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Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates - Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. More

Born in 1975, the product of two beautiful parents. Raised in West Baltimore—not quite The Wire, but sometimes ill all the same. Studied at the Mecca for some years in the mid-’90s. Emerged with a purpose, if not a degree. Slowly migrated up the East Coast with a baby and my beloved, until I reached the shores of Harlem. Wrote some stuff along the way.

Depressing...

By Ta-Nehisi Coates
May 20 2008, 2:17 PM ET Comment

I'm trying to be optimistic about this and stick with my standard, "we are the future" line. Very difficult when you read things like this:

Later, when asked if she thinks this campaign has been racist, she says she does not. And she circles back to the sexism. "The manifestation of some of the sexism that has gone on in this campaign is somehow more respectable, or at least more accepted, and . . . there should be equal rejection of the sexism and the racism when it raises its ugly head," she said. "It does seem as though the press at least is not as bothered by the incredible vitriol that has been engendered by the comments by people who are nothing but misogynists."

This is the same woman who, only a week ago, equated "white" with "hard-working," whose surrogate claimed that Obama would not be in the race if he weren't black. When I read things like that, it brings forth some really dark thoughts about race in this country, and how black people should proceed. This is the case for Malcolm X and Jeremiah Wright, the case for a complete blindness to a nation of black men toiling in prisons, to black girls growing up fatherless. This is the case against Barack Obama--that his compassion for people who step on his wife and kids for power, is in fact a compromise of black people. I know that this a short-sighted way of seeing the world, that the great tragedy of African-American life is that the only way forward is jettisoning of our anger. But of course it can't truly jettisoned, it can only be hidden and in moments like this it returns.

Feminists have expended whole barrels of ink wondering why the fuck they have virtually no following among black women. But over the past week all I've heard is this stupid-ass attempt to raise the profile of privileged white women at the expense of black boys and girls who I see out on Lennox Avenue scrapping in the belly of the beast. Nothing is more irritating than watching people who think they know what beef is because they watched Roots, and took an Af-Am Studies class at Wellesley, tell me that it's now all good. Hillary, and people who support this sort of invective, are loathsome and disgusting. I don't care if they're racist--they clearly find racism useful. The only women who they care about, the only young girls who they truly are concerned about, are the ones from their side of the tracks.



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