black crime” is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding.
As this thoughtful and lengthy reader review at Amazon states:
It is as simple as this: [according to Coates] there is literally not a single thing a black person can do wrong that is their fault in a cosmic sense. Every single moral, ethical or legal crime is carried out as a result of the effects of White Supremacy. Some people, including myself, characterize this as true racism. Denying that black people are capable of being agents or partners in their own life or destiny is the ultimate kind of racism and bigotry…
…Mr. Coates seems to think it is OK to insult all white poeple in the gravest of possible ways. All white people exist on a spectrum that has “benign neglect” and “free rider” on one end and “violent torture murderer” and “slave master” on the other end. In Mr. Coates’ world, to wake up white is to wake up a guilty person. All white Americans are guilty, it is only a matter of determining where they fit on the guilt spectrum. This acts as a kind of mirror image of his view of black people which I discussed in the previous point.
…White people are literally lined up around the block to get on “the right side” of this book and its author. They mistakenly and cynically believe that doing so will inoculate them against the charge of being a racist oppressor themselves.
As I wrote just a couple of days ago:
…the promised land – equality of outcome – has not been reached, and doesn’t seem all that close despite the achievements of some black people and the evidence of President Obama’s election. The persistence of inequality of outcome can only be explained by two factors or a combination of those two factors: problems inherent in the black community or black people, or problems inherent in the non-black (white and “other) community’s treatment of black people. Look inward or look outward, or look both ways.
It is much less painful to look outward, however.
Coates appears not to look both ways but to look solely outward: whites are deeply, deeply guilty, and blacks are their “broken” victims. It is his prerogative to believe this and write about it, and I am fairly certain that nothing I could say could ever change his mind. What is especially interesting to me, however, is how many white people (or as Coates would say, “people who believes themselves to be white”) buy it (literally, as well). As the commenter at Amazon puts it, they are “lined up around the block to get on ‘the right side’ of this book and its author. They mistakenly and cynically believe that doing so will inoculate them against the charge of being a racist oppressor themselves.”
I do have a quarrel with the use of the word “cynically” there. I don’t think cynicism is a part of it for the vast majority. I think self-flagellation is, especially for younger people, who have had guilt for the crime of being white drilled into them from their early days in school. The left fosters and uses this guilt as a way to effect societal change, to persuade white people and black alike to give up any idea of Western society as superior or desirable for both races, and to change the power structure (that’s a favorite leftist term) in ways that give the left more power.
Who loses? Both races. In fact, I think black people probably lose more.
This has been reflected in the presidency of Barack Obama. Just as his election seemed to prove how far the nation had come from its earlier more overtly racist days, so it also provided hope of better things. At least it did in the beginning, but those “better things” in the racial sense have most definitely not materialized.
That is not an accident. Obama’s tenure have been marked by a purposeful fanning of the flames of racial division and tension, and the economic situation in the black community has declined further and faster than that of the white community in the years since Obama has become president.
I’ve been reading about this book as well, and will have to actually read the thing now. I won’t look forward to it because my impression is the same as yours essentially. It makes me feel a near despair that people are so taken with this book, white and black and that it is being touted as some kind of racial epiphany.
This is a relatively new fashion on the left to use the rhetorical device of “bodies” instead of “lives” or “people”. I have heard this used recently in person by black activists, young activists, and I find it cloying. I can’t quite figure out where they are getting this but it extends to women and LGBT people also, everyone is “bodies’ and not “people”. I think it sounds mechanical and false to my ear as a writer and as a person, it sounds strange to describe people this way. It might be an offshoot of Foucault or of gender theory – Judith Butler _Bodies that Matter_ or… who knows? This “bodies” language does indicate a deeper attitude and philosophy that is a problem.
Of course, this is all critical race theory, the white supremacy schtick. It does hurt Black people more than white though it can’t help but hurt white people also. You are right to say that those white people who feel they are inoculating themselves from being considered racists with their enthusiasm for this book are just wrong. You can never apologize enough to left wing people who have these politics. And, it is not apologies that are wanted.
