2015 article: "The Hard Untruths of Ta-Nehisi Coates" (anti-White racist)

By Free Republic | Created at 2024-11-20 05:53:54 | Updated at 2024-11-20 08:30:00 2 hours ago

2015 article: "The Hard Untruths of Ta-Nehisi Coates" (anti-White racist)
Commentar Magazine ^ | Sept. 24, 2015 | Kyle Smith

Posted on 11/19/2024 9:45:50 PM PST by Words Matter

The Hard Untruths of Ta-Nehisi Coates.

A bestselling polemic riven with hatred thrills the liberal elite.

[...] for harboring roughly the same level of suspicion, fear, mistrust, distaste, and unease about whites as Derbyshire does about blacks, the essayist and blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates has found himself crowned America’s leading civic thinker. ...

Coates repeatedly returns to an incident in which his son, at age four, was shoved on an escalator on the Upper West Side by a woman who said, “Come on.” Coates reacted angrily, which is understandable, but he also pushed another man who took the woman’s side, which is not. To Coates, this was the same old story: slavery. “Someone had invoked their right over the body of my son,” he writes. Coates stands 6’ 4” and no doubt did not appear in the moment as the sagacious soul beloved to New York Times readers, possibly because he was screaming his lungs out, though the vague language makes it hard to say (“I spoke to this woman, and my words were hot with all of the moment and all of my history”).

Such an incident would upset any father. But Coates evidently overreacted because of an unquenchable need to find racism, an eagerness to assume the absolute worst of people at all times, even when there is no evidence for it. Or does he think white New Yorkers never shove other white New Yorkers? A couple of years ago, I was walking to work on West 48th Street when a black man stopped me. I thought he might be seeking directions, but when he instead commenced a tale of woe, no doubt with an eye toward asking for spare change, I continued on my journey. Half a block later, he ran up behind me and shoved me, not gently, in the chest with both hands. “The next time you IGNORE me, I’m going to beat the shit out of you!” he cried. I realized he could have done great harm to me in a few seconds. Shaken, I hurried off to work, wishing I had eyes in the back of my head, but that was the conclusion of the incident.

I quickly forgot all of this and never mentioned the encounter to anyone. The only reason it has arisen in my memory now is that I was trying to think of an experience similar to Coates’s at the escalator. There’s nothing remarkable about what happened to me. It’s the sort of nuisance you learn to forget when you live in New York. Frustrated and impatient people are everywhere. But we don’t organize our personalities around minor run-ins, much less intentionally pass along such an obsession to our children or elevate them to world-historical status, as Coates does in a bathetic and dreadfully written paragraph that begins with the hypocrisy of the Founding and its tolerance for slavery, and concludes with that single shove of four-year-old Samori:

[It] was true in 1776. It is true today. There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. But because they believe themselves to be white, they would rather countenance a man choked to death on film under their laws…. And they would rather reach out, in all their sanity, and push my four-year-old son as though he were merely an obstacle in the path of their too-important day. Coates would declare that my encounter with the angry black man was my fault, for being white, or rather for being one of those who “believe themselves to be white,” an awkward formulation intended as an insult (albeit a strange one). Coates uses the phrase throughout, apparently in homage to James Baldwin, who in a bizarre 1984 essay called “On Being ‘White’ . . . and Other Lies” argued that “there are no white people” and that being white was merely a “moral choice” to subjugate black people.

In Coates’s view, if I were black and had been shoved by a black man, this would also have been the fault of white people, who have been deliberately keeping black people poor. When he was a boy, “naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease,” the nakedness was, as it remains, “the correct and intended result of policy.” This is the conspiracy theory to rule them all, one so satisfying to Coates’s readers that they don’t request any support for it. The $22 trillion spent on the War on Poverty? An elaborate ruse.

To Coates, history is a maze in which every path leads back to the dragon in the center, which is slavery. So blame the white racist superstructure even if a black cop working for a black county run by black politicians kills a black suspect—that would be Coates’s college acquaintance Prince Jones, who died when an undercover cop in Prince George’s County, Maryland, mistook the young man for another suspect and Jones responded by ramming his car at the officer, who shot him.

And the street gangs in Coates’s native Baltimore? Their aggression is purely a defensive posture. They’re “girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered ’round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away.’” By such logic, no black person can ever be considered responsible for his acts. People, in Coates’s view, are simply hapless playthings, borne this way and that by history’s winds. This is why Coates believes criminals should be released from prison en masse, violent criminals included. How catastrophic would be the effect on black neighborhoods if their most lethal alumni suddenly returned all at once? Are not “public intellectuals” supposed to reason past step one of their policy proposals?

