Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.
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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.
Sorry, just happened to see this while I was digging through Arsenio's clips. This was the West Coast response to Self-Destruction--it's so ironic to think, at that point, Cali and NY were competing to see who could increase the Peace, as we used to say. And man, to see that go to Big v. Pac...
Ah well, I can remember cats coming to school the next day bragging about how Humpty ripped it on that "the underground's down for peace among brothers" (how is it that him and Shock G are on stage together). But all I remember watching this clip was that the dark-skin chick in Oaktown 357 was a stunner. We'll get Juicy Got You Crazy in here at some point. No pubescent boy should have seen that video. But for now...
So I've decided to include in this blog, along with random political observations, some thoughts on the influences of my my debut memoir, The Beautiful Struggle (hereto forth known as TBS). At the very least, it should break up the monotony of hearing the kid drone on and on about the greatness of Barack Obama. I'll be posting video/audio/text which I think really shaped my world-view during the period of the memoir (roughly 86-93, post-Good Times, pre-Illmatic) as well as my writing (no real time limit on that).
A lot of this is stuff that I didn't actually see (this is the era before DVR, kiddies) but that still signify the times. One of the things that I hope comes across in TBS is the chaos of the early 80s and early 90s in black inner-cities. On the one level this is crack and the attendant rise of violence, but it's also the culture, which seemed to be changing every other year. It's nice, every once in awhile, to revisit those moments when the weirdest things imaginable, actually happened.
Item: The Arsenio Hall Show.
Arsenio was like what late-night talk would look like had it been black people who sailed out from the coasts of West Africa and colonized the larger world. It was Johnny Carson done, not just in a black way, but in the way of our generation. I usually was sleep, and thus missed most of Arsenio's greatest moments, but the next day at school all everyone talked about was what happened on his show the night before. There was always an allure of danger and mayhem to what he was doing--this dude interviewed Farrakhan--that matched how we, as young black people, saw the world. I hope that perspective comes through in the book.
Anyway, I should stop talking. Here's a fascinating clip where Arsenio gets into it with some gay activists. Beyond just being fascinating because it's Arsenio, the politics of it all seem so of that time. Would this happen to Jimmy Kimmel? Probably not and for a variety of reasons.
At least in the South. Basically Tom Schaller demonstrates that blacks in the South vote proportionate to their share of the population. But when you take class into account, they actually are more--not less--likely to vote then their white counterparts. Can we now retire these stupid diatribes about young black folks squandering the right their parents fought for? Or would we then take that as license not to vote...Things that make you go, Hmmmm...
The academic who put Maragaret Seltzer on weighs in here. The piece is pretty silly and towards the end takes to arguing in favor of a blurry line between memoir and fiction based on precedent (Memoir writers have been faking it for centuries!). Except by that token why don't we bring back witch-hunts, slavery and betamax. Anyway, dude just seems to be defending himself and his old student, and I was willing to let him go on that. And then he went and said this:
The New York Times reported that because
“Ms. Seltzer told (Times reporter Mimi) Read that her foster siblings
were dead, in prison or no longer in touch, it was difficult for Ms.
Read to find people to interview.”
The real scandal is that, given the
predicament of African-American men in Los Angeles, the claim is
plausible, not that the agent and publisher accepted it.
No it isn't. Neither the reporter, nor the editor should have accepted the "no longer in touch" fudge. That should have been a tip off. It's the reporters job to get names and go and track those people down. Dude then continues with this.
To discredit
“Love and Consequences,” in which Seltzer writes, “We used to say that
South Central was separate from the luxury of America — it was an urban
Third World” allows Americans the luxury of continuing to ignore the
problems the book represents, or at best of waiting for another voice
to bring it to our attention.
Right, uhm, because John Singleton never made Boyz In The Hood. Because Menace II Society never hit. Because NWA never existed. In fact gangsta rap never existed. Dude get out the Ivory Tower and get a F--ing clue.
I haven't been blogging about The Wire, and I won't be blogging about
the season finale. I know, as a native Baltimorean, I should something
to say. But I don't right now--except this: The Wire is one of the most
painstakingly detailed works of art that I've ever seen. It seems
deeply wrong to offer up any level of instant McAnalysis of what it all
means. I know, I know. It's what I do on this blog all the time. But
for The Wire, somehow, and I don't know why, it just seems wrong.
So since I have a memoir coming out in May, I felt extra qualified to talk about the temptations of fakery and fraud. Tried to get this published, but you know how it is for the kid--every day is hustle when the Man is trying to keep you down. So I'm taking it to the streets, check it out:
When news broke that Margaret Seltzer had concocted an
entire life for her memoir, Love And Consequence, I thought about
calling up my editor and telling him that my own upcoming memoir was a fake. I
imagined him going through several stages of panic, and this made me laugh a
little, but only a little and in a really uncomfortable way. The truth of the
matter is that whenever I hear about another Jayson Blair/J.T. Leroy/Stephen
Glass I shudder just a little. So much of what any nonfiction writer does occurs
out of the line of sight of any supervision, and plagiarism and fabulism are
always there as tempting possibilities. This isn’t like the deliciously
mind-fogging temptation of say, adultery, but more like the self-destructive
madness that makes you wonder what it would feel like to shoplift.