Make no mistake, this is an anti-American book (from everything I have read) that will only inflame race issues and bring everyone closer to some brink. Of course, there is no brink, there will be no race war, black people will pay with more violence in their own communities — black on black.
The last paragraph here might get you into trouble especially with your NE liberal friends. However, it is exactly how I see it. It is amazing that the hoped for racial reconciliation never materialized, but indeed, just the opposite happened. I hold Obama responsible for all of it.
Let me know when i can crawl into the ovens and get this crap over with…. my family is exterminated, my career is moribund for decades, i have been attacked more than 4 times in 5 years, and i am told i have to give up more an dmore and more cause being homeless on a park bench is privelege that white people have, and my indonesian wife has to be barren – cause she married a evil person
I have tried everythign from starting a company, which failed as i dont have enouhg money thanks to no raises, same with a home… or other things… i am not social enough to garner help that actually helps outside of some sympathy in verbiage, but you cant eat that, sell that, buy a home with that, have a baby with that, etc
so
i sit waiting to die
and hope that the ovens will be done soon as i am already cooking and dying and its hopeless as i dont have connections, resources, and so on
meanwhile, what i can do in terms of think, make, create and such, is invalidated cause it comes from me, just as a author was invalidated for being a communist
someone please shoot me and get it over with
Liberty Wolf:
It makes me sad as well.
It seems more and more as though the closer we get to eradicating racism the more it rears back under different guises. And it is hardly limited to white people.
As for “bodies,” it is probably both a literary fashion thing and something connected to some leftist theory or other. Probably feminist theory, as here. An excerpt:
As an anecdote and purgative to this “foolishness” by Coates, I offer a strange and fascinating and actually – excellent blog by a black woman who calls herself here “Muslim Bushido.”
The element of Islam is mostly confined to a few Koranic quotes which she mixes in with Biblical quotes so the blog does not concern itself much with Islam. Her focus is African American women and African American men and race… She is fierce and part of a movement of black women bloggers called the “Black Women’s Empowerment” or BWE bloggers. She would call Coates an advocate of “foolishness” is my guess though I have not checked out her latest posts on him, if there are any. She now blogs at “Sojourner’s Passport”. At any rate, she basically wants black women to “divest” from black communities that are filled with crime, avarice and danger – particularly to women and girls. I found reading her fascinating and the comments from like-minded black women are fascinating.
http://muslimbushido.blogspot.com/2009/04/welcome-new-readers-please-catch-up.html
SR:
Almost everything I write gets me in trouble with my liberal friends and family, both in NY and elsewhere (I don’t have all that many friends in NY anymore).
Fortunately, most of my liberal friends never read what I write. For some, it is through disinterest. For others, they are too busy. For still others, they don’t want to become so angry at me that we would either have to argue or they would have to stop talking to me, or first one and then the other.
That is a very useful link Neo and I think that gets at the origin of this latest idiocy.
I have had left wing people cringe when I am at readings and say “nature” in a positive way or neutral way. I think it links to these ideas as well. Nature and bodies…
Oddly, Alicia Garza uses the term “freedom” in her speeches and I have never heard that word used by the far left. Of course, her idea of freedom appears to be founded on Marxist insurrection and revolution and is no freedom at all. Gaza is one of the founders of “Black Lives Matters” and uses “bodies” too, in place of people.
This can’t be a good trend — “bodies” not “people’ or “lives”. The words point to a deeper issue.
I will read that link you posted — the crazy does not stop getting crazier!
Oops, “Garza” not “Gaza” — I need to always proofread. Haha -but yes, Gaza is not a good omen either the way things are going!
Liberty Wolf:
“Liberty” (the word in your name) tends to be used by the right. “Freedom” (which is sometimes used by the right) is often used by the left, but it means something different when they use it, and that “something” is not the same as “liberty.”
See this, for example.
That essay (which was written in 2003) doesn’t quite take it far enough, I think. The way the left uses the word “freedom” usually has to do with one of two things. The first is anything to do with the civil rights of black people. The second is about license—that is, sexual license, or license to take drugs, for example.
I was taught in school many years a ago ( I’m an old fart) that I was guilty for slavery, and all white people were. This applied to all white people even though my ( and half of the “white population” came to America 50 or more years after slavery ended. I have always felt that this was making whipping boys of white ethnics. Obama’s family may have been slave owning scum, mine wasn’t.
