More on Ta-Nehisi Coates
[NOTE: If you don’t know who Ta-Nehisi Coates is and what I think of his work, please see this. I decided to add the following for further clarification.]
When I read this quote from Coates, it seemed to me to provide a basic psychological clue as to what might be going on with him:
My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us. Everyone had lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to guns…
When I was 6, Ma and Dad took me to a local park. I slipped from their gaze and found a playground. Your grandparents spent anxious minutes looking for me. When they found me, Dad did what every parent I knew would have done””he reached for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze, awed at the distance between punishment and offense. Later, I would hear it in Dad’s voice””“Either I can beat him, or the police.” Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn’t. All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke from a fire, and I cannot say whether that violence, even administered in fear and love, sounded the alarm or choked us at the exit.
Coates appears to be saying that violence at the hands of his father and at the hands of the world got all mixed up in Coates’ mind—explicitly mixed up and linked, I might add, when his father would say, “Either I can beat him, or the police.” The larger 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 from and being intended to forestall that official 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 larger and very dangerous world.
I think that Coates is describing some sort of powerful emotional (and also physical) trap that he got caught in early on, as a child, and has never gotten out of. The way it goes is this: I am a small powerless boy, my father whips me, my father loves me, he says he whips me so the others won’t, therefore they are causing my father to hurt me, it is their fault not my father’s, the world is a dangerous and violent place, how can I ever be safe?
See also this:
Coates added that experiences during his childhood in Baltimore in the 1970s made him realize the material differences between many blacks and whites in America. The vast majority of white Americans had a childhood that was free of violence, he said. Coates said that while growing up, he made every decision based on his concerns for his own physical safety.
Whether or not Coates is correct about the “vast majority of whites” and their exposure to violence, I think we can safely say that he’s generally right in terms of the neighborhoods white people are more likely to live in versus the neighborhoods that poorer black people are more likely to live in.
Fear is the motivator. The pen, and Coates’ facility with words, turn the tables and make the man who was once the frightened little boy strong, enabling him to have some power against the white people he believes created and motivated both the black people and the police of whom he was (and is?) so afraid.
Occasionally, academia does provide some decent reading material: my younger daughter last year for her freshman reading was assigned a book that she kept telling me to read. Well I did this summer, and it speaks directly to this thread; it even occurs in Baltimore. It’s “The Other Wes Moore”. Non-fiction.
Try it. It’s a fairly easy read, but fascinating. The premise is that there were two Wes Moores growing up in Baltimore’s west side; one ends up in prison for life, the other PBK from Johns Hopkins, Rhodes Scholar and US Army. While the successful Wes Moore claims no real major turning point, I definitely can point to critical junctures in his life that separated him from the other Wes.
Coates, like the great majority of black pundits, journalists and academicians, seems interested almost exclusively in the subject of blackness, while completely unwilling to accept any explanation for the pathologies of the black ghetto other than white racism and the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. The adoration accorded to him by white progressives (not to mention the craven surrender of leading Democrats to the outrageous demands and tactics of the BLM movement) does not augur well for the possibility of any sort of rational discussion of race relations in this country.
It’s the existential angst of the eternal victim. Of course, there are a lot of advantages to claiming to be the victim as pointed out by Dr. Sanity.
http://drsanity.blogspot.ca/2008/01/victimhood-101-short-course-on-how-to.html
I too have noted what “j e Says” writes. Their blackness is their overwhelming preoccupation. How much of that is because of the perpetual reminder they get from the establishment, and how much because of being taught victimhood by politicians who want to keep them in line on the party roster remains to be seen. It is clear, though, that the Democrat party has benefited enormously from the victimhood felt by minorities. Does it seem likely the Democrats would seek to end that victimhood as long as it perpetuates their power?
Say what you will about Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and I don’t think highly of him, but at least he’s a black academic whose field of study is something other than the black experience.
I am not interested in understanding the genesis of Coates’s disordered mind. Understanding leads to what? We should treat him? He is clearly unwilling, because he is massively profiting from the pollutants in his mind.