Ordinary journalistic standards don’t apply to Coates. His aggrandizement is the predictable outcome when a self-flagellating elite class, having spent 30 years propagating notions of group rights and group guilt while dismissing individual agency, concludes that victim classes should be encouraged to bear witness to “my truth,” the better to advance an extreme vision. Coates’s great stylistic innovation is to render his inner turmoil thrillingly visceral by repeatedly, even obsessively, referring to America’s alleged determination to attack and cage “my body” or “the black body” in general, even when the topic is such abstract calculations as how mortgage lenders figure credit ratings. “How do I live free in this black body?” Coates asks. A better question would be, why does he imprison himself with fear? In a country the size of ours, a one-in-a-million event can be expected to happen 320 times. Coates behaves as if such headline-making events are the norm. A routine traffic stop that ends without incident (a cop pulled over Coates, checked his license, and sent him on his way) becomes memoir-worthy solely because of what’s going on in his head. “I sat there in terror. . . . I had read reports of these officers choking mechanics, shooting construction workers, slamming suspects through the glass doors of shopping malls.” Coates is, of course, like the rest of us, far more likely to die in a motor-vehicle accident than at the hands of police, but an all-consuming fear of cars is not going to get you anointed America’s deepest thinker. When Coates isn’t ignoring facts, as in the Martin and Brown cases, he shamelessly misrepresents them, as in the case of Jordan Davis, a black Florida youth who was fatally shot by a white man after a dispute over loud music. “The killer was convicted not of the boy’s murder,” Coates writes, “but of firing repeatedly as the boy’s friends tried to retreat. Destroying the black body was permissible—but it would be better to do it efficiently.” This is an outrageously false recounting. In no sense were the actions of Michael Dunn, the shooter, deemed “permissible.” A jury initially deadlocked on the most serious charge, but after a second trial, Dunn was indeed convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole, in addition to a 90-year-sentence for conviction at the first trial of three counts of attempted murder and firing into an occupied vehicle.

The case wrapped up last October, well before Coates’s book went into production. But Coates, purposefully vague, omits names when referring to the case on page 112, even though the details are clearly those of the Davis murder. By specifically mentioning Davis 18 pages later, he shows that this is the incident he was referring to. (Coates has been consistently irresponsible on the matter: He began a February 15, 2014, Atlantic piece, published after the first trial but before the second, “I wish I had something more to say about the fact that Michael Dunn was not convicted for killing a black boy.” The piece was grossly misleading at the time and remains uncorrected on the Atlantic’s website.)

Coates’s detachment from fact is nothing compared with his moral detachment, however. He says, “my heart was cold” when he watched the Twin Towers burn and collapse. The cops present on September 11 deserved to die because they all shot Prince Jones; firefighters had to go because they are kind of like cops, though if Coates has any examples of firefighters killing black men, he does not supply them. Those office workers guilty of believing themselves to be white obviously had it coming to them. And everyone else who died? Black office workers? Foreigners? Shrug.

If you think I’m exaggerating Coates’s position, consider this passage:

I could see no difference between the officer who killed Prince Jones and the police who died, or the firefighters who died. They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were the menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could—with no justification—shatter my body.

This is not a man possessed of hard truths, but rather a hard heart. To praise Coates is to condone mass hatred. Coates’s college hero, Malcolm X, was widely denounced after he remarked, upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy, that “chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they’ve always made me glad.” Coates is if anything even more blasé about the destruction of the World Trade Center.

But then we are speaking of a man who says, “the heroes given to me by the schools . . . struck me as ridiculous.” The heart sinks. He doesn’t specifically mention Martin Luther King Jr. (that vagueness again), but it’s obvious that he is thinking of King and the other civil-rights icons. He says, ludicrously, of the documentary footage from the era, that “the black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life—love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the fire-hoses that tore off their clothes.”

Love! It’s beyond obtuse.

If Coates is both morally and factually at sea, he is also self-contradictory. Prince Jones is a close friend on page 63 (“a boy about whom I think every day. I would smile whenever I saw him, for I felt the warmth when I was around him and was slightly sad when the time came to trade dap and for one of us to go.”) But on page 140, Coates writes: “The fact is that I had not known Prince Jones all that well. . . . I could not account for his comings and goings.”..