D. Watkins obviously likes dramatic language, but why was this "the most pointless feud ever"?
West and Coates are staking out 2 different positions which really are in a major conflict. I don't read either enough to be sure I'm saying this correctly, but West seems to want a more general left-wing critique and Coates wants to impose a specifically racial template. Instead of talking about which of 2 prominent men "won" on a particular occasion of verbal aggression, maybe the subject should be whether racial analysis or economic analysis should predominate. But it's easy to see why we the people of the internet are more interested in talking about a hot fight between 2 big men.
D. Watkins says West and Coates "aren’t my leaders" and "their work is too complex for the reading level of many of the adults I work with." I kind of think West and Coates are writing in a style that's too complex for just about everybody (though many people like the feeling of themselves reading West and Coates). But who does D. Watkins work with?
Here's his profile at Salon:
D. Watkins is an Editor at Large for Salon. He is also a professor at the University of Baltimore and founder of the BMORE Writers Project. Watkins is the author of the New York Times best-sellers “The Beast Side: Living (and Dying) While Black in America” and "The Cook Up: A Crack Rock Memoir."So Watkins may think he's really the one who deserves the "most important" title. I'm just going to guess that his books are more readable and reality-based.
Watkins concludes:
There’s no need for West to try to ether Coates. He didn’t create the oppressive systems that hinder people of color; he just makes money talking about them. The only thing Coates may be guilty of is taking liberal money out of West’s pockets, and if that’s the real issue, Dr. West, write about that.Sounds good to me. And now I can see why Watkins is calling it "the most pointless feud ever." I don't know if deep down Watkins is envious of West and Coates, who've received so much money and adulation in the enterprise of winning recognition as the most important black intellectual. But Watkins is daring to be anti-intellectual: create some jobs, and go and help some real people.
To the people who dream of being the leader of the black race or having a monopoly on the extremely complex black experience: Put your money where you mouth is it, create some jobs, and go and help some real people.
पोस्ट्स
१०० टिप्पण्या:
I’m with the guy who doesn’t have a hyphen in his first name.
Meh a tale full of sound and fury between two idiots signifying nothing. Let the two of them chew on each other.
Stop trying to make ether happen.
"but why was this 'the most pointless feud ever'?"
No, that feud took place sometime in the '90s at an apartment on the West Side. Two incredibly stoned females stood for more than an hour in front of some kind of plant arguing about the color of its leaves. I can't remember which one won, or the winning color.
Still, the West-Coates dispute probably fits within the mode.
That they could both lose their arguments at the same time.
It's just as well that Coates' Twitter account was ethered. He wrote a Twitter thread that was 31-tweets long. Coates does not understand Twitter as a genre.
What Ignorance is Bliss said. Verbing Nouns Sucks.
Coates' prose is anything but ethereal. It is chloroform.
It's pointless because no one outside the left wing bubble cares in the least.
I kind of think West and Coates are writing in a style that's too complex for just about everybody.
That's a very polite way of putting it.
West tried to ether Coates but did not succeed.
However, Coates did ether his own Twitter account.
The use of ether as a verb is beginning to grow on me.
Leading black intellectual in the self-defeating wing.
I don't care about ether of them.
Jesse Lee Peterson is the leading black intellectual in the not-self-defeating wing.
Does either one ever write about anything other than how horrible it is to be black?
Twitter is where adults can go to be a child again.
Or is it nether of them?
The most important black intellectual is not BO?
It seems to me that to ether someone means to silence him for only a short time -- on the scale of an hour or so.
That is a semantic problem in this context, where Watkins seems to want to communicate that West tried to silence Coates for a much longer time -- for at least several weeks.
the most important black intellectual
That sounds so racist.
"It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Coates what was going on with Cornel West’s piece in the Guardian criticizing him
West is a showman, a BS artist, and West calling out Coates what, in the world of wrestling, is a “work.” It’s just a game: West gets his name in the papers and clings to Coates a bit by saying he’s not man enough (“a neo-liberal”) and Coates is supposed to answer this feud by listing his credentials and pretending to be mad back.
What you’re not supposed to do is what Coates did: get your feelings hurt and quit Twitter.
Coates is a con-man, West is a con-man. You need each other.
This kind of showbiz/wrestling dynamic is something Trump instinctively gets, calling his opponents names and slandering them and then asking them to work the phones for his campaign."
http://www.unz.com/isteve/ta-nehisi-coates-hara-kiris-off-twitter/
and these people complain about us being racist?
Coates has been living in France.
Maybe in France, writing 31-tweet threads on Twitter is something that is commonly done.
George Orwell - One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.
West and Coates "aren’t my leaders" and "their work is too complex for the reading level of many of the adults I work with."
I think what he's saying, without saying it, is that their audience is primarily white people.
The only thing Coates may be guilty of is taking liberal money out of West’s pockets
West and Coates are like those Black Panthers who were invited to that cocktail party to spice things up.
Except, you know, word spice instead of gun spice. This isn't the 60's any more!
But it's unseemly and kinda fucked up when the Panthers start fighting each other at the cocktail party. "You Negros are fucking up our party!" Which is only funny if yet another Black Panther says it. Otherwise, it's totally racist.
"Bitch, you don't even have an afro. Nobody has an afro like mine!"
Normally I would think "ether" was a typo for other. However when viewing SJW conversations, one can never be sure. There seems to be a tendency to make up words and use others in weird and unprecedented contexts. Using "other" as a verb is a good example, though I have seen it before.
I am not going to read the article but perhaps someone can explain what ether means in this context.
John Henry
Noted that the think-fascist left leave out much smarter persons of color on the "right".
Yesterday we should have been commenting about Charles Cook trying to ether Jennifer Ruben and about David Frum trying to ether Cook.
Re: complex writing styles
"If you cannot explain something to your grandmother, you don't really understand it"
- Albert Einstein (paraphrased)
the most important black intellectual?
I'd go with Thomas Sowell.
Most important is entirely subjective. So I choose neither the old communist nor the thin-skinned racist.
Thomas Sowell gets my vote for the most important living black intellectual.
I think it all comes down to a unpleasant sense of inferiority. Either that is warranted, or it is not. If it is warranted, then the Ta'Nehisi Coates of the world should be grateful that white people have been as nice as they have been in recent times. Historically, we have been much, much meaner. But if the sense of inferiority is not warranted, then it is time to quit worrying about what white people think and do, and start worrying about living happy, productive lives NOT on the government dole. Of course, repatriation to an African majority country is also an option, but I don't see any demands for that these days.
I wanted to see the 31 deleted tweets. Then I found them using Google cache and could have copied them, but it was all too boring, mostly Coates excerpting text from his book in an effort to answer various criticisms West had made. It was more or less: You said I didn't say X, but here's a place where I said X.
I thought Coates had lost his temper and said things that embarrassed him, which would have been interesting to read. But it was just earnest self-quoting, on and on. Maybe Coates is terrified of being boring.
Maybe West could become cool again in Prog circles if he countered Ta-Nehisi's hyphen with a an even more au courant Teh Cornel. That'll etherize him good.
To the people who dream of being the leader of the black race or having a monopoly on the extremely complex black experience: Put your money where you mouth is it, create some jobs, and go and help some real people.
"Create some jobs." That's pretty damn funny.
Ann Althouse said...Maybe Coates is terrified of being boring.
If so it's a newly-acquired fear! Given, of course, that one correctly finds florid, overwrought prose eye-rollingly boring.
Where is Dr. Thomas Sowell when you really need him?
West isn’t entirely comfortable with being defined as a victim, at least not 24/7. Coates, on the other hand, embraces his victimhood with a religious fervor.
It’ll be interesting to see which falls first to the sexual harassment hysteria. My money’s on West just because he’s more expendable to White Progs.
D. Watkins obviously likes dramatic language, but why was this "the most pointless feud ever"?
Because it splits allies in the war against the real enemy.
Shame that blacks self-segregate themselves in the "black intellectual" homeland. Why not play with all the intellectuals?
I believe the first time I was exposed to black observers calling out Coates was on this blog, with John McWhorter and Glenn Loury on Bloggingheads.
(Interesting...if you Google John McWhorter the second suggestion is "John McWhorter wife.")
to ether (see Definition 3), Urban Dictionary:
Here
I've never read either of them, but I'm amused by the first name.
Mark Twain mentioned a guy who changed his name from Dunlap to D'un Lap, poking fun at his pretension and ego. I had no idea that this is a thing people actually did.
Slow week for sex scandals. We have to settle for this teacupped tizzy for titillation. An example of non erotic asphyxiation......The argument isn't about who's the most important black intellectual but who's the most black important intellectual........Question: Why do you only find black heroes of implacable courage, quiet dignity, and sheer nobility in the context of white oppression, Who's the Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela of Kenya, Rwanda, the Congo, and Uganda? Robert Mugabe had a vogue as that kind of hero, but no so much anymore. White oppression seems to bring out the nobility in black leaders. Unlimited power less so.
There’s no need for West to try to ether Coates. He didn’t create the oppressive systems that hinder people of color; he just makes money talking about them. The only thing Coates may be guilty of is taking liberal money out of West’s pockets, and if that’s the real issue, Dr. West, write about that.
Ahh, the next Jesse Jackson.
It's about the Benjamins.
As to create Jobs, I'm still surprised at the big money in Hollywood not creating their own production company/studio.
but West seems to want a more general left-wing critique and Coates wants to impose a specifically racial template.
West, the Marxist, versus Coates, the post-Marxist.
Ah, the question of the month: "who be more black? I be more black"
"To the people who dream of being the leader of the black race or having a monopoly on the extremely complex black experience: Put your money where you mouth is it, create some jobs, and go and help some real people."
Exactly what my favorite president is doing. Trump will do more for black america than has been done since 1980.
I wouldn't expect black america to get it, because they really seem way too brainwashed to think very well, but he will still do it.
Both so-called intellectuals are BS artists and racists dependent upon White Liberal guilt and black racial prejudice.
I am not going to read the article but perhaps someone can explain what ether means in this context.
I also didn't read the article -- but I assume 'to ether' means to make something vanish away, as into radio waves that propagate away into nothingness. 'The ether' was used in the distant past to refer to electromagnetic waves, after all.
I don't think it means ether as the chloroform-like anesthetic. So the one guy isn't trying to render the other unconscious.
(Conflicting edits!)
Battle of the Intellectual Giants (or what passes for such these days).
Ethering is like ghosting. Except in reverse. I think.
This is a classical battle between a communist and a national-socialist. One believe in the class warfare, the other in the race war. Stay tuned.
I guess I'm either not woke enough or not non-white enough to know what "to ether" means. Never seen it verbed before.
Sounds to like the whole crowd was on ether!
Ah! Devil ether!
One wonders why these two are considered the most important black intellectuals, and not say, Clarence Thomas, who actually has the ability to significant impact on life in the US.
Weird to say that Coates is "complex."
What's complex about writing a Black Panther comic book?
I had to go looking for a definition. This one from Urban Dictionary seemed spot on:
ether
it means to humiliate someone verbally, or to "dis them", but to a greater extent. it ends all "insult-fests"
if jon and mike are goin back and forth with insults, then all of a sudden jon insults mike so bad that he cannot think of an insult of equal or greater viciousness and has to give up the battle, jon could be said to have ethered mike
by RealFerrari June 02, 2005
"'The ether' was used in the distant past to refer to electromagnetic waves, after all.
Actually, it was the medium through which EM radiation was assumed to propagate. Its nonexistence was proven by the Michelson–Morley experiment.
I did not realize that the SNL skit called "The Bubble" had white people reading Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Anyway, that hurt his feelings.
The black people in Harlem, in West Baltimore, in the south-side of Chicago, and in Washington, DC, who inspired that book, who empowered that book- they’re erased. They have no meaning for the interpretation of the book and what matters is white people reading the book.
(I think erased is like ethering. But not like ghosting).
Anyway, when one white girl found out that by reading and commenting on Ta-Nehisi Coates, she was erasing black people, she kind of had a white girl existential crisis.
I wont lie, my initial instinct was to feel hurt. I was concerned that my motives had been misconstrued. I fully admit to living in “the bubble.” It’s part and parcel of being raised white in this country. I want people to know I’m not a racist, that I absolutely abhor Donald Trump’s message of hate and fear… so I want to make sure you know I’m trying. I’m reading the right books. I’m following the right social justice warriors on Twitter.
I think she would ghost herself if she could!
And then Coates gets embarrassed in public.
You have white fans, ha ha ha!
When did these two pedestrian race-hustlers become intellectuals?
Spike Lee's great Do the Right Thing culminates with opposing quotations from Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. West and Coates are fighting the same fight.
People like Coates are going to rekindle White identity politics, and I don't think they'll like the results.
Spike Lee's great Do the Right Thing culminates with opposing quotations from Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. West and Coates are fighting the same fight.
The fight goes back to the very beginning of the Civil Rights movement with Washington V Du Bois.
Good editorial in NYT here.
There were distinct advantages to black atheism, to a disbelief in dreams and moral appeal.
you reject God
you reject Christ
you reject a hope for a better future
you reject morality
you reject spirituality
and what is left is an obsession with pigment
In liberal USA, Coates is worshipped like an angel. He has Genius Award. Pulitzer. Unlimited support at the Atlantic. I tried to get a ticket to his book talk. I was told: Good luck! He won't even sign books. He is the Son of God. Who is West?
Where is Dr. Thomas Sowell when you really need him?
Is there a better indication of public lack of discernment that West is considered "the most important living black intellectual" and not, say, Thomas Sowell or Walter E. Williams?
"West and Coates are staking out 2 different positions which really are in a major conflict."
Bullshit. West and Coates are two cheapjack race hustlers. The only point they differ on is whose pocket the money should end up in.
Actually, I may be selling Coates short;
“The history is what the history is. And it is disrespectful, to white people, to soften the history.”
Damn straight. We invented civilization, you can't even run the ones we gave you.
So, diversity is a progressive condition. One step forward, two steps backward.
Still, it's not a wicked solution like selective-child or recycled-child, unless you believe that judging people by the "color of their skin" is religiously/morally impaired.
Did Thomas Sowell die?
He fancies himself a combination of Baldwin and fanon a fatuous fool.
Except, you know, word spice instead of gun spice.
On buckets of word salad.
I'm pretty sure the verb "Ether" is derived from a well known Rap feud song. Per Wikipedia:
"Ether" is a song by hip hop recording artist Nas, from his 2001 album Stillmatic. The song was a response to Jay-Z's "Takeover", a diss track directed towards Nas and Prodigy which appears on Jay-Z's album The Blueprint, during the Jay-Z vs. Nas and Prodigy feud. Nas named the song Ether because "I was told a long time ago, ghosts and spirits don't like the fumes from ether, and I just wanted to affect him with my weapon and get to his soul".
Isn't there an old quote about academic politics being nasty because very little is at stake?
The piece Saint Croix links nails it. Coates is a photographic negative of a white supremacist:
“I have spent the past six months poring over the literature of European and American white nationalism, in the process interviewing noxious identitarians like the alt-right founder Richard Spencer. The most shocking aspect of Mr. Coates’s wording here is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race — specifically the specialness of whiteness — that white supremacist thinkers cherish.
“This, more than anything, is what is so unsettling about Mr. Coates’s recent writing and the tenor of the leftist ‘woke’ discourse he epitomizes. Though it is not at all morally equivalent, it is nonetheless in sync with the toxic premises of white supremacism. Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural.
“This summer, I spent an hour on the phone with Richard Spencer. It was an exchange that left me feeling physically sickened. Toward the end of the interview, he said one thing that I still think about often. He referred to the all-encompassing sense of white power so many liberals now also attribute to whiteness as a profound opportunity. ‘This is the photographic negative of a white supremacist,’ he told me gleefully. ‘This is why I’m actually very confident, because maybe those leftists will be the easiest ones to flip.’”
Blogger Bay Area Guy said...
Where is Dr. Thomas Sowell when you really need him?
12/20/17, 8:55 AM
I believe Dr. Sowell retired sometime last year, at the age of 86.
@Earnest Prole: ‘This is why I’m actually very confident, because maybe those leftists will be the easiest ones to flip.’
They were so in the 20s, 30s and 40s. Exhibit A: Mussolini. Exhibit B: the Sturmabteilung. Whether Black or Red, they're both socialists and aren't different from each other in much.
The fight goes back to the very beginning of the Civil Rights movement with Washington V Du Bois.
And the good guy lost.
I can't read Tennessee Coates. It's mostly gibberish, surrounding the twin assertions that slavery was evil and the US should pay reparations.
I prefer Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. John McWhorter and Glen Lowrie are good, but they are too deferential to Tennessee.
The most important living black intellectual is LeBron James.
Isn't there an old quote about academic politics being nasty because very little is at stake?
On the contrary, I suspect both men charge quite a bit on the college speaking circuit. West is upset with Coates because he's competition.
Folks really are not doing Thomas Sowell, Walter E. Williams, or themselves any favors by listing them as most important black intellectuals. Both of them are rather ancient. Which lends a rather strong odor of Token to mentioning them. You may as well list the kid Token Black from South Park.