We were also taught a lie that whitey went into Africa and kidnapped free blacks form an African Eden. What nonsense. It was black slaveowning kings who kept their most productive slaves and sold those they considered unworthy for whiteys guns and rum( anyone remember (1776)? Isn’t amazing that recent African immigrants whose ancestors were responsible for the slave trade get to benefit from affirmative action?
The entire leftist project is aimed at ensuring that those who can and will, do not ultimately look at those who cannot or won’t, and finally say to them: “Do what you want. Over there, though. You just are not worth the trouble it costs me to deal with you.”
I find it interesting that we don’t see much talk about reparations anymore. Could this be because of fear that reparations would let whites off the hook once and for all?
I, for one, would rather pay reparations than spend money on Coates’ obviously terrible book.
Like Neo, I have not read his book yet, though because it is a short one, I have no excuse for not doing so in the near future. An excerpt follows from Steve Sailors review, The First Rule of Black Club:
But it’s the white folks who are to blame, doncha’ know?
Coincidentally, I just finished reading Buck: A Memoir,by M.K Asante.The author, like Mr. Coates, had a black radical parent and got raised in an urban northeast black neighborhood: Philadelphia for Asante, and Baltimore for Coates. A difference between the two appears to be that as a youth, Asante embraced the thug ghetto culture, which it appears that Coates did not. Asante went on to become an academic.
[Also note that both have Africanized names. A childhood friend gave a Swahili name to her son. I never had the guts to point out to her that Swahili was the lingua franca for East African slave traders.]
http://tinyurl.com/pdw5g6x Buck: A Memoir, by M.K. Asante
If you look at a night time view of the earth from space, Africa is still the Dark Continent. Egypt stands out, there are some lights along the coast of North Africa, a bit around Nigeria and South Africa, but the rest is pitch dark. Some one should ask Coates if he’d like to live in Zimbabwe under the kind governance of Mugabe. All the white colonialists are gone, it should be a black man’s paradise. But, but excuse me, I forgot that they destroyed the utopia that existed there and poor blacks have never recovered even after throwing off their oppressors’ chains.
The fact that this book is a best seller says volumes about the Left.
Paul in Boston:
I am relatively certain that Coates’ answer to that question would be that Zimbabwe is in bad shape because of its white colonial past.
A better question for him, I think, would be to ask about Haiti, which threw off its white colonial yoke at the turn of the 18th-19th century. He would almost undoubtedly have the same answer—that Haiti was subsequently influenced and manipulated too much by white nations.
Here’s something interesting I never knew before about Haiti:
anyone interested in…
How to make glass edged shaving razor blades
innovative new water propulsion system (efficient, faster, fewer parts, good for NAVY littorals, and more)
New design for high speed search of big data – can do millions of compares per clock tick
New vermin contro devices that are designed for urban government, companies, etc (especially good for food service, farming, and can even handle the mice/rat explosions) – prevents desease, centralizes, etc.
Fly traps for third world made so cheap they would sell for 10$ – Originally designed for sensitive areas (baby rooms, hospitals, etc.) can be disposable.
License opportunity for faucet design for water limited but improved shaving (men or women)
New drop calibrator for pipette systems and training on same systems
Cheap method to separate oil and water in emergency spills
and lots lots more (like notebooks full) that will just go to nowhere…
Including designs, artwork, software, etc…
Symbols of a life wasted trying to do what my aspergers and politics wont allow given isolation and lack of melanin, pudenda, or attraction to the same sex – or desire to be an example of such programs
Here is to hoping St Jude picks me up and brings me home
Zugzwang depresses me…
The walls are too high in the bucket to climb out alone…
Deepa Kumar
A Rutgers University professor who is under fire for saying that the U.S. is “more brutal” than ISIS has used racial slurs against white men, attacked a leading advocate against female genital mutilation [Ayaan Hirsi Ali] and even led a successful protest last year to stop former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from speaking to students.
