"[CBS journalist Tony] Dokoupil met for an hour with members of the CBS News standards and practices team and the in-house Race and Culture Unit..."

"... which advises on 'context, tone and intention' of news programming. The conversation focused on Mr. Dokoupil’s tone of voice, phrasing and body language during his interview with [Ta-NeHisi] Coates.... Executives who discussed the interview on Monday’s call had asked staff members to keep their remarks confidential. But their comments were reported within hours by Puck, and The Free Press, the news and opinion site run by Bari Weiss, published audio recordings of the meeting.... Jan Crawford, the chief legal correspondent at CBS News, spoke up later on the call to say she did not understand why Mr. Dokoupil’s questions had not met editorial standards. 'When someone comes on our air with a one-sided account of a very complex situation, as Coates himself acknowledges that he has, it’s my understanding that as journalists we are obligated to challenge that worldview so that our viewers can have that access to the truth or a fuller account,' Ms. Crawford said. 'To me, that is what Tony did.' Ms. Crawford said she was confused as to how CBS correspondents should proceed. 'What is the objective standard for the rest of us when we are doing our own interviews?' she asked."

From "CBS Rebukes Anchor Over Tense Interview With Ta-Nehisi Coates/Executives said the interview, conducted by the morning show anchor Tony Dokoupil, had fallen short of network editorial standards" (NYT). You can see video of Dokoupil questioning Coates here.

"But of all the backward ass campaign cliches to be visited upon the American public, none is more pernicious than 'beer track/wine track.'"

"What an utter abuse of metaphor. Look, I'm a liberal who lives in Manhattan. In my fridge-right now---you can find a six of Red Hook. I love beer, and instantly distrust anyone who doesn't. In fact, in college, I refused to date any girl who didn't drink beer. None of that Midori Melon and a salad bullshit for me; Nothing says sexy like a Sam Adams and chicken wings. I don't think I have a single friend (who isn't a recovering alcoholic) who doesn't like beer. Most of them drink wine too, but the official drink of young Manhattan liberals is beer, no question. Moreover, I detect a hint of racism here. This false analogy leaves no place for the many tribes of black voters--'The Hennessey Track,' 'The Curvosier [sic] Track,' 'The MGD Track.' Once again the media conspires to keep black folks out...."

Wrote Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2008 (in The Atlantic). 

I ended up there after reading this new article at Politico, "Trump’s beer track advantage over Ron DeSantis":

"The past year has been very good to Howard University. One of its alumna — Kamala D. Harris — ascended to the vice presidency.... And last week, the university scored a coup..."

"... announcing Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates as new faculty.... Long-standing concerns over the way the school treats survivors of sexual assault were put on display when College of Fine Arts dean and actress Phylicia Rashad — another recent high-profile hire — shared her support for 'The Cosby Show' co-star Bill Cosby after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court vacated his sexual assault conviction.... The backlash — from students and others outside the Howard community — was swift. The issue was personal for Aliya J’mari, a 2016 graduate who said she had trouble getting help from school officials when a professor physically assaulted her during her senior year.... 'I just felt a little sad for the students that are at Howard now that are going to be up under her leadership,' J’mari said...."

Writes Lauren Lumpkin in "Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates appointments signal new era for Howard University/The recent growth at Howard University comes a few years after students waged a nine-day protest over conditions at the school and called for their president’s resignation" (WaPo). 

The highest-rated comment over there is: "As long as Howard continues to focus on celebrity over intellect, and to foster the concept of racial segregation for its student body, the university is doomed to a destiny of mediocrity. As proof, take a look at the SAT scores of incoming freshman at Howard versus the Ivy League schools — no comparison."

"It’s not my job to heal the University of North Carolina. That’s the job of the people in power who created the situation in the first place."

Says Nikole Hannah-Jones, quoted in "Nikole Hannah-Jones to join Howard faculty after UNC tenure controversy/Author Ta-Nehisi Coates is also set to join the faculty of Howard, a historically Black university in the nation’s capital" (WaPo). 

Hannah-Jones will also found a Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard. She said it will aim to train journalism students from historically Black schools to “accurately and urgently [cover] the challenges of our democracy with a clarity, skepticism, rigor and historical dexterity that is too often missing from today’s journalism.”