In a much-needed, but flawed retort to Charlotte Allen's foolish piece on why women are so foolish, Katha Pollitt represents for Grey's Anatomy fans the world-over:
Oh, gag me with a spoon. Sure, girly culture can be silly -- but what
does that prove? It's not as though men spend their evenings leafing
through the plays of Moliere. Susie whips up doggy treats, Mike surfs
porn sites; she curls up with the Friday Night Knitting Club, he
watches football. Or maybe the two of them watch "Grey's Anatomy"
together -- surprise, surprise, about half the show's audience is male.
If you go by cultural preferences, actually, you could just as well
claim that women are obviously smarter than men -- look around you at the museum, the theater, the opera
house, the ballet, the concert hall. Women read more than men, too,
especially fiction, which men tend to avoid. (A story about things that
didn't happen? How does that work?) Women even read fiction by men and
about men, further evidence of their imaginative powers -- while men,
if they do pick up a novel, make sure it's estrogen-free. Who's really
the dim bulb, the woman who doesn't see the beauty of "Grand Theft
Auto," or the man who thinks Tom Clancy is a great writer?
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say Katha Pollitt doesn't know what she's talking about. She's basically sinking to Allen's level and using the same methodology of hasty generalizations. It's not enough for Pollitt to simply dismiss Allen's thesis on its merits--an easy enough task. She has to argue that it's actually women who are smarter than men, via a highly dubious series of markers of intelligence--opera, theater, ballet etc--and ignorance--video games and football. Does Pollitt even understand football? Has she ever played Grand Theft Auto? The problem with Allen's article wasn't that she argued the wrong side, it's that she reduced really complex observations into a grab-bag of overstatements and employed to make a transparently false argument.
Pollitt ends by asserting that "misogyny is the last acceptable prejudice." Great, the good old "Whose More Opressed Than Who" contest which the left so delights in. Hey Katha, I know a lot of Muslims, Asian-Americans and Latinos who would love to get in on that. I'm glad Pollitt took on Allen for her stupidity--but I wish she had have been more disciplined about it. Instead what we got was piece that was almost as problematic as the article it sought to refute.
That's just my view though. I will say that one my favorite blogs thought the piece was great.
What I think this misses are the cultural and social consequences of
beating Obama (or McCain) this way. I don't mean beating Obama because
the Clintons' message is more persuasive, or because the Clintons'
healthcare plan is better, or because she has a better approach to
Iraq. I mean: beating him by a barrage of petty attacks, by impugning
his clear ability to be commander-in-chief, by toying with questions
about his Muslim past, by subtle invocation of the race card, by
intermittent reliance on gender identity politics, by taking faux
offense to keep the news cycle busy ("shame on you, Barack Obama!") and
so on. If the Clintons beat Obama this way, I have a simple prediction.
It will mean a mass flight from the process. It will alter the
political consciousness of an entire generation of young voters -
against any positive interaction with the political process for the
foreseeable future. I'm not sure
that Washington yet understands the risk the Clintons are taking with
their own party and the future of American politics.
Generally, I agree with that statement, but there is one problem with it. Hillary can only win this way --barring an unlikely move by the super-delegates--with the consent of the voters. I really have been thinking a lot about this lately, and I think we need to remember that old quote about the people getting the government they deserve. If we, as Democrats, are prepared to send Clinton back to the White House again, then I'll have to do some heavy thinking about politics. I'll know for sure, then, that I'm not a Democrat--the Democratic presidential nominee who I've seen who and liked the most in my life-time was John Kerry. Yeah, I know, not saying much. Bill was amoral, and there was something really cowardly about Gore's 2000 campaign--his hedge on Elian still irks me. But I'll also have to do some thinking about my own place in this country, which I no doubt, love. I will just need to assess what that means.
Clinton's path to the nomination, then, involves the following steps:
kneecap an eloquent, inspiring, reform-minded young leader who happens
to be the first serious African American presidential candidate
(meanwhile cementing her own reputation for Nixonian ruthlessness) and
then win a contested convention by persuading party elites to override
the results at the polls. The plan may also involve trying to seat the
Michigan and Florida delegations, after having explicitly agreed that
the results would not count toward delegate totals. Oh, and her
campaign has periodically hinted that some of Obama's elected
delegates might break off and support her. I don't think she'd be in a
position to defeat Hitler's dog in November, let alone a popular war
hero.
I was really thinking about it, but this latest bit tears. Only a power-hungry fool--and yes a Democrat--would imply that the Republican opponent was more qualified than their fellow Democrat. I know I live in New York and it doesn't matter, but on GP, there's no way I can, in good conscience, vote for this craven fool.
Not bad advice at all. I am especially in favor of this one:
4. Make a speech about the Internet slurs. Stop ducking them. Confront them.
Talk about your Christian faith and your childhood exposure to Islam.
Tell people about your parents. Debunk that idiotic pledge of
allegiance meme. Grab the flag pin issue by the lapels. Do it all at once undefensively. Yes, it will raise
the profile of every single slur. But if you rebut them candidly,
gracefully, calmly, you will defuse them. You can run but you can't
hide from Internet crapola. So confront it; defeat it. Right now, on
these issues alone, the Obama camp is actually captive to the politics
of fear. Don't be.
You said you would go right at them brother. Well, don't talk me to death.
Heh. Nice list over at Radar. Half of these movies I never saw because the sexism oozed off the trailer. Generally I hate listacles, but this is worth a look.
Pretty awesome reporting job here by Anne Kornblut and Peter Baker. Screw the dumb analysis. Here is a pretty comprehