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Ta-Nehisi Coates is not here to comfort you
Vox ^ | 10/9/2017

Posted on 10/14/2017 7:45:40 AM PDT by Altura Ct.

“I think these things don't tend to happen peacefully,” says Coates.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates began his book tour for We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, he had a telling exchange with The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert.

“You’ve had a hard time in some interviews expressing a sense of hope in this country,” Colbert said. “Do you have any hope tonight for the people out there, about how we could be a better country, we could have better race relations, we could have better politics?”

“No,” Coates replied. "But I’m not the person you should go to for that. You should go to your pastor. Your pastor provides you hope. Your friends provide you hope.”

This wasn’t the answer Colbert was looking for. “I’m not asking you to make shit up,” he said. “I’m asking if you personally see any evidence for change in America.”

“But I would have to make shit up to actually answer that question in a satisfying way,” Coates shot back.

Colbert is not alone in his request, or in his frustration. It speaks to the quasi-prophetic space Coates occupies in American life that his pessimism grates so deeply on so many, that the central struggle over his work is not its rightness, or its righteousness, but whether it leaves too little space for sunbeams. Coates freely admits that he owes his career to Barack Obama's political rise, to perhaps the most optimistic politician in American life, and yet he refuses to pledge allegiance to hope or place any confidence in change. Indeed, his understanding of those terms puts him at odds with the American consensus.

We Were Eight Years in Power is an unusual book. It collects nine of Coates's Atlantic essays, one from each year of Obama's presidency, and one from its savage aftermath. Connecting the essays are lyrical, autobiographical reflections that situate the work in Coates's daily life, that track his steady evolution as a writer and a thinker.

The most interesting thread of these reflections traces Coates's slow loss of hope, the rising recognition, long before Donald Trump won power, that Obama's presidency would not have a happy ending. The question Coates poses, to himself and to us, is this: What does it mean to be hopeful about race in America?

There was a time when Coates believed in hope and change, or at least wanted to believe in it. "It was hard not to reassess yourself at, say, the sight of John Patterson, the man who'd 'out-niggered' George Wallace to become governor of Alabama in 1959, endorsing Obama," he writes. But then, in quick succession, came Shirley Sherrod, and the humiliation of the “beer summit," and the reaffirmation, for Coates, of "the great power of white innocence — the need to believe that whatever might befall the country, white America is ultimately blameless."

Coates is not a writer who grasps for easy answers. He does not condemn Obama for firing Sherrod, or for placating the police officer who had arrested Henry Louis Gates Jr. on his own porch by inviting him for a drink in the Rose Garden. "Obama was the first black president of a majority-white country,” he writes. “He should've feared white innocence!"

Everything had changed, and not enough had changed. It is in moments like these that you see Coates diverge from his critics. There are two ways of looking at the beer summit. It took place on the lawn of the White House, and the occupant of the White House was black. Hope. But even a black president of the United States still had to genuflect before white America's fear of black men, and its insistence that that fear is innocent and valid. Despair.

Americans venerate progress. Our national mythos is of a perfecting union, a country always striving to come closer to its ideals. To deny that there is hope is to deny that America is getting steadily better, and it is folly to deny that America is a better, fairer, more just country today than it was 50 years ago, or 100 years ago. This is the position of Coates's critics: There is progress, and therefore there is hope. This is what Colbert asked for when he asked for hope: evidence that we could be better, that we were becoming better. This is what New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait accused Coates of missing, saying he “defines out of existence the very possibility of steady progress.”

Reading Coates, I do not believe hope, for him, is synonymous with progress. Hope is prediction. It is about ultimate levels, not current trends. To be hopeful about race in America is not to say that slowly things will become less bad. It is to say that they will become good, equal, just. To be hopeful is to believe that America will one day embody its ideals, that it will atone for its past. Coates quotes Malcolm X, who said, "You don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress."

There is a paragraph in Coates's book that I have read and reread. It is, to me, the clearest distillation of his worldview and its power. I do not think there is any doubt that this paragraph is true. I also do not think it is possible to live inside its truth and feel very hopeful:

Any fair consideration of the depth and width of enslavement tempts insanity. First conjure the crime — the generational destruction of human bodies — and all of its related offenses — domestic terrorism, poll taxes, mass incarceration. But then try to imagine being an individual born among the remnants of that crime, among the wronged, among the plundered, and feeling the gravity of that crime all around and seeing it in the sideways glances of the perpetrators of that crime and overhearing it in their whispers and watching these people, at best, denying their power to address this crime and, at worst, denying that any crime had occurred at all, even as their entire lives revolve around the fact of a robbery so large that it is written in our very names.

Though America may improve, its debts will never be repaid, its ideals will never be reached, the barest definition of justice will never be attained. It was, Coates says, his seminal article on reparations that crystallized this knowledge. "The reparations claim was so old, so transparently correct, so clearly the only solution, and yet it remained far outside the borders of American politics. To believe anything else was to believe that a robbery spanning generations could somehow be ameliorated while never acknowledging the scope of the crime and never making recompense. And yet that was the thinking that occupied mainstream American politics."

Here, again, you see Coates's insistence that mere progress cannot be the measure of hope. He had written an Atlantic cover story that set the entire country talking about reparations, that forced at least an intellectual reckoning with the idea and its unsparing logic. The article made him a celebrity, a “public intellectual." That’s progress, and for many, that would be hope. But no matter how sound his argument, reparations were no likelier to come to fruition the day after he published his article than the day before. Progress isn’t enough.

For Coates, progress can, and likely will, coexist with deep injustice and a society ordered around, and constantly rationalizing, its crimes. The villains will not be punished, and the victims, many of them dead, will never be made whole. This is not just American truth. It is a cosmic truth, seen across nations and across times. "Nothing in the record of human history argues for a divine morality, and a great deal argues against it," he writes. "What we know is that good people very often suffer terribly, while the perpetrators of horrific evil backstroke through all the pleasures of the world."

Last week, I interviewed Coates for my podcast. I asked him to describe the world in which justice had been done, in which equality had been achieved, in which hope was merited. "We have a 20-to-1 wealth gap," Coates replied. "Every nickel of wealth the average black family has, the average white family has a dollar. What is the world in which that wealth gap is closed? What happens? What makes that possible? What does that look like? What is the process?"

Even imagining that world, Coates makes ample space for tragedy. When he tries to describe the events that would erase America's wealth gap, that would see the end of white supremacy, his thoughts flicker to the French Revolution, to the executions and the terror. "It's very easy for me to see myself being contemporary with processes that might make for an equal world, more equality, and maybe the complete abolition of race as a construct, and being horrified by the process, maybe even attacking the process. I think these things don't tend to happen peacefully."

For Coates, even hope can be covered in blood.


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society
KEYWORDS: race; racewar; racialtensions
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To: Rurudyne

So it’s entirely self inflicted, correct? 80% divorce rate, 7% of population commits 55% of violent crimes, etc.


21 posted on 10/14/2017 8:26:24 AM PDT by Jan_Sobieski (Sanctification)
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To: Altura Ct.

So he’s hoping for a French Revolution that destroys white people.

He really just a hard core racist and pseudo intellectual. But the media tries to puff him up into some kind of intellectual giant.


22 posted on 10/14/2017 8:39:16 AM PDT by crusher2013
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To: Jan_Sobieski

No, not entirely; but, a big problem with the remainder is the view that being affected is being afflicted and THAT, as part of an ideology, is entirely self-inflicted.

When you accept some myth that whatever happens to someone of your description, past or present, is also somehow magically transferred to you, you do yourself little good and indeed will do yourself much harm (even if it doesn’t seem like it is presently harming you it’s really only a matter of time before it harms you or your posterity). This victimhood birthright taints everything, excludes any facts to the contrary and latches on to any “evidence”, no matter how spurious, to support itself.

Everyone is affected by stuff and it isn’t on the human level some grand conspiracy against them.


23 posted on 10/14/2017 8:45:20 AM PDT by Rurudyne (Standup Philosopher)
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To: Altura Ct.

>”Every nickel of wealth the average black family has, the average white family has a dollar. What is the world in which that wealth gap is closed? What happens? What makes that possible? What does that look like? What is the process?”<

Oh, I don’t know. Actually paying attention in class, then doing assignments, not spending every penny you earn on junk food, cigarettes and soda pop might be a help.


24 posted on 10/14/2017 8:51:49 AM PDT by Darnright (Never let a good crisis go to waste!)
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To: Altura Ct.
It speaks to the quasi-prophetic space Coates occupies in American life that his pessimism grates so deeply on so many, that the central struggle over his work is not its rightness, or its righteousness, but whether it leaves too little space for sunbeams.

Coates doesn't grate on me. He has no effect on me. Just another race hustler and a lousy writer to boot.

25 posted on 10/14/2017 9:09:44 AM PDT by Rummyfan (In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel.)
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To: Altura Ct.

I lost interest as soon as Coates was described as a “thinker”. He’s an insignificant polemicist stewing in racism and hatred. Clearly what he wanted out of an 0bama government was a dictator throwing down lightning bolts of retribution against anyone with a white skin. It’s the politics of small children or genocidal lunatics.


26 posted on 10/14/2017 9:12:01 AM PDT by Billthedrill
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To: Darnright

Values and Effort inequality?

Where is the movement to close the gap on those issues?


27 posted on 10/14/2017 9:12:29 AM PDT by crusher2013
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To: Altura Ct.

[Intro]
Uh, uh-huh, yeah
Uh, uh-huh, yeah
It’s all about the Benjamins, baby
It’s all about the Benjamins, baby

It’s not enough that we’re paying to raise their (feral) kids, they want a cash jackpot. Then it will never be enough.


28 posted on 10/14/2017 9:22:40 AM PDT by tumblindice (America's founding fathers: all armed conservatives)
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To: crusher2013
You should go to your pastor. Your pastor provides you hope. Your friends provide you hope.”

He has the answer. Maybe he doesn't realize it ... yet. Maybe we don't realize it ... yet.

Individual FReepers and individual lefities and individual centrists acting voluntarily in the private sector to provide jobs ... to acting voluntarily in the private sector to help other individuals prepare for and find those jobs... that is the solution.

The government is not the solution..not Obama, not Trump.

29 posted on 10/14/2017 9:35:08 AM PDT by spintreebob
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To: Altura Ct.

>>Ta-Nehisi Coates began his book tour for We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

It failed because of your Just Us approach to governing. You don’t win an election and tell half the people that their input is no longer valid in a Republic.

Your racism doomed the Obama agenda.


30 posted on 10/14/2017 9:47:08 AM PDT by Bryanw92 (Asking a pro athlete for political advice is like asking a cavalry horse for tactical advice.)
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To: spintreebob

The Government has a role.

To have policies that promote a healthy economy with lots of jobs. It also needs to enforce equality of opportunity and equality before the law.

But certain communities need to adopt better values. If they were to focus on family values and education, they would make more progress in 10 years than they have in the past 50.

Instead people like Coats promote hatred. They are more interested in pulling down white people than in improving their own communities.


31 posted on 10/14/2017 9:47:32 AM PDT by crusher2013
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To: Altura Ct.
never heard of it
32 posted on 10/14/2017 9:47:41 AM PDT by Chode (You have all of the resources you are going to have. Abandon your illusions and plan accordingly.)
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To: x1stcav

This ‘gap’ will never be closed, as long as:

1. They keep taking money from those who earn it, and count the person’s GROSS as how much money he/she makes, and use it to call the person “rich.”

2. They keep giving that money to those who don’t earn it, and DON’T count that money in their income, causing them to be continued to be called “poor.”

The “poor” can rake in $40,000 a year in welfare, and still be called poor because they didn’t earn it.


33 posted on 10/14/2017 9:51:08 AM PDT by I want the USA back (*slam is a violent political movement that hides behind the illusion of religion.)
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To: Altura Ct.

What he misses, is that the ENTIRETY of black progress in the United States, has been due to the good will of the white majority. The white majority has spent a HUGE amount to effort and money to try to achieve a successful black community.

What Obama, “Black Lives Matter”, and the rest have been doing over the last few decades, is to erode all that good will. They will not like it when they have finished the process.