Deepa Kumar, associate professor of journalism and media studies at New Jersey’s main public university, made news recently by tweeting: “Yes ISIS is brutal, but US is more so, 1.3 million killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.” But that tweet, sent in March but only brought to prominent attention after it was noticed by the site SoCawlege.com, is not Kumar’s first brush with digital bigotry.
“Okay, I’m sold on using the term ‘douchebag’ to describe rich, white entitled males and their misogynistic, racist behavior!” Kumar wrote in a Facebook endorsement of an online article last fall.
Unarmed White Guy Killed by Cops, No One Cares
Black activists, liberals, and their media propaganda machine are currently outraged by the death of Sam DuBose, an unarmed black man killed by a cop in Cincinnati. Despite being eerily similar to that case, no one seems to care that a police officer in South Carolina shot and killed an unarmed white guy. The officer in Cincinnati was arrested and charged with murder. The officer in South Carolina didn’t even mention the shooting in his report.
Greenvilleonline reports that last Sunday 19-year old Seneca, SC resident Zachary Hammond was lured to a Hardee’s parking lot as part of a drug-sting operation. An officer approached his car with a gun drawn and a moment later Hammond was dead from a gunshot wound. The officer said that Hammond accelerated towards him and he responded by firing two shots. Police found a small amount of marijuana in Hammond’s car but no weapons.
There is however a big problem with the officer’s story. The autopsy shows that Hammond was shot twice in the back at point-blank rage.
At least he didn’t die alone:
June 20, 2015 — LAPD Shot and killed white man armed with a towel.
May 11, 2015 — St. John’s, FL officers shoot and kill suicidal white man Justin Way.
May 26, 2015 — Trenton, MI cops shoot and kill white teenager Kyle Baker.
May 29, 2015 — Oklahoma State Troopers shoot and kill unarmed white guy Nehemiah Fischer who was trying to rescue his vehicle from a flood.
February 2, 2015 — Hummelstown, PA officer shoots unarmed white guy David Kassick in the back killing him.
And let’s not forget last year’s unjustified killing of white guy Dillon Taylor by Salt Lake City police.
The fun part is that those who are supporting this, dont wear any symbols of their support, dont have their foreheads tatooed, all they have is their internal thoughts that they are different from others… then they have the crap kicked out of them, they are chased out, harrased, threatened and stand so confused.
Gringo:
When I read the following quote from Coates, it seemed to me to provide a basic psychological clue to what is going on with him:
The violence at the hands of parents and at the hands of the world got all mixed up—explicitly mixed up, I might add, when his father would say, “Either I can beat him, or the police.” Understand that the message was that he would always get beaten at someone’s hands, either parental hands or public official hands via the police, and that his father attributed his own violence towards his son as originating in that public violence. His father was claiming that the private violence the father doled out to son was administered to prevent the public violence, both at the hands of the police and by the son or daughter who might be wanting to act in a criminal manner out in the dangerous world.
I think I may write a post on this in the next few days, because I think that Coates is describing some sort of powerful emotional (and also physical) trap that he got caught in early on and has never gotten out of.
If Coates’ skin wasn’t black he’d have no career at all. He’s the house negro of the Atlantic and the Left.
Without reading it my intuition is the book rests upon bogus premises. The tell is that pretty much any critical analysis from a white person not 100% sympatico with Coates will perfunctorily be deemed racist, and even if it is 100% sympatico, it still might be deemed racist because of the source.
The black subculture in America has some great things to offer, but it is seriously and self-defeatingly dysfunctional. It will not begin to make progress until it takes a degree of ownership of the problem(s).
The blacks have been taught that all their problems are the fault of the evil white man and they believe it. They’re victims.
About 10 years ago the NAACP celebrated 50 years of Brown VS Board of Education and Dr. Bill Cosby was the featured speaker. He read them the riot act. He got on them about the high illiteracy rate, the high crime rate the high illegitimacy rate, etc. After Bill Cosby finished, the head of the NAACP went to the podium and said these problems were not the fault of the black community. Cosby took a lot of flack for that speech but he didn’t back down, and in a later interview said that if you keep blaming white people for your problems nothing is going to get better.
The “body” bit is an echo of 12 Years a Slave.
