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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.

Hold On, I Hear Somebody Coming

By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Aug 2 2010, 12:08 PM ET Comment

Heh. From comments:

TNC can turn off his newsfeed, but they've got quotas to meet. I bet they've got someone watching his log cabin right now and a black helicopter prepped for the extraction. They're planning on taking him pack to the secret illuminati facility under the Senate where he'll have his eyelids pinned open while the villains play Beethoven and Birth of a Nation on repeat until his heart explodes. I'm already in mourning.

This takes me back to college in the mid to late 90s, when a special "HBCU" strand of millennialism sprung up. You couldn't go to a house-party without some acolyte hemming you up with a copy of Behold A Pale Horse and the latest Steve Coakley lecture. Here you are trying to get up with some honey, and this dude is steady talking about Malachi York and numbers branded on your wrist. And it was always dudes--always dudes talking that chips in your ear shit. 

Heh. Fun times. I always thought Jada had the most ignorant, and by ignorant I mean enlightened, response to black collegiate millennialism, "Niggers running round talking that Y2K shit\Crackheads is still goin want that grey shit."




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