Cornel West’s Reckless Criticism of Ta-Nehisi Coates
Cornel West’s Reckless Criticism of Ta-Nehisi Coates
Why his broadside should feel like a crushing disappointment to any young critic who writes about race in America.
By Ismail Muhammad
Cornel West and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Win McNamee/Getty Images, Paul Marotta/Getty Images.
It’s not an overstatement to say that, if you are a young writer who interrogates American race relations and white supremacy, Cornel West is the foundation upon which you stand. Alongside the likes of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, and, of course, James Baldwin, West’s work is part of the canon that teaches younger writers how to think and write about race. It is impossible to imagine a writer like Ta-Nehisi Coates having come into existence without a book like West’s Race Matters, which, in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, helped popularize the thesis that anti-black racism was inextricably entangled with almost every aspect of American politics and culture—including, most crucially, our capitalist economy.
West’s importance to contemporary black thought is what makes his recent Guardian broadside against Coates so disheartening. Not only is it a case of one of black thought’s elder statesmen attempting a hatchet job on a younger writer, West thoroughly botches the job via disingenuous readings from which a reader is tempted to conclude one of two things: Either he hasn’t read We Were Eight Years in Power very closely, or he has intentionally misrepresented Coates’ writing in an attempt to bolster his own brand. (It is probably not a coincidence that West’s Twitter feed is full of plugs for the 25th-anniversary edition of Race Matters.) Coates addressed West’s attack but deleted it along with his entire Twitter account. The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb also assailed West on Twitter, accusing him of “cloak[ing] petty rivalry as disinterested analysis.” It’s hard to say for sure, of course, whether West was motivated more by competitiveness or by ideology. But it’s pretty shocking that he authored a partially baked, inaccurate hot take that all but labels Coates a stooge of white liberalism—an accusation that feels especially reckless coming from a writer of West’s stature.
West’s interpretation repeats some familiar criticisms of Coates’ work, namely the charge that Coates portrays white supremacy as an intractable, omnipotent force that we might never overcome. For critics of Coates, this portrayal betrays an apolitical pessimism that neither takes stock of black resistance to structural racism nor charts a path forward. But West takes this critique a step further, arguing that Coates “hardly keeps track of our fightback, and never connects this ugly legacy to the predatory capitalist practices, imperial policies (of war, occupation, detention, assassination) or the black elite’s refusal to confront poverty, patriarchy or transphobia.” For West, Coates’ alleged silence around these issues is exactly what has garnered him acceptance among white audiences: He decouples anti-racist thought from an intersectional critique of state power, effectively rendering himself a “neoliberal” mouthpiece of the state.
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Ismail Muhammad is a writer based in Oakland, California. He’s a staff writer at theMillions and contributing editor at Zyzzyva.