In that film, even decent [ White ] souls are portrayed as benefiting from institutionalized slavery.
THAT’S where this ethos is coming from.
Modern Blacks want to STILL have the moral blanket of oppression.
Trillions in transfer payments and the artificial elevation of Blacks in economic life is STILL equated with being enslaved.
Folks, this is mass delusion of a new kind.
Think of it as 0bamavision.
Thanks, Neo. For having been raised by educated parents in s black urban neighborhood, TaNeshi Coates was from an early age aware of the terrible choices confronting him – terrible because of the terrible consequences resulting from those choices. The result is a terribly conflicted adult.
The beating he got from his father reminds me of a problem that some whites have in teaching black children. The white way of child rearing tends to be gentler, less confrontational than the black way of child rearing. [Yes, this is a generalization for which there are many exceptions.] The translation of this into teaching means that the gentler tones and approaches which many whites bring to teaching black children often do not work, because the black children are expecting something less gentle. [By gentle/not gentle approaches to TEACHING, I am NOT referring to corporal punishment.]
From Coates’s book:
I recall one student [a student who did not pass my class], whose mother worked as a Teacher’s Aide at another school, comparing the way I handled the class with his mother’s approach. “You gotta be tougher,” was more or less what the student said.
Sounds like Eldridge Cleaver and his 1968 Soul on Ice all over again. A book in which he justified the “insurrectionary” rape of white women. And folks like Leonard Bernstein showered him with praise.
Neo said, ” … As for “bodies,” it is probably both a literary fashion thing and something connected to some leftist theory or other. … ”
= = = = =
Well, that; and also –> the notion of “bodies” removes “mind, soul, spirit, reason, and will” from the equation.
“Bodies” are thus passive and “done unto”.
“Humans”, aka “People”, see and think and reason; they get to CHOOSE how to act. Presumably they see what works, and what doesn’t work, and (over time) learn to make wise choices.
Whether their choices are wise or not, though, PEOPLE have to live with the consequences of their choices.
I’m guessing that mere “bodies” get to deflect any blame onto somebody else, because “bodies” have no choice. Kind of like abortion victims.
Ann:
Did you know that in later life Cleaver became a Mormon and a conservative Republican?
As well as several other things.
Ann Says:
August 3rd, 2015 at 4:33 pm
Sounds like Eldridge Cleaver and his 1968 Soul on Ice all over again. A book in which he justified the “insurrectionary” rape of white women. And folks like Leonard Bernstein showered him with praise.
Since Bernstein was apparently only interested in raping white male second-chair violinists, he wasn’t worried about competing with the Black Panthers.
Blacks who subscribe to Coates POV are NOT interested in equality, not even equality of outcome nor reparations leading to a future promised land.
No, what they are interested in is revenge… murderous, bloody revenge. They are filled with a genocidal blood lust. There’s plenty of evidence, it’s just not being widely reported by the MSM.
“Media Struggling to Ignore Black Mob Violence”
It’s not possible to view all the links that Flaherty provides
and remain unconvinced.
“Among black Americans, 31% think most blacks are racist.” Rasmussen Reports, July 03, 2013
“The left fosters and uses this guilt as a way to effect societal change, to persuade white people and black alike to give up any idea of Western society as superior or desirable for both races, and to change the power structure (that’s a favorite leftist term) in ways that give the left more power.” neo
Bingo. The Left, communist elitists to the core are at war with Western civilization.
“we don’t see much talk about reparations anymore.” mizpants
The Obama administration has moved from talk to “preparing the battlefield”.
“Attention America’s Suburbs: You Have Just Been Annexed”
“Obama Administration’s Racial Database”
Cheney: President Obama Wants ‘To Take America Down’
mizpants and Geoffrey Britain:
Coates has certainly been talking about reparations, and people are both reading and listening:
The implication of Coates’s reasoning is that blacks in America have been perpetual victims of their original oppressors: blacks and Muslims in Africa. The vast majority would still be running for survival from #CecilTheLion, if not for the wars and racism that lead to their enslavement by competing factions and neighboring tribes.
I’ve been thinking about some of the ideology of Coates and others that is afoot in the nation. Indulge me while I write some thoughts down.