>Both of them are rather ancient.
Yeah, old people are stupid.
Anyone else here wondering why Ta-Nehisi is pronounced "Ta-Nehasi"? I am getting something of a secret-handshake vibe about this: If you're in the know, you pronounce it "right." As in, Ralph Vaughan Williams' first name is actually "Rafe," if you know. And at a more obscure level, the Shostakovich scholar Feofanov likes the accent on the second syllable, though by ordinary Russian pronunciation standards it should be on the third.
There's sort of an echo of this in Cornel West's name. Obviously he didn't name himself, and it's hardly his fault that so many people call him "Cornell." Still ...
Thirding (fourthing? fifthing?) recommendations for Sowell. He turned out some too-rapid books in the past (I remember The Vision of the Anointed, a good idea that might have become an actual good book with another six months to sit on it), but he's done a stream of books over several decades that make a consistent case. I think my favorite of those I have read is Preferential Policies, where he early on makes some eye-opening claims, as that South African Apartheid was opposed by the mining companies but supported by the (white) public, and the front-and-back segregated bus lines in the US likewise opposed by the lines themselves, but supported by the public. In both cases, the people operating for profit wanted the best workers for the least money, while the rest of the public wanted to shove it to "dem darkies."
Folks really are not doing Thomas Sowell, Walter E. Williams, or themselves any favors by listing them as most important black intellectuals. Both of them are rather ancient. Which lends a rather strong odor of Token to mentioning them.
How does that make sense? Have either of the gentlemen in question lost their mental faculties? We're talking about intellectuals here, not athletes.
I should point out West's last book came out in 2014, and Williams's last was in 2015.
And West left Harvard (I think it was Harvard; might have been Yale) for Princeton after mild suggestions that he might raise his academic work beyond a rap album and a graphic novel or two in the previous decade.
What was West's last work? And did it actually have more words than pictures? (I'm joking, but only a little. I was introduced to West by a visiting professor at UC/Berkeley, a good 25 years ago, who gave us an interview with him on philosophy -- he was then, apparently, a rather complicated sort of pragmatist -- and expected us all to be in awe. I was in a sort of awe at his truly fantastic bullshittry, but that was about it, and my opinion hasn't changed as he's gotten more "populist" [but not in the badsense!] and so forth.)
Coates, OTOH, is not at all hard to read, except in the sense that migraines may ensue. I mean, the Atlantic Monthly passes for a mass-market magazine, and Coates is a regular contributor. West would not sully himself with such filth, preferring the more obscure Princeton journals.
How does that make sense? Have either of the gentlemen in question lost their mental faculties? We're talking about intellectuals here, not athletes.
Coates is young(ish) (eeek, born 1975!), but West is definitely not; like I said, I was getting dispatches from him as A Distinguished Scholar in the early 90s. (Ah, yes, born 1953; he has 14 years on me, and I'm 50 myself.) Sowell is born 1930, a generation before. I think McWhorter is younger -- yes, nearly as young as I.
I'm sorry but Thomas Sowell is such a better black intellectual than either of these two idiots that I lack even a proper frame of discourse to describe it. Of course, Sowell does not blame all evil on white devils so I guess he is disqualified.
To perhaps oversimplify it: West is an self-admitted Marxist so he views economics/class/wealth as the dividing line, as the cause of misery in America. Coates is a racialist who, in contrast to West, substitutes race for class and economics and views race - the white race - as the cause of misery in America.
West thinks if we get rid of the rich, redistribute wealth, share it then the misery of people of color (including poor whites) will disappear. Coates also wants a redistribution of wealth - reparations - but obviously can't get rid of white people although I think he would like to.
Why do black intellectuals always identify as black? Shouldn't the character of their argument carry the day?
OK.....intellectual was an overstatement.
Wow! Although I have no proof, blogger just ate my comment.
Is our Hostess moderating comments??
Which black community are they talking about? Do they represent the middle class suburban blacks, the church going Baptists community, or just the inner city one? And what about those "African Americans" who are actually African immigrants or Somalis? And what about Haitian or Hispanics who are black?
then you have that dirty little secret: interracial marriage..
I guess I should read their writing, but I have a life...
So West wants a class war and Coates wants a race war.
I say they deserve each other.
To quote one of my favorite dead white guys:
It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
There's moderation for posts that are more than a day old.
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