Meanwhile, Coates "will be a writer-in-residence in the university’s College of Arts and Sciences, and hold the Sterling Brown chair in the English department." We're told he "also has plans to finish his bachelor’s degree, which he started at Howard in 1993."

"I'm trying to make it into something playful — It shocked me at first," said Jordan Peterson, about seeing himself adapted into a super villain, Red Skull.

 

"I've been called a Nazi before. It's not pleasant.  This is one step beyond that. Nazi, apparently, isn't enough. I have to be a magical super-Nazi." 

The video is from April 8th. Here are tweets from April 6th, showing the way the Ta-Nehisi Coates comic book satirizes Peterson:

Why aren't people talking about the new Jordan Peterson book? It came out 4 days ago, and I'm only just noticing it now.

Here's the book: "Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life." 

I only noticed it just now because I was having an in-person conversation that caused me to need to check the exact reason why Toni Morrison called Bill Clinton "the first black President" and I landed on "It Was No Compliment to Call Bill Clinton 'The First Black President.'" 

That was in The Atlantic. I hadn't stopped by The Atlantic in a long time, but while I was there, I noticed "What Happened to Jordan Peterson?/Adored guru and reviled provocateur, he dropped out of sight. Now the irresistible ordeal of modern cultural celebrity has brought him back." 

Reading that, I was surprised to see that Peterson was "back" in the sense that he'd published a new book. The publication date was March 2d. You'd think I'd have tripped across that information by now. 

I've put the book in my Kindle, and I'll get back to you about it.

For now, let's read a little of this Atlantic piece, which is — you can't tell from the headline — a book review. It's by Helen Lewis:

After nearly 400 pages, we learn that married people should have sex at least once a week, that heat and pressure turn coal into diamonds, that having a social life is good for your mental health, and that, for a man in his 50s, Peterson knows a surprising amount about Quidditch....

Peterson writes an entire chapter against ideologies—feminism, anti-capitalism, environmentalism, basically anything ending in ism—declaring that life is too complex to be described by such intellectual frameworks. Funny story: There’s an academic movement devoted to skepticism of grand historical narratives. It’s called … postmodernism.

That chapter concludes by advising readers to put their own lives in order before trying to change the world. This is not only a rehash of one of the previous 12 rules—“Clean up your bedroom,” he writes, because fans love it when you play the hits—but also ferocious chutzpah coming from a man who was on a lecture tour well after he should have gone to rehab.

The Peterson of Beyond Order, that preacher of personal responsibility, dances around the question of whether his own behavior might have contributed to his breakdown. Was it really wise to agree to all those brutal interviews, drag himself to all those international speaking events, send all those tweets that set the internet on fire?

Like a rock star spiraling into burnout, he was consumed by the pyramid scheme of fame, parceling himself out, faster and faster, to everyone who wanted a piece. Perhaps he didn’t want to let people down, and he loved to feel needed. Perhaps he enjoyed having an online army glorying in his triumphs and pursuing his enemies.

In our frenzied media culture, can a hero ever return home victorious and resume his normal life, or does the lure of another adventure, another dragon to slay, another “lib” to “own” always call out to him? Either way, he gazed into the culture-war abyss, and the abyss stared right back at him. He is every one of us who couldn’t resist that pointless Facebook argument, who felt the sugar rush of the self-righteous Twitter dunk, who exulted in the defeat of an opposing political tribe, or even an adjacent portion of our own.... 

"All that has happened is there was a peaceful transition of power from Trump to a career politician, in Joe Biden, who has done far more violence than Trump has..."

"... because he’s been … a politician for decades. We didn’t topple anything. All we did was replace one figurehead with another, we’ve done nothing about the institution. It’s not about the leader, it’s about the institutions and the structures and the systems of capitalism and white supremacy that we reside under that are the main forces of domination here."

Said Joshua Briond, of the Black Alliance for Peace and co-host of the Millennials Are Killing Capitalism podcast, quoted in "Organizers: Nothing is fundamentally changed under Biden-Harris While many are taking 'joy' in the new Biden-Harris administration, grassroots organizers remain laser-focused on dismantling white supremacy" (NBC News).

