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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.

A Funeral For Funerals

By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Jun 27 2009, 11:44 PM ET Comment

At some point I'll read the Times Magazine's profile chronicling "The Fall Of The Black Middle Class." But it's hard to escape the sense that, by the lights of most mainstream media coverage, there really isn't much of a Black Middle Class. It all feels anticlimactic.

I thought Detroit, like most places where black people congregate, was the site of everything wrong with this country. The notion that it actually had produced something approaching normalcy, and that that normalcy is now imperiled would be much more interesting--had the normalcy been regularly explored in as much depth as its erosion. 

Kinda hard to mourn what you never had...


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