Ta-Nehisi Coates Deletes Twitter Account After Feud with Cornel West :snoop:

[Hood Critic]

Side note, when did ol' rodimusprime get verified on Twitter?

 

[Red Shield]

you can't be fukking serious...

Is this supposed to be our ally?

Racism May Have Gotten Us Into This Mess, But Identity Politics Can’t Get Us Out









THIS IS WHY AFRO-PESSIMISM EXISTS! Because girls like this:






write articles that say dumb shyt like this:

None of this should be surprising after reading Coates’s historical account — tragically, in America, black lives don’t matter. But given this political reality, progressives should think hard about whether it’s good strategy to make black faces the singular mascot of a broader and more inclusive movement. Race is an important factor in this narrative, but centering it exclusively risks shifting focus away from those voter concerns that politicians can actually control. Personal prejudice, unfortunately, is not one of them.​

HOW CAN WE WIN WITH shyt LIKE THIS?!?!?!?!

Man see, as much as I like leftist media, this shyt just bothers the living fukk outta me.

Now black people have to cede their identity that we didn't even create to comfort white people to MAYBE eek out economic gains with programs that really don't even do shyt in the long run?

The fukk is up with that? Just so you can fulfill some quixotic marxist wet dream?




@GzUp @wire28 @Atlrocafella @Blessed Is the Man @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Darth Nubian @88m3 @Dameon Farrow @jj23 @General Bravo III @2stainz @BigMoneyGrip @hashmander @Call Me James @MVike28 @VR Tripper @Soymuscle Mike @BaileyPark31 @Darth Nubian

this broad is stupid

 

[No1]

It's fascinating how this somehow became a proxy between centrists and leftists. And Coates didn't delete because of West. He got mad because people from all angles came at him. Feminists, leftists and the alt right.

But it says a lot that people are attacking West and not his points. Coates does lionize Obama and does have a defeatist mentality towards race that allows him to set a low bar.

 

[Sammy Steez]

"Baldwin was a writer, first and foremost. The Fire Next Time is a beautiful work of art. And I really wanted to make something beautiful."

"I have this fond memory of my time in college – I wasn't a great student, but my time was open and unrestricted. I remember sitting in this library at Howard University and reading The Fire Next Time in one session. It was such a pleasurable experience, to be lost in a work of art. I didn't really grasp the political points. Did I understand what Baldwin was saying about religion? No, not really. But I knew that it had been said really beautifully. I had that."

"I enjoy the challenge of trying to say things beautifully. The message is secondary in that sense. Obviously, I have something that I want to say that's very, very important to me – but the process of actually crafting it is essential."

"Well, the lyricism doesn't serve if it's not conveying. Chris helped me a lot with that. He'd say, "OK, what does this mean? Clarify, clarify." A lot of the time, I write by ear. So in rough draft form it's probably a lot more lyrical. He'd say, "Ground this. What are you saying specifically?" A lot of times, I actually didn't know. You just have to write, and strip down, and rewrite, over and over and over again, until it's not only beautiful, but it actually says something. It's almost like a melody coming to you before the words."



That's the sort of stuff that bugs me a bit about Coates. Sometimes it feels like he's more about making a good, beautiful argument than getting everything right. So he has this thesis in his head, and he writes elegantly on that thesis, and then he makes sure he does all the research to back up his thesis. The result is a fine piece of writing that makes a great point. But there's nothing in the process to challenge the thesis, to second-guess himself as to whether what he is saying is the whole story, and that's why I think some of his analysis ends up being a bit too single-minded and fails to take into account other factors sufficiently. It makes for better writing, but West was right (while still being jealous and ornery too) that Coates doesn't get the full picture in.

I'm a big fan of Coates, but this is a really excellent critique. Objective and well thoughtout.

 

[Althalucian]

It's one thing to criticize Coates on intellectual grounds, it is another to try to go after him as if he is the enemy.