NBC also copies this quote from an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates: "Trumpism did not begin with Trump. ... To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but it is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular." NBC goes on to summarize what Coates wrote next: "He added that presidents before Trump 'carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman.'" 

I clicked through to Coates's January 21st article (it's in the Atlantic), and I can see why NBC shied away from quoting the full sentence. It's: "But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies."

"Eldritch" is a Scottish word that means — according to the OED — "Weird, ghostly, unnatural, frightful, hideous." I had to look it up, though it sounds familiar, because of the book title, "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch."

On Mars, the harsh climate could make any colonist turn to drugs to escape a dead-end existence. Especially when the drug is Can-D, which translates its users into the idyllic world of a Barbie-esque character named Perky Pat. When the mysterious Palmer Eldritch arrives with a new drug called Chew-Z, he offers a more addictive experience, one that might bring the user closer to God. But in a world where everyone is tripping, no promises can be taken at face value.

That world where everyone is tripping might make more sense than Coates's notion of Trump's cracked-open glowing amulet. But Briond's position is easy to understand, and I give it my "Biden attacked from the left" tag.

"Respectfully, it's an odd thing to say that Coates's debut is essentially long and shallow, but compare him to some of the most masterful storytellers in the canon."

"I understand it's challenging in this day in age to just say one or the other for fear of being cancelled, but you don't need to bring in Octavia Butler or Toni Morrison in order to do so. None of the sentences highlighted here suggest the tonality of any of the writers you've compared his debut to, either, except for Stephen King — even then, the most comparable thing seems to be pace and plot, not the shape or substance of the novel."

That's the top-rated comment at the NYT review of "The Water Dancer," the first novel by the high-profile nonfiction writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. I can see how the unsung fiction-writers of the world can be very easily irked when somebody who's already successful for some other reason suddenly presents himself as a novelist.

The review is by Dwight Garner — I don't have a problem with the name Garner — and I was looking at the NYT list of his other reviews and I see he reviewed a novel that I happen to have just finished reading: "With ‘Doxology,’ Nell Zink Delivers Her Most Ambitious and Expansive Novel Yet." As in the "Water Dancer" review, Garner names a lot of other writers, and unlike the "Water Dancer" review, this review has some solid quotes from the author to prove the praise is soundly based on artistic merit:

"Afro-pessimism and its treatment of withdrawal as transcendence is no less pleasing to white supremacy than Booker T. Washington’s strategic retreat into self-help."

"Afro-pessimism threatens no one, and white audiences confuse having been chastised with learning... My father used to say that integration had little to do with sitting next to white people and everything to do with black people gaining access to better neighborhoods, decent schools, their share. Life for blacks was not what it should be, but he saw that as a reason to keep on, not check out. I had no idea how much better things were than they had been when he was my age, he said.... A couple of decades later I was resenting my father speaking of my expatriate life as a black literary tradition, because I understood him to be saying that I wasn’t doing anything new and, by the way, there was no such thing as getting away from being black, or what others might pretend that meant. Black life is about the group, and even if we tell ourselves that we don’t care anymore that America glorifies the individual in order to disguise what is really happening, this remains a fundamental paradox in the organization of everyday life for a black person. Your head is not a safe space."

From "The Afro-Pessimist Temptation" by Darryl Pinckney in the New York Review of Books, reviewing "We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy" by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Andrew Sullivan finds himself "instinctually siding with the independent artist" like Kanye West...

"... perhaps because I’ve had to fight for my own individuality apart from my own various identities, most of my life," writes Andrew Sullivan in  "Kanye West and the Question of Freedom."

It wasn’t easy being the first openly gay editor of anything in Washington when I was in my 20s. But it was harder still to be someone not defined entirely by my group, to be a dissident within it, a pariah to many, even an oxymoron, because of my politics or my faith....

I’m not whining about this experience, just explaining why I tend to side reflexively with the individual when he is told he isn’t legit by the group. In that intimidating atmosphere, I’m with the dissenter, the loner, and the outlier. I’m with the undocumented, the dude who has had his group credentials taken away.

And so I bristle at Ta-Nehisi’s view that West cannot be a truly black musician and a Trump admirer, based on the logic that the gift of black music 'can never wholly belong to a singular artist, free of expectation and scrutiny, because the gift is no more solely theirs than the suffering that produced it …What Kanye West seeks is what Michael Jackson sought — liberation from the dictates of that we.'

I bristle because, of course, Coates is not merely subjecting West to 'expectation and scrutiny' which should apply to anyone and to which no one should object; he is subjecting West to anathematization, to expulsion from the ranks. In fact, Coates reserves the worst adjective he can think of to describe West, the most othering and damning binary word he can muster: white.... Coates denounces West for seeking something called 'white freedom'....

I even feel something similar in a different way as a gay man in a straight world, where the general culture is not designed for me, and the architecture of a full civic life was once denied me. But that my own freedom was harder to achieve doesn’t make it any less precious, or sacrosanct. I’d argue it actually makes it more vivid, more real, than it might be for someone who never questioned it. And I am never going to concede it to 'straightness,' the way Coates does to 'whiteness.' As an individual, I seek my own freedom, period....

There is no gay freedom or straight freedom, no black freedom or white freedom; merely freedom, a common dream, a universalizing, individual experience. 'Liberation from the dictates of the we' is everyone’s birthright in America... A free artist owes nothing to anyone, especially his own tribe."

Sullivan focused on the same material in Coates's essay that I wrote about a few days ago: "I had to read it out loud to try to absorb the part where we can understand why West's idea of freedom is specifically white. It didn't work. Maybe because I'm white and that's making me think that complete freedom is every human being's birthright and that it would be racist to tell black people to adhere to a prescribed black form of freedom."

I'm interested in Sullivan's attention to the idea of the artist, even as he speaks of identifying with Kanye and "the independent artist." I don't think Sullivan regards himself as an artist, and I don't know about Ta-Nehisi Coates, but I suspect that Coates does see himself as an artist — as a literary genius of some sort. Certainly Coates hears himself spoken of that way, and his prose style — to my eye — reflects that self-image. Coates has made race his template, his brutally repetitive message. His artistic freedom has moved him to continually say that black people are not free. He's really not free to say anything else, is he? So he must say it about other artists, even as those other artists claim their freedom to say whatever they want too. Coates can only describe a prison. He can't put anyone else in it. He can only invite them to perceive the prison and themselves inside it.

Obamalove collides with Trump derangement syndrome.

I love this interchange in the comments to "Kanye West rebuked by Ta-Nehisi Coates in biting essay called ‘I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye’" (WaPo)(click to enlarge):

Careful with your thinking!

(We've already started talking about the Coates essay, here, so don't feel you need to start at square one with that.)

"A day after pulling double-duty as both the host and musical guest on 'Saturday Night Live,' actor-writer-comedian-musician Donald Glover was garnering attention on Sunday for another reason."

Garnering.

Sorry. I had to get that out of the way.

Now: here's the video:



I watched it. Tell me what you think. My subjective impression is unavoidably affected by the Ta-Nehesi Coates essay — the subject of the previous post — which attacks Kanye West for wanting a kind of freedom Coates calls "white freedom." Presumably, Coates would approve of Glover. But how dare I, a white person, presume?

Here are the lyrics to "This Is America." I went to Urban Dictionary because I wanted to look up "celly" (cellphone?) and "hunid bands" (??) and I saw that that "caught slippin" is the featured word on the front page. That expression is in the song (repeatedly): "This is America/Don't catch you slippin' up." It was defined in '04 as "to be caught off guard, in a very bad way."

Actually, that lyrics page is full of annotations. No need to resort to Urban Dictionary. About "celly":

This line references the 18 March 2018 shooting of Stephon Clark, an African-American who was killed in Sacramento, California by police who presumed that he was responsible for local area robberies and was armed – only to be found with his iPhone....

"I want to tell you a story about the time, still ongoing as of this writing, when I almost lost my mind," writes Ta-Nehisi Coates.

