Ta-Nehisi Coates

A lot of folks have e-mailed me recently about the Cosby piece. I would say they fall into two camps--black followers of Booker T. Washington, or white people who believe that black folks have consigned themselves to the demographic basement. Better, smarter, more literate folks than me have hit this one out the park. Kenneth Jackson's incredible Crabgrass Frontier includes some devastating chapters on how black folks were essentially excluded from FDR's housing programs. Ira Katznelson's book, When Affirmative Action Was White, does a fine job showing how FDR was forced by Southern Democrats to exclude black people from many of the other programs which basically subsidized the middle class in this country.

There are reams of stats showing blacks lagging behind whites. I think virtually all of them are irrelevant save one--the difference in wealth between black and white America. The great Dalton Conley (who I had the chance to interview, but regrettably, not quote) has written movingly about how many of the differences between blacks and whites are actually differences in wealth. Social scientists who simply try to control for income, and then wonder why blacks still lag are missing the point. As arguably the greatest black intellectual of our time, Chris Rock, once noted, "Shaq is rich, the white man who signs his check is wealthy...Wealth is passed down from generation to generation, you can't get rid of wealth. Rich is some shit you can loose with a crazy summer and a drug habit."

That was the message of Booker T, and from that perspective he was right. The Du Bois faction overlooked the great power of economics, and how wealth allows you to bend society and--if your cause is just--make things right. But, equally, Booker T took an incredibly pollyannish view of America at large, and the white South in particular.

Nothing else so soon brings about right relations between the two races in the South as the industrial progress of the negro. Friction between the races will pass away in proportion as the black man, by reason of his skill, intelligence, and character, can produce something that the white man wants or respects in the commercial world.

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He's funny. It's that simple. It's what allows him to counterpunch with such effectiveness. Dig the video below, where he apologizes and then two-pieces John McCain and Hillary. The Annie Oakley crack is great.

Peace to CeezDiem for the link. Ghost is one of my all-time favorites. Sometimes his women issues get the best of him and he becomes too extreme for the kid. But he was a HUGE influence on the writing style of my book. I just give him props for the line, "Yo, who goes there?" in "Shakey Dog." Classic.

Worth a look...

So here's the piece I referenced. They'll have some video up soon also.

So, with the exception of the new Batman (hell any Christopher Nolan flick) I'm done with the theater. But I might have to go see the new Harold And Kumar. Check out the site if you haven't.

Evidently, just a little bit. According to this prejudice test, I "moderately" prefer people of a darker hue compared to people of a lighter hue. It's funny because I'm a light-skinned brother. Still, being black, you forget all of that and lump yourself with everyone else, I think. My feeling is that color prejudice in country as segregated as ours has to be somewhat of a foregone conclusion. I didn't have any significant relationships with a white person until I was, like, nineteen. I've never dated anybody who wasn't black, or so much as even cracked on a girl who wasn't black at a club.

I'm certainly not saying that to brag. As far friendship goes, that simply wasn't possible as there were practically no white folks in my corner of West Baltimore. As far as anything more than friendship, it never even seemed like an option to me. I was black. I was gonna be black all my life. I was gonna live around black folks all my life. So what was the point? I guess that's all fine a good, but I think there's one problem. I've come to believe that segregation breeds prejudice. When you're not around people who don't look, talk and act like you, it's becomes incredibly easy to dehumanize them.

But that's me talking years later, as a New Yorker, with friends of all shades. I have no idea how I would have been, had I been this way from jump. I guess I'm going to find out while watching my son grow older. Anyway take the test. Let's hear how you do, and whether you think it reflects who you are. I have to be honest and say it probably does reflect me. You can't come up this way, and then suddenly wake up color-blind.

I've got a piece coming out in this month's Atlantic, which attempts to place Bill Cosby in, what  Professor Christopher Alan Bracey calls, the organic black conservative tradition. In that space I see folks like Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Macolm X, hell, maybe even David Walker. The point I try to make is that it's wrong to see black conservativism, strictly, as the province of fools like Alan Keyes or ragaholics like Clarence Thomas. We have to concede that Louis Farrakhan, the man who led us to the mall, is a black conservative--if a somewhat nutty one. We have to concede that Malcolm, in all likliehood, probably would have been pro-life. (As a die-hard Malcolmite, I'm just dying for some reader to correct me on this, by the way).