The only black people who really seem to be offended by Coates seem to be people who think Coates isn't extreme enough?! Or that some white people like him? Or that he is...a writer?! I don't know - these people seem very illogical. I mean, the dude was raised by black panther parents, went to Howard (dropped out) and writes about how white people objectively, factually, and historically oppressed black people...but he is the enemy? Take a look at this bio and tell me that this is the white man's ally:

"Coates was born in Baltimore, Maryland. His father, William Paul "Paul" Coates,[9] was a Vietnam War veteran, former Black Panther, publisher and librarian. His mother, Cheryl Lynn (Waters), was a teacher.[10][11] Coates' father founded and ran Black Classic Press, a publisher specializing in African-American titles. The Press grew out of a grassroots organization, the George Jackson Prison Movement (GJPM). Initially the GJPM operated a Black book store called the Black Book. Later Black Classic Press was established with a table-top printing press in the basement of the Coates family home.[2][12]"

Are these brehs jealous that he became famous for his hard work? Do they not understand that he is a writer and not a god? Coates isn't saying he's a god - a perfect Kanye-like person like Cornell West. When people ask him questions in interviews and he doesn't know the answer he says "I don't know. I really don't know." He encourages other people to think for themselves and to write from their lives.I'm glad Coates deleted his twitter. Why waste your time talking to idiots?

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

It's one thing to criticize Coates on intellectual grounds, it is another to try to go after him as if he is the enemy.

The only black people who really seem to be offended by Coates seem to be people who think Coates isn't extreme enough?! Or that some white people like him? Or that he is...a writer?! I don't know - these people seem very illogical. I mean, the dude was raised by black panther parents, went to Howard (dropped out) and writes about how white people objectively, factually, and historically oppressed black people...but he is the enemy? Take a look at this bio and tell me that this is the white man's ally:

"Coates was born in Baltimore, Maryland. His father, William Paul "Paul" Coates,[9] was a Vietnam War veteran, former Black Panther, publisher and librarian. His mother, Cheryl Lynn (Waters), was a teacher.[10][11] Coates' father founded and ran Black Classic Press, a publisher specializing in African-American titles. The Press grew out of a grassroots organization, the George Jackson Prison Movement (GJPM). Initially the GJPM operated a Black book store called the Black Book. Later Black Classic Press was established with a table-top printing press in the basement of the Coates family home.[2][12]"

Are these brehs jealous that he became famous for his hard work? Do they not understand that he is a writer and not a god? Coates isn't saying he's a god - a perfect Kanye-like person like Cornell West. When people ask him questions in interviews and he doesn't know the answer he says "I don't know. I really don't know." He encourages other people to think for themselves and to write from their lives.I'm glad Coates deleted his twitter. Why waste your time talking to idiots?

You gotta read these two posts calling this shyt out:

http://www.thecoli.com/posts/27648650/

http://www.thecoli.com/posts/27644098/

 

[The War Report]

I swear I hate the term neoliberal...

Why?

 

[No1]

It's one thing to criticize Coates on intellectual grounds, it is another to try to go after him as if he is the enemy.

The only black people who really seem to be offended by Coates seem to be people who think Coates isn't extreme enough?! Or that some white people like him? Or that he is...a writer?! I don't know - these people seem very illogical. I mean, the dude was raised by black panther parents, went to Howard (dropped out) and writes about how white people objectively, factually, and historically oppressed black people...but he is the enemy? Take a look at this bio and tell me that this is the white man's ally:

"Coates was born in Baltimore, Maryland. His father, William Paul "Paul" Coates,[9] was a Vietnam War veteran, former Black Panther, publisher and librarian. His mother, Cheryl Lynn (Waters), was a teacher.[10][11] Coates' father founded and ran Black Classic Press, a publisher specializing in African-American titles. The Press grew out of a grassroots organization, the George Jackson Prison Movement (GJPM). Initially the GJPM operated a Black book store called the Black Book. Later Black Classic Press was established with a table-top printing press in the basement of the Coates family home.[2][12]"

Are these brehs jealous that he became famous for his hard work? Do they not understand that he is a writer and not a god? Coates isn't saying he's a god - a perfect Kanye-like person like Cornell West. When people ask him questions in interviews and he doesn't know the answer he says "I don't know. I really don't know." He encourages other people to think for themselves and to write from their lives.I'm glad Coates deleted his twitter. Why waste your time talking to idiots?

Have you ever read the variety of critiques of Coates? I stopped reading your post when you started characterizing it as abo ut not liking him and then started talking about his parents as if that has anything to do with his arguments. I could post several brilliant and well thought out critiques of Coates. You do realize that you're making the point for West? A lot of you guys read nothing but Coates and look at him as black Jesus so anyone who criticizes him must be a hater and you use the term radical as a pejorative. Take a look around you, the intellectual weight of HL is gone strictly because 95% of it got tired of arguing with idiots. Now look @ who just cosigned you. You just made the worst sort of defense of Coates. I guess MLK's son is above critique because of his pops. Coates is telling you to think for yourself and I stead of engaging with the critique you're cheerleading.

 

[ExodusNirvana]

Side note, when did ol' rodimusprime get verified on Twitter?

Rod been heavy in these Twitter streets for a minute

I just can't follow him because he live Tweets too many things that I watch and I tend to DVR shyt and watch it at my leisure

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

It's one thing to criticize Coates on intellectual grounds, it is another to try to go after him as if he is the enemy.

The only black people who really seem to be offended by Coates seem to be people who think Coates isn't extreme enough?! Or that some white people like him? Or that he is...a writer?! I don't know - these people seem very illogical. I mean, the dude was raised by black panther parents, went to Howard (dropped out) and writes about how white people objectively, factually, and historically oppressed black people...but he is the enemy? Take a look at this bio and tell me that this is the white man's ally:

"Coates was born in Baltimore, Maryland. His father, William Paul "Paul" Coates,[9] was a Vietnam War veteran, former Black Panther, publisher and librarian. His mother, Cheryl Lynn (Waters), was a teacher.[10][11] Coates' father founded and ran Black Classic Press, a publisher specializing in African-American titles. The Press grew out of a grassroots organization, the George Jackson Prison Movement (GJPM). Initially the GJPM operated a Black book store called the Black Book. Later Black Classic Press was established with a table-top printing press in the basement of the Coates family home.[2][12]"

Are these brehs jealous that he became famous for his hard work? Do they not understand that he is a writer and not a god? Coates isn't saying he's a god - a perfect Kanye-like person like Cornell West. When people ask him questions in interviews and he doesn't know the answer he says "I don't know. I really don't know." He encourages other people to think for themselves and to write from their lives.I'm glad Coates deleted his twitter. Why waste your time talking to idiots?

Have you ever read the variety of critiques of Coates? I stopped reading your post when you started characterizing it as abo ut not liking him and then started talking about his parents as if that has anything to do with his arguments. I could post several brilliant and well thought out critiques of Coates. You do realize that you're making the point for West? A lot of you guys read nothing but Coates and look at him as black Jesus so anyone who criticizes him must be a hater and you use the term radical as a pejorative. Take a look around you, the intellectual weight of HL is gone strictly because 95% of it got tired of arguing with idiots. Now look @ who just cosigned you. You just made the worst sort of defense of Coates. I guess MLK's son is above critique because of his pops. Coates is telling you to think for yourself and I stead of engaging with the critique you're cheerleading.

On West on Coates
Simon Balto
302 Comments
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On December 17, 2017

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At 7:00 pm

/

In General
Leftist criticisms of Ta-Nehisi Coates have become their own weird cottage industry in the last year or so. Cornel West has been part of the genre, and today published a blistering attack on Coates in The Guardian. (I very carefully phrase this as an attack on Coates, personally, and not a review of Coates’ latest book, We Were Eight Years In Power, because I don’t think that West actually read that book and is not engaged in good faith with it.)

The gist of West’s take is that Coates focuses so much on the totalizing oppressiveness of white supremacy and fetishizes the Obama presidency so significantly that he offers us nothing of value in service of the struggle. And, because we live in 2017 and it’s cool for leftists to call other leftists neoliberals if their political worldviews don’t conform exactly to their own expectations, West accuses Coates of being part of a larger neoliberal agenda that is preventing the One True Revolution (TM) from coming to fruition.

West is right about this: Coates’ writing “generates crocodile tears of neoliberals who have no intention of sharing power or giving up privilege.” Liberals do love Coates, and to the best of my knowledge have done little to translate their subsequent angst into action.

He’s wrong about pretty much everything else.