34 posted on 10/14/2017 9:52:59 AM PDT by PapaBear3625 (Big governent is attractive to those who think that THEY will be in control of it.)
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To: Altura Ct.

Coates is a putrid racist who deifies blackness and villifies anything white.

He’s hired solely because of his race even though his writing style is more bombastic than focused and informative.

He owes every shred of his career to his race.


35 posted on 10/14/2017 10:08:01 AM PDT by Bogey78O (So far so good.)
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To: Altura Ct.
"We have a 20-to-1 wealth gap," Coates replied. "Every nickel of wealth the average black family has, the average white family has a dollar. What is the world in which that wealth gap is closed? What happens? What makes that possible? What does that look like? What is the process?"

So...you're looking to government to balance racial economics, Mr. Coates? How silly. No wonder you're depressed.

Regardless of what the race pimps are telling you, the primary problem blacks in America face is not whites in America.

In fact, what the race pimps are telling you is nothing but mental malware and your believing and following that malware IS the major source of ALL of your problems.

The economic part of your problem flows freely from that malware, is embarrassingly obvious and has NOTHING to do with race whatsoever, so why not listen to what simple economics has been screaming at you and the rest of US decade after decade.

Intact, two-parent families are far better off financially and also raise healthier, more mature children than single parents do.

Did you hear that, Mr. Coates? Children having children with one child attempting to raise those babies to be adults all by herself isn't working and no amount of Government is going to fix that for you.

Instead of listening to and then following those who divide family and nation, and they come in all colors, btw, all of US would do better for ourselves and our families by listening to our Pastors, just as you told Colbert, and following the advice and examples the Bible teaches everyone.

Without those solid, immovable Truths and Standards to rely upon, you're easily mislead into mental and emotional bondage, to then dance by the strings of your puppet masters whom you follow without question or suspicion.

At least in the old days, your ancestors knew who the slavemasters were.

Nowadays, they are your "friends" in high places who promise the same solutions year after year and hand out treats to those they've trained to speak and do their tricks.

Your modern slavemasters are the false prophets of your politics promising the false profits of progressivism.

They have purchased the shining city on the hill and built a tower of babble in its place, surrounded by an Alinsky moat of protection.

Look around you with eyes that see, Mr. Coates.

If you truly want to be free, then it's time to storm that malignant tower of malware and knock it down!

36 posted on 10/14/2017 10:22:18 AM PDT by GBA (A = 432)
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To: Altura Ct.
It's the "Uncle Tom" mentality that keep the black race down. Any black person who tries to do well in school or in a professional career is immediately labeled an "Uncle Tom" and shunned by the black community at large.

Therefore, intense peer pressure is brought to bear to keep the blacks down. Not by white people but from their fellow blacks!

Only rappers and athletes are the accepted routes out of the ghetto. Otherwise, blacks are ostracized by their own. It's a tragedy. Until that changes, their lot will never improve.

Compare their plight to Asians, who were also heavily discriminated against when they came to this country. But they educated themselves, worked hard, and now they are, as a race, equal and even superior to whites in many ways. They did not allow themselves to be victims who needed "reparations" and "affirmative action." They went out there and obtained knowledge and wealth for themselves, without the help of the white man, and on their own terms.

37 posted on 10/14/2017 10:30:24 AM PDT by SamAdams76
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To: Altura Ct.

Apparently the Black Community’s 74% illegitimacy rate has nothing to do with any of these problems, so let’s just keep redistributing wealth until everyone in Funkytown has a free Escalade.


38 posted on 10/14/2017 10:36:14 AM PDT by Hat-Trick (Do you trust a government that cannot trust you with guns?)
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To: Altura Ct.
Help! I need a safe space from leftist black people!! I am offended!

39 posted on 10/14/2017 11:19:32 AM PDT by Right Wing Assault (Kill: NFL, NBA, BLM, CAIR, Hollywood, Antifa, SPLC, CNN, ESPN, NPR, TWITTER, FACEBOOK)
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To: x1stcav

Teensy is a moron among morons. What a despicable piece of filth.


40 posted on 10/14/2017 11:53:30 AM PDT by Luke21
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