This country was founded with the idea of providing equal opportunity for all citizens. Doing so is hard because there will always be differences in education, geography, and culture in a large nation. Though providing equal opportunity imperfectly, our system (Democratic capitalism) has provided citizens of the U.S., regardless of race, with the opportunity to achieve a standard of living that is envied by most of the world. Today there is a school of thought that claims that that success has been achieved almost exclusively at the expense of other races and cultures.
Their thinking seems to go like this:
All humans are equal. Therefore all races/cultures must be equal. Therefore, all races/cultures should be equally successful. However, some races/cultures are not as successful as other races/cultures. It must be that less successful races/cultures are less successful due to the exploitation or interference by the more successful. Therefore, more successful races/cultures owe a debt to the less successful ones. This debt will remain until the less successful races/cultures are at least as successful as the most successful. This debt must be paid as reparations in the form of wealth or intellectual property transfer or the crippling of the more successful races/cultures to bring them down to the level of the least successful, where everyone will be equal. (And equally miserable. 🙁 )
In other words Coates wants equal outcomes no matter the race /culture, something that has never been achieved in all of history. Every recent attempt to achieve equal outcomes on a national basis; such as in the USSR, Communist China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and Myanamar; has failed. Yet these examples of failure do not give pause to the peddlers of the ideology of equal outcomes. They claim it just hasn’t been done right yet. We hoped it was dead and buried when the USSR and Red China fell apart, but it is still alive and living in our colleges, universities, Hollywood, the MSM, and government. Radical Islamism is probably less dangerous.
Liberty Wolf Said:
“As an anecdote and purgative to this “foolishness” by Coates, I offer a strange and fascinating and actually — excellent blog by a black woman who calls herself here “Muslim Bushido.””
It is amazing to read posts like this from a transgender. Of course perhaps Liberty Wolf has a point since in the strongest theocracy in the Middle East, Iran, where the Mullahs are in charge they do not always hang homosexuals. Sometimes they are merciful and allow them to undergo sex change operations instead. So perhaps we could even say that Iran is ahead of the USA on transgender issues. Not only are the operations provided by the state without the gay person forced to scrimp and save to afford the operation but the operations are even provided to people before they even think to ask for gender reassignment surgery.
Seriously, the entire strategy of the left in promoting racism and hatred is to destroy Western Civilization by making things here appear so evil for everyone that in contrast Islam with Sharia law will seem like a blessed relief. By repeating the lie that the USA is worse than ISIS they will be able to sell the bondage of Sharia law administered by so called “moderate” Muslims as a blessed relief.
The people of Baltimore are paying dearly for their affirmative action mayor and states attorney. You can put a shoe in the oven, but that does not make it a biscuit.
White folks have nothing to do with the melt down in major inner cities. They do everything they can to get away from it. White boys are not impregnating black teenage girls. White boys are not shooting those hundreds of black boys and men. White boys are not causing black boys to quit school.
Blaming all this on the impact of slavery is nuts. Fifty years ago which was much closer to slavery the black family was in much better shape.
“We hoped it was dead and buried when the USSR and Red China fell apart” Jimmy J
We’ll have to agree to disagree as to Red China having ‘fallen apart’. Politically, China is as ‘Red’ as ever. Militarily, China’s accelerating build up has obvious goals.
“Fifty years ago which was much closer to slavery the black family was in much better shape.” Mr. Frank
There you go again, confusing the issue with facts! 😉
The second time I saw “bodies” used in the way y’all are describing I knew it came from the academy, most likely the feminist camp therein.
Feminism, I regret to say, has become one of the chief toxins in our culture and especially in our intellectual life (insofar as specific toxins can be discussed apart from the whole brew of leftism).
Geoffrey Britain: Like Vietnam, the Chinese had to reform their economic system because too many people were starving.