No treatment for him. He should be put down, like a rabid dog.
I first looked at this an hour ago, went away because I don’t want to spend a lot of time on a lengthy post, but now I have come back, and I’ll try to this in as abbreviated a form as possible.
This is really hard. Whites never know as much violence as blacks?
When I was 4 I was kidnapped for an afternoon and evening. All I heard when I got back was “You’re OK? You’re OK?” the main focus was to not give my mother no excuse to go into one of her fits. The police were never called. I always said I didn’t remember what went on, but I did. Not every minute. But I remember being given a hamburger, and later on a Snickers candybar. The guy wanted me to like him. I didn’t understand what moved him to pull down my pants and lick my ass for a very long time. It didn’t hurt. I didn’t like it. He never tried to fuck me. He cried at one point, while hugging me tight.
I was plagued by bullies until maybe 6th or 7th grade. I was tall for my age, and this attracted the attention of much older boys. I didn’t know how to talk to them, how to respond, and when for instance my arms were held behind me by a high school football lineman whlle Billy McAvoy punched me until my nose and mouth were bleeding, I chased Billy home but he hid in his house, a coward.
But I was a natural athlete, and things changed. Pat Hamilton, a notorious bully, blocked me way too hard in the back, during a gym class touch football game, and I turned and hit him with a left hook to the balls. As his head came down I hit him on the temple with my right hand. He fell on his face, and when he tried to get up I kneed him in the face. He lay there. The gym teacher ran up, but he was laughing. Nobody liked that fucking Pat Hamilton.
In high school, we had 20% blacks, and they constantly bullied whites, asking them for money or they couldn’t go up the stairs, etc. One day in gym class it was raining outside and the teacer couldn’t decide what to have do, so we just sat there in our gym clothes. An older black guy named Nate Hill had a squirtgun, and he walked slowly down the row, unsmilingly squirting each white guy in the face. They all took it, and all the other black guys laughed. He squirted Matt Biggs, a fat kid just to my left, in his glasses, and took them off, wiped them on his t-shirt and put them on again. Whereupon Nate squirted him in the face once more, taking his time.
I was by then in a state of almost unbearable tension. When Nate moved in front of me I jumped up, grabbed him by the front of his shirt and ran him into the showers, slamming him against the wall, holding him up off his feet, saying, Come near me with that thing again and I’ll fucking BLIND you. I’ll put out your eyes.” We’d been followed in by 10-12 black guys. Tommy Bell told me later that he’d loved seeing me do that, nobody liked Nate.
I’m leaving a lot out.
Years later, working as a clerk in the ER, Fletcher Patterson was being thrown out, and the two security guards were overconfident. Somehow I took off my white lab coat, draped it over the counter, then when Fletcher pulled a knife I had my left arm around his throat, lifting him off his feet, while grabbing his right wrist with my own right hand, turning to my right so that I sort of swung him over my hip and landed on top of him, hitting the floor hard on his face, the knife clattering away.
I’ve omitted my mother going crazy and having shock treatments, after breaking my sister’s arm. My triumphs in sports. I was a star in baseball and football, less so in basketball (though useful to an undefeated, mostly black team).
Some of the people who away with things against when I was young I still wish I could kill, but to make anything meaningful I’d have to go back in time.
You get to a point, you realize that pain doesn’t hurt (Hell’s Angels know this); you also know that violence gets you high. If it didn’t feel good it wouldn’t be so popular.
Well, Coates didn’t grow up in the 70s. He was born in 1975.
When I was in the Navy served one tour under a black Captain (O6, for those of you not familiar with Navy ranks, the equivalent of a Colonel in the army, marines, or air force).
He was extremely liberal, but very intelligent and he could hear out my conservative viewpoints without his head exploding. He actually did listen, and engage me on what I was actually saying instead of simply responding to the caricature of conservative arguments other liberal senior officers with whom I had occasion to talk politics. My discussions with the latter group were fewer and farther between for obvious reasons. They simply didn’t listen to what I had to say, but instead while I was talking they just heard white noise as they were thinking about “how to argue with dumb conservatives” and would respond to that.