My basic critique of West’s critique is that he isn’t even arguing with Coates’ work in anything approaching good faith. Anyone that has read Coates understands that he is deeply cynical about America, and that his animating preoccupation is white supremacy’s central role in constructing our society. West sees this as giving too much power to white supremacy and not enough agency to the courageous struggle against it — what West calls the black “fightback.” West is doing two things here: 1) he is ignoring the attention that Coates has paid to black freedom fighters within the scope of his work (to claim the most obvious among many examples, We Were Eight Years in Power takes its title from and begins with the words of Reconstruction-era political leader Thomas Miller, who fought back — however unsuccessfully — against the rising tide of white supremacy in late-1800s America); and 2) he is demanding that Coates write something completely different than what Coates set out to write. Critiquing something for what you wanted it to be, rather than for what it is and what its author wanted it to be, is a common problem in academia. And so here too, it is in the world of social analysis and political thought. Because Coates has written books about the power of white supremacy rather than writing books about how to upend white supremacy (which are two related but very different projects), West deems Coates worse than useless.

This leads to a series of terrible takes. West is particularly aghast at what he sees as Coates’ overly sympathetic stance toward Obama (with whom West has also had public though ultimately unrequited beef). West tries to cast Coates as a starry-eyed and uncritical lover of the Obama presidency, based upon the pieces of We Were Eight Years in Power that West may have read or skimmed. But a central piece of that book, and of all of Coates’ writings on Obama, lies in Coates trying to reconcile the promise that many of us saw in Obama — that his election maybe signaled the best of us and that his presidency might shepherd the same — with the realities of what he did in office. No one who consistently read Coates over the years, or read his recent book entirely, could honestly cast him as an uncritical Obama lapdog.

The same could be said for West’s accusation that Coates’ “narrow racial tribalism and myopic political neoliberalism has no place for keeping track of Wall Street greed, US imperial crimes or black elite indifference to poverty.” It’s true that We Were Eight Years in Power doesn’t have a lot of specific analyses of American empire, even though it — as with most of Coates’ work — proceeds from the acknowledgment that America was built on stolen lands and labor and thus was, in many ways, imperial from the jump. But beyond that, this is essentially West critiquing Coates for not writing a Cornel West book. Why is Coates expected to write about “black elite indifference to poverty?” In what way is that a condemnable offense? And, for that matter, what about Coates’ relentless, deeply researched writing on poverty and exploitation? And, relatedly, given that Coates’ entire intellectual framework for thinking about America’s racial (racist) history could be distilled to the word “plunder,” how can West argue that capitalist greed isn’t part of his analysis? In general, how, in good conscience, can West write that sentence?

The answer, of course, is that West can write that sentence because he see Coates as part of a huge cross-section of the left that is a nail in need of hammering with the “neoliberal” stamp. Cornel West considers anything that doesn’t have the Cornel West “proper revolutionary politics” seal of approval to be illegitimate, and that’s unfortunate. The truth is that we have always needed chroniclers as well as street-marchers, researchers as well as revolutionaries. James Baldwin was a chronicler. Kenneth Clark was a researcher. Their impacts on the black freedom struggle were significant. West criticizing Coates because he makes the power of white supremacy more intelligible for hundreds of thousands of readers, but doesn’t instruct white readers explicitly on how to relinquish their power and give forth their wealth, is the definition of bad-faith arguing. It’s not unexpected from Cornel West these days, but it’s disappointing nonetheless.

 

[King Kreole]

The problem with Coates isn't that he's a bad writer, or that he's too famous, or whatever other personal/jealous motivations people accuse his critics of having, it's that his politics fukking suck. He identifies "white supremacy" only in its most superficial form because his politics don't enable him to focus his critiques at the engines truly propagating white supremacy, such as the financial system and the military-industrial-complex. I say that because while I know that Coates (relatively briefly) mentions these topics, there is nothing in his writing that necessarily brings one to the conclusion that in 2017, these institutional agents are the primary drivers of white supremacy, and their presence is incompatible with progress and revolution. He chooses to substitute them for an amorphous "White Supremacy" that gives his readers the space to replace the real perpetrators with whatever actor is most convenient to them, which, for white liberals, is Trump or whatever. This results in a dilution and obfuscation of the true nature of White Supremacy. Look at the politics of his most ardent fans. The proof is in the pudding.