I'm pretty much a left-libertarian (do they even make us anymore?) , which sort of reflects my upbringing. I was mostly raised to the political left--my mother worked, my folks believed in a woman's right to choose, they would have opposed a gay marriage ban, had the issue came up in the 80s. Plus my parents had a strong, healthy critique of American mythology. But at the same time they stressed education and hard work--there was no way I could be failing in class (as I often was) and claim that I was failing because I was black. I was raised to be, as my mother would say, a strong black man--get a job, don't broach any foolishness, and be a good spouse and a great father. Thus, there are times when I hear conservatives talk, when I find myself nodding in agreement with a lot of what they have to say.

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Black Snob takes on these fools complaining about the pressure they're getting for supporting the sinking ship that is Hillary Clinton:

So, pardon me, if I'm not buying into all this "black treason" garbage. I'm about as not mad at black superdelegates for Clinton as I am not mad at white women superdelegates for Obama. Seriously. This is the dumbest load of hooey ever.

Let me clear--superdelegates have the right to support whoever they want. And then their constituents have the right to vote them out of power for disagreeing. It's called politics. If you can't take it get out the business. Better yet stick around, and give us the honor of putting you out. I swear this is like watching running backs complaining about getting tackled.

Fascinating post up over at Model Minority, about getting older and realizing the wisdom of MLK:

Malcolm naturally appealed to me. For us, in the early 90's witnessing, the vestiges of the 80's crack era, the notion of violence as amethod of obtaining and retaining power made sense.

Same for a lot of us. The violence and the anger of the late 80s-early 90s just us all up to be Malcolmites. I guess in many ways, I still am. But as I got older, and got hip to the radicalism of MLK, I came to see things his way too. Plus, I still grapple with his point about the basic immorality of ALL violence, state-sponsered or personal. I think that point he made about being unable to lecture ghetto youth about the emptiness of violence, and yet remaining silent about Vietnam is one of the most courageous statements made ever in American history. But there will always be some Malcolm in men. The self-determination, the unflappability, the intellectual curiousity (transcribing the entire dictionary while in prison!!) will always be with me.

The following comes from the comments section in the initial post, by CVT. I thought it was interesting:

Did some more thinking about this and read some comments to my initial post. Here is my problem. "Black Anti-Intellectualism" is a broad lazy phrase, that comes from broad lazy thinking. It is of a piece with "The War On Terror," or "The War On Drugs." It's big and abstract, and ducks the hard thinking needed to get our hands around the problem, and thus get to tangible solutions. To accuse black kids of being anti-intellectual, is, in itself, anti-intellectual. It's a charge that results from not pushing yourself to get tot the core of the problem.

Furthermore, I submit that it's foolish to define intellectual curiosity by how you perform in school. That doesn't mean that the achievment gap is a myth, or that it isn't a problem. But I'm very leery of hazy, undefined, sprawling answers. I'm much more apt to believe that this has to do SPECIFIC problems--a chronic level of broken families, a lack of safety in and around schools, the wealth gap etc.

I don't object to people pointing out the achievemnt gap. It's real and deeply problematic. But it's incredibly weak-minded to basically say that black kids just don't care, or they just don't want to know about the wider world. If that's the line we're taking to our children--as opposed to critiquing ourselves as parents--then our kids are in big big trouble. If we--the very people who are supposed to be their guardians--are condemning from day one as "anti-intellectual," I can only imagine what the wider, unsympathetic world has in store.

Interesting piece...

Move along...

Say it with me children: There is no racism. There is no racism. There. Is. No. Rasim.

Pretty cool piece by Chait over at TNR exposing the folly of Sean Wilentz' attempts to blame the rules for Hillary terrible performance in primaries. Wilentz has now taken to arguing that the proportional system devised by the DNC is the reason for Hillary's loss, which is sort of like arguing that the Giants would have lost Super Bowl if the field had been 130 yards long:

Clinton supporters are spending an inordinate amount of time devising scenarios where Clinton would be winning if the rules of the primary were changed retroactively. Yet all the rules were understood and agreed to by both candidates in advance. The rules are not perfect, but the hypothetical alternatives proposed by Clinton's side -- imposing a winner-take-all system, counting the votes in states with no campaigning or only one candidate on the ballot -- would make the race less fair, not more fair. So, yes, it's possible to imagine different, less-fair rules where the losing candidate would have prevailed. But so what?