My Captain, though was a different kind of liberal and we had many good talks. I recall when the subject of race came up he made a point that stuck with me. He said that most black Americans have been so damaged by the seige mentality that their “official leaders” force upon them maintain the group think (thereby ensuring they have political power in liberal circles) that they really need therapy.
That’s how I see this Coates fellow. He grew up paranoid because of the siege mentality, and he will never get over his paranoia. Instead he is lauded for wallowing in it, and contributing to enforcing the groupthink.
Of course, my Captain was a liberal and he had something of a habit of seeing racism in everything. If it could be blamed on racism, then it must be due to racism. And if I didn’t see the racism in some minor slight, because the same things had happened to me. He’d be amazed and ask me some variant of, “Are you denying racism exists?” And I’d always respond with
(Hit submit too early). I’d always respond with something like, “No, of course it exists. But then so do car theft and arson, and if someone claims to be a victim of those then I’m not going to convict the accused without a little more evidence.”
Somehow my requirement for evidence made me somewhat suspect in his eyes. But we still got along.
Our friend ta may be crazy but it sells.
Do Thomas Sowell or Juan Williams get invited to the White House for discussions on matters of race? Al Sharpton does.
If Ta didn’t write like a raving lunatic would his book be a best seller that everybody is writing about?
This is a repeat of the Leonard Bernstein/Black Panthers Radical Chic. The guy needs a shrink to help him get over his abusive father.
Samoan culture, Black culture is MUCH more violent inside the family than White norms.
Samoans even trump Blacks — with police blotters all over the nation showing Samoans at hyper-elevated levels of husband-wife VIOLENT fighting.
What’s interesting — and shocking — is how Samoans give the lie to most Black complaints WRT the echo of Slavery.
Samoans have got all of the social ills — with a cultural history of NEVER being on the bottom. Indeed, their culture had been one of cannibalism — until the White man showed up.
( Gee, that’s just like certain tribes in Africa — Somalia comes to mind. White explorers often found themselves on the food table.)
In sum: a LOT of the violence in Black culture may well be genetic — and a reflection of r-selection — the echo of a continent where human life was cheap — going back just about forever.
We can’t change it.
As for blame, we might as well blame the stars — or the gods.
At no time did anyone — of any race — of volition — decide to pull the ‘Mean Switch’ so that harshness ruled society.
If anything, Blacks are legally super-elevated — racially — inverting their status in the Antebellum era.
Inverse-slavery is still slavery of a kind. It figures to end in a veil of tears.
Without Federal wealth transfers — based on racism — Black violence would G R A D U A L L Y be bred out of humanity — over the course of millennia.
The reverse is true. Black violence-DNA has enhanced Darwinian prospects under the current economic regime.
This is most explicitly seen in the Black ghettos wherein the Alpha thugs are getting the booty — and the civilized Betas are getting no booty at all. The physical destruction of public housing property and co-located assets occurs during mating demonstrations of Alpha cred.
The booty goes to the fellas that LEAST respect civil order. The gals just can’t stop themselves.
Such Darwinian urges hail back twenty millennia.
Lectures from the lectern won’t make these impulses go away.
This reminded me of the brouhaha around Viking’s running back Adrian Petersen switching his young son as well as comments from my AA wife about punishments from her grandmother and mother. I’m old enough to remember when my parents stopped corporal punishment. As I recall there was push in the mid-70’s to end it in the home as well as schools. My home church ran a seminar called Parent Effectiveness Training. I’m thinking that it had more of an effect on UMC parents. Avoiding corporal punishment does seem to be a mark of UMC ‘enlightened’ parents.
All these white families with no violence Coates observed… given his neighborhood and family situation, I wonder how many of those families were on TV, the movies, or in magazines.
Hell, I envied those people, too, and I’m quite white. I thought it surprising when I got to high school social studies and found out ours was not an especially poor community.