"In the summer of 2015, I published a book, and in so doing, became the unlikely recipient of a mere fraction of the kind of celebrity Kanye West enjoys. It was small literary fame.... My life had been inconsequential, if slightly amusing. I had never stood out for any particular reason, save my height, and even that was wasted on a lack of skills on the basketball court. But I learned to use this ordinariness to my advantage. I was a journalist. There was something soft and unthreatening about me that made people want to talk. And I had a capacity for disappearing into events and thus, in that way, reporting out a scene..... Fame fucked with all of that... It was the oddest thing. I felt myself to be the same as I had always been, but everything around me was warping. My sense of myself as part of a community of black writers disintegrated before me. Writers, whom I loved, who had been mentors, claimed tokenism and betrayal. Writers, whom I knew personally, whom I felt to be comrades in struggle, took to Facebook and Twitter to announce my latest heresy.... I remember going with a friend to visit an older black writer, an elder statesman. He sized me up and the first thing he said to me was, 'You must be getting all the pussy now.' What I felt, in all of this, was a profound sense of social isolation. I would walk into a room, knowing that some facsimile of me, some mix of interviews, book clubs, and private assessment, had preceded me. The loss of friends, of comrades, of community, was gut-wrenching. I grew skeptical and distant. I avoided group dinners. In conversation, I sized everyone up, convinced that they were trying to extract something from me. And this is where the paranoia began...."

From "I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye/Kanye West wants freedom—white freedom" (The Atlantic). The headline seems off, based on that excerpt, doesn't it? A lot of the article is about Michael Jackson, and how fame wrecked him, and of course, the visible wreckage had something to do with whiteness. But Coates is using his own experience with fame to understand Kanye West, and what do Coates and West have to do with a desire to be white? I assume Coates didn't write the headline, but I did search the article for "white" to find something that was about Kanye. Here:

West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.

Ooh! Wow. That's all one sentence. I had to read it out loud to try to absorb the part where we can understand why West's idea of freedom is specifically white. It didn't work. Maybe because I'm white and that's making me think that complete freedom is every human being's birthright and that it would be racist to tell black people to adhere to a prescribed black form of freedom.

Other questions: Who was the black elder statesman who said "You must be getting all the pussy now" to Ta-Nehisi Coates and how did Ta-Nehisi Coates react at the time and why? And how tall is Ta-Nehisi Coates and does he really believe that tallness is wasted if not used for basketball? There are so many uses for tallness, or maybe I only think so because I'm white.

"First Congregational Church of Oakland... has joined a small handful of like-minded congregations with a radical goal: to stop calling the police."

"Not for mental health crises, not for graffiti on their buildings, not even for acts of violence. These churches believe the American police system, criticized for its impact especially on people of color, is such a problem that they should wash their hands of it entirely," The Mercury News Reports.

“Can this actually be reformed, when it was actually created for the unjust distribution of resources or to police black and brown bodies?” [volunteer leader Nichola] Torbett asked. For her and for her fellow church members, the answer is no – the police don’t just need reform. The police need to be abandoned altogether.

The churches call their drastic approach “divesting” from policing... The project of divesting is organized by Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), a nationwide organization that tries to get white Americans working on behalf of racial justice....

“It’s a challenging ask,” acknowledged the Rev. Anne Dunlap, a United Church of Christ minister who leads SURJ’s outreach to faith communities. “It’s a big ask to invite us, as white folks, to think differently about what safety means. Who do we rely on? What is safe? For whom? Should our safety be predicated on violence for other communities? And if not, what do we do if we’re confronted with a situation, because we are, as congregations? . . . How do we handle it if there’s a burglary? How do we handle it if there’s a situation of violence or abuse in the congregation?... In the case of interpersonal violence, for the survivors as well as the perpetrators, we want to look at transformative justice... Would a punitive police and legal system actually bring us the desired outcome for everyone involved? What are our actual values? What do our traditions teach us about redemption?”

No mention of the #MeToo movement, which seems to be on a collision course. In this light, notice Torbett's rhetoric about policing "black and brown bodies." Why "bodies"? It seems that women are being called to subordinate their bodies to the even more vulnerable bodies of men — more vulnerable because the violence they encounter comes from the government. And yet it is women who are quoted in the article — Nichola Torbett and Anne Dunlap. For many many years, women were discouraged from calling the police on their men. Are we circling back to that position? How can that be, given the intensity of #MeToo?

One answer to my question "Why 'bodies'?" is that it's the rhetoric of Ta-Nehisi Coates. (Do a search the page for "body"/"bodies" on his Atlantic article "Letter to My Son/'Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage'" and you'll see what I mean.) But that simply restates the question.