Coates cannot abstract out to those levels because his politics are comfortably within those paradigms, and he refuses to focus on them because he is not a holistic thinker. He either elides or mutilates the true condition of the black body politic because his politics are incompatible with revolution and what it would entail. And that's ok! Not everyone has to be everything. He's not required to be a revolutionary. But he needs to be appropriately contextualized, and that has not been happing in the broader cultural discourse surrounding Coates, which paints him as one. My problem isn't even really with Coates, as I don't believe he is really trying to be a holistic writer/critic. My problem is with his legion of white and black stans who hold up his work as some panacea for black ills, in the lineage of true revolutionaries like Malcolm or Baldwin. Not only does Coates' writing/politics provide no meaningful solution to the political problems facing black people of this era, they contribute to the oppression by giving the agents and institutions of oppression cover by omission.

I find it annoying how everything comes back to the 2016 Primary/Election, but it is simply impossible to hold the level of uncritical fandom/support for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as an institutional actor that many of Coates' acolytes hold, and be serious about analyzing and undoing the levers of white supremacy. The reason Coates is so popular amongst white liberals is that he allows one to simultaneously acknowledge the historical and contemporary injustices being levied against black people in America, while not taking any meaningful actions to disrupt it. He provides a safe space where they can discharge the cognitive dissonance and engage in the performative wokeness of a cosmetic revolutionary.

And falling back on Coates' call for reparations to prove his radical credentials, as Jelani Cobb does here:



is totally idiotic when in the same breath you dismiss leftists in the mold of Bernie Sanders. To eschew more in-reach policies (Universal Healthcare, free college tuition, reigning in Wall Street, getting money out of politics, etc) that will significantly and meaningfully alleviate the struggles of the black underclass in favour of a single-minded quixotic quest for reparations is juvenile.

This whole argument ultimately comes down to Barack Obama.If you are pro-Obama, as the majority of his fanbase is, then you have to find a way to ignore or downplay the myriad of injustices that befell the black community (along with many other oppressed peoples) during Obama's tenure as the head of the American Empire because you love the symbolism of Obama sitting on the throne. If you cannot bring yourself to value the symbolism over the material results, you'll probably find issue with Coates and his work.

 

[mitter]

But it says a lot that people are attacking West and not his points. Coates does lionize Obama and does have a defeatist mentality towards race that allows him to set a low bar.

This is the problem I have with how most people respond to West.

Yes, we know West has his faults. But I wish people would actually try to refute/address the points he is making rather than just resort to personal attacks on the man himself.

 

[Pirius Black]

It's fascinating how this somehow became a proxy between centrists and leftists. And Coates didn't delete because of West. He got mad because people from all angles came at him. Feminists, leftists and the alt right.

But it says a lot that people are attacking West and not his points. Coates does lionize Obama and does have a defeatist mentality towards race that allows him to set a low
People are attacking West because his anti-Coates diatribe was founded upon a false premise, that Coates is a "neo-liberal " darling, which is an absurd claim. Coates isn't out here stumping for Keynesian economics, open borders or free trade. To paint him as such renders his facile argument moot. Secondly, Coates does not lionize Obama, he has criticized Obama numerous times for his drone policy, Obama's response to mass incarceration and talking down to black people in a patronizing way. Coates ionized Obama the symbol while remaining a steadfast critic of Obama the President. Lastly, how is it defeatist to look at 400 years of history and conclude that despite our best efforts, white supremacy is so thoroughly ingrained in Western civilisation that defeating white supremacy in all its form is a nigh impossible task. It may be that we are Sisyphus, destined to roll that rock up the hill for as long as we remain here. It is what it is.

 

[CEO of Morgan Industries]

Coates doesn't argue that defeating WS is nigh impossible. He argues that it's probably going to take bloodshed, and he personally has no interest in that.

I don't think that it will take bloodshed necessarily, but it probably, at least as far as this country goes, will take the breakup of the United States and its fall as a global power. This is why accelerationists are fine with Trump destroying the country from the inside, though I have a whole number of issues with the accelerationist mindset.

No matter how it happens, black people will be hurt in an outsized way while it happens, but where else is there to go if you want black folks to be free of a state run on WS?