This is why I am glad Hillary is going to loose. I can just imagine her whining her way through the general, complaining about a double standard, and unfair rules. The last thing we need is a nominee whose team spends most of their time crying on the sidelines, instead of running out on the field to hit somebody.

dNa does me one better and takes apart Hitchens foolish, strawmen-like "Obam Is No King" argument:
 

Again: I don't see anyone comparing King to Obama other than people who want to explain how much better King was than Obama. They're not in the same fucking league: Obama is an elected official, and the very nature of his position means that he will have to compromise his ideals. And I have yet to see a white politician held to such an absurd standard: It's as thought because Obama might be president, he has to be implicitly compared to the only other black guy who was a national figure that all Americans can agree on liking (even if they have to make him up to do so).

Moreover, dNa notes, Hitchens sees not a wit of irony in the fact that he's waving the flag of King, when King was an avowed pacifist. It is virtually certain that King would have opposed the very Iraq War which Hitchens can't seem to get over.

I've maintained for a long time that Barack Obama is no more unique than any other black person. Hmm, I guess. This video is incredible.

It's amazing to see people making this argument right at the moment when Barack Obama--one of the most cerebral presidential candidates in recent memory--is making such a strong bid for the White House. Furthermore, Obama is doing this with utterly unprecedented support in the black community. And yet, here we have Harold J. Logan spewing generalities to whoever come may over at theroot.

no one who has spent any significant amount of time with African-American teenagers over the past 20 years can fail to have observed that far too many of our children see the behaviors that lead to success in school as fundamentally foreign to their conception of authentic blackness.

Uh, you talking to me? Is he talking to me?? Well given that 20 years ago, I was exactly 12 and on the precipice of my teen years, I think he is talking to me. Seriously, this is the sort of claim tossed out by people who are just tired of thinking. In Logan's defense, he argues that America at large is increasingly anti-intellectual (not sure I even buy that). But to buttress his main point, he offers, literally, NO proof that shows black people today are in the grips of neandrathalism. Logan just leans on a John Mcwhorter book written some eight years ago. Meanwhile there is considerable evidence that the "acting white" explanation, as a meaningful agent in the achievement gap, is either mythical or greatly misunderstood.

Surely there can be no argument that the educational gap between black and white, and between all of us and the rest of the civilized world, is yawning. But leaping from that contention to the idea of a black anti-intellectual culture confuses credentialism with curiosity. Sorry, but I feel this intently. I was an awful student. My two parents weren't much better. But in my house, literature was the national past-time. When I wasn't thumbing through Greg Tate, Chancellor Williams or David Walker, I was transcribing the Chuck D's latest, trying to decipher what was being said. Hip-hop in those days was a great pop intellectual movement--no one who truly understands De La Soul or Nas would ever say that the black kids who pledged themselves to hip-hop, were anti-intellectual.

I can't speak for most of today's acts, but I'm leery of people who cut on BET and then go write essays about the stupidity of black folks. Teenagers generally don't write for op-ed pages, publish studies, or write for the theroot, and thus are easy targets. Furthermore, there is something ironic about accusing black people of essentially worshiping stupidity, when the plaintiff, himself, has not subjected his own claims to any intellectual rigor. Physician heal thyself. You want black kids to raise their game? Set an example by raising yours first.

Baratunde over at Jack And Jill looks at the utter lies of the Clinton campaign, focusing on this week's whopper--Clinton opposed the war before Obama:

The short version is this: Hillary has all to often not demonstrated the leadership qualities necessary to be president. She has had many choices available to her, but she has chosen the course of short term gain (mocking Obama supporters, fuzzy mathematical hypotheticals, Jeremiah Wright dissing, Muslim fear flaming).

Interesting, if not entirely original, piece:

For me and most of the people I know, the postpresidential love for Bill Clinton has evaporated completely and breathtakingly fast. No matter how many mosquito nets and microloans he helps supply to the Third World, I’m out of love. I found Bill Richardson’s endorsement of Obama two weeks ago especially gratifying not in spite of its fuck-you to his former patron but because of it.

And this swing of sentiment isn’t just some elite coastal phenomenon. According to NBC News/Wall Street Journal polling, from Clinton’s impeachment until the end of his presidency, his approval number never sank below 44 percent, but in the latest survey it’s down to 42 percent—and his “very negative” number, 32 percent, is nearly at an all-time high. The other polls tell similar stories: People feel more negatively toward Bill Clinton than at any time in at least the last five years.