From the jacket of the book, “Life Under Mao Zedong’s Rule,” by Zhang Da-Peng:
“And like countless others, Da-Peng personally became the target of the “class struggle,” as the Communist Party undertook a never-ending cycle of absurdly destructive political campaigns and purges of the so-called enemies of Socialism that culminated in the Cultural Revolution and the terrifying near-complete breakdown of Chinese society and institutions. Written many years later in Hong Kong, Life under Mao Zedong’s Rule is both Zhang Da-Peng’s dramatic and deeply humanistic personal memoir and his impassioned call to his fellow Chinese not to bury the memories of those terrible years in newfound prosperity but to reform the continuing abuses of the political system, lest tyranny recurs in China.”
What China has today is not dedicated to equal outcomes as it was under Mao. They call themselves Communist, but are really a crony-capitalist, fascist state. They had to let people get rich. They try to choose who those people are so they can control them – much like Russia does.
China has made huge gains because they started from so low on the totem pole. No one knows for sure what the true state of their economy is because it is so opaque. There has recently been panic selling in their stock market. No one on the outside really understands why, but we do know that their GDP growth is slowing from the blistering pace it’s been on since they opened up to trade with the free world and began their huge infrastructure building plan. Will things eventually implode? Many on the outside seem to think so. Will the new Chinese economic model work? We don’t know yet, but if it does, it will surprise a lot conservative free market economists. What most are hoping for is a gradual trend toward more liberalism, more transparency, and less fascism. A major implosion would not auger well for the world economy, which is drowning in deflation.
The way white Leftists swoon over these black racists reminds me of Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic”: Lenny Bernstein et cie. inviting the Black Panthers, murderers and thugs, to a chic party at his penthouse:
http://www.tomwolfe.com/RadicalChicExcerpt.html
If you’ve never read it, do. It explains some of the fanboi attitude about Coates.
The Leftists live on Weaponized Grievances, which is why all the minorities, racial and sexual, have to be kept in an angry ferment forever. They are the Left’s ammo dump.
Jimmy J,
“What China has today is not dedicated to equal outcomes as it was under Mao. They call themselves Communist, but are really a crony-capitalist, fascist state. They had to let people get rich. They try to choose who those people are so they can control them — much like Russia does.”
I can’t agree that China under Mao was ever “dedicated to equal outcomes”. The disparity between the ruling elite and peasants was only less severe. China is IMO “a crony-capitalist, fascist state” entirely committed to the triumph of communism. They’re simply more patient than we and quite amenable to pretending to be closet capitalists who have abandoned their ideology in favor of the almighty buck. China’s adoption of capitalism is a means to economic dominance, which in turn provides the means to military dominance, which in turn is the means to political dominance, i.e. “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” Mao Zedong
As for the viability of China’s economic plan, I would suggest that it rests upon the ability of the Western economies to continue to kick their economic ‘can’ down the road. As long as the West can keep its economic ‘house of cards’ from collapsing, China’s position as ‘supplier to the West’ will remain for the foreseeable future.
IMO, China’s communist leadership seeks nothing less than outright dominance of a world communist state. Cultural racism, xenophobia and China’s historic cultural dynamic of the ‘needs of the collective’ superseding any individual need are all fundamental factors that drive China’s embrace of communism.
Well, to be honest, I never really liked James Baldwin (found the man obnoxious and pompous beyond belief) so if I ever do read this I’d be probably be chuckling and saying to myself, “And people point to the Bible as an archaic relic of the past that should be left on the bookshelf to be only opened during history and English class? People actually believe this stuff?”
Liberty Wolf Says:
I can’t quite figure out where they are getting this but it extends to women and LGBT people also, everyone is “bodies’ and not “people”.
More materialistic. Just want them for what they can do. Be it labor or sexual. No interest in the person or their personhood.
Well; Coates seems to have quite a personal struggle going against this whiteness system…. with its unfair advantages, unearned privilege, et cetera. I wonder what kind of solutions he has in mind. 😉
Let’s give a welcome clap to the house negro, the black plantation servant of the Democrats.
He deserves it, having risen up from his ancestor’s field slave status, right?
I can’t quite figure out where they are getting this but it extends to women and LGBT people also, everyone is “bodies’ and not “people”.
Ever hear of Planned Profit’s use of bodies?
Bodies are economic gold mines to the Left, and as Geoffrey said, power comes out of the barrel of a gun. But to get that gun, you need gold mines to fund the creation of the formations.