"Over the weekend Cornel West, who many call the most important living black intellectual, tried to ether Ta-Nehisi Coates, who many also call the most important living black intellectual...."

So it was an epic battle of the important living black intellectuals, according to D. Watkins at Salon in "Cornel West failed to 'ether' Ta-Nehisi Coates in the most pointless feud ever/Coates did end up deleting his Twitter account, though — points to West?"

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.

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.

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.

"Ta-Nehisi Coates deletes his Twitter account after argument with Cornel West."

The Hill reports.

West recently criticized Coates in an essay published in The Guardian, slamming him for not being critical enough of former President Obama... [for] “fetishiz[ing] white supremacy" [and for] having a “preoccupation with white acceptance” and an “allegiance to Obama.”...

According to the AP, Coates and West engaged in a “contentious exchange” on Twitter, prompting Coates to delete his account.... Coates often used his Twitter account for political commentary. Earlier this year, his 31-tweet thread criticizing chief of staff John Kelly’s controversial comments about the Civil War being started by a “lack of compromise” went viral.

Well, let's see the exchange with West. Coates had an active Twitter feed and then deleted it all. That seems highly emotional. I want to see what the 2 men said to each other.

I understand feeling offended by West's essay, but stand up to him! He's not that hard to fight, is he?

Maybe Coates thought that he's doing so well with his books that it's foolish to let people take shots at him on Twitter and that West was using him to leverage his own flagging career as a race pundit.

ADDED: You can un-delete your Twitter account (within 30 days) (and you can also just take it private), so the gesture isn't as self-destructive as it may look.

John McWhorter goes on an epic tirade against Ta-Nehisi Coates (and the white people who make a show of embracing him).

This is really something:

Thomas Chatterton Williams explains "How Ta-Nehisi Coates Gives Whiteness Power."

A NYT op-ed.

In the study of German history, there is the notion of sonderweg, literally the “special path,” down which the German people are fated to wander....

A similar unifying theory has been taking hold in America. Its roots lie in the national triple sin of slavery, land theft and genocide. In this view, the conditions at the core of the country’s founding don’t just reverberate through the ages — they determine the present. No matter what we might hope, that original sin — white supremacy — explains everything, an all-American sonderweg.

No one today has done more to push this theory in the mainstream than the 42-year-old author Ta-Nehisi Coates....

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.....

Thomas Chatterton Williams comes very close to calling Ta-Nehisi Coates a white supremacist.

"I don’t know what’s going to happen under Hillary Clinton. Obviously she’s preferable to Donald Trump..."

"... and I don’t blame black folks who vote for her or support her. I get it. But I just don’t know. When I see her husband defending her use of the 'superpredator,' come on. Talking about how the crime bill actually cut crime, come on. Stand back. Defending welfare reform at this hour? Here’s the thing that’s most damning for me: How do you take $600,000 from Goldman Sachs for speeches, knowing you’re going to run for president? Somebody says, 'What were you doing?' and you say, 'Well, that’s what they offered.' It’s a disturbing lack of personal judgment. So it scares me.

Said Ta-Nehisi Coates in his Playboy interview.

"But the world is real. And you can’t really be a black writer in this country, take certain positions, and not think about your personal safety."

"That’s just the history. And you can’t really be a human being and not want some place to retreat into yourself, some place to collapse, some place to be at peace. That’s just neurology. One shouldn’t get in the habit of crying about having a best-selling book. But you can’t really sell enough books to become superhuman, to salve that longing for home. I want you to know that I have been struggling, these past few months, to write about politics. I feel people, all around me, uninterested in questions and enthralled with prophecy... If the world wants a 'Writer Moves to Brooklyn Brownstone' story, it’s going to have one, no matter your thoughts.... Within a day of seeing these articles, my wife and I knew that we could never live in Prospect-Lefferts Garden, that we could never go back home. If anything happened to either of us, if anything happened to our son, we’d never forgive ourselves..."

Writes Ta-Nehisi Coates, saying he's backing out of moving into the $2.1 million brownstone he bought because The New York Post put up an article revealing the address and showing 5 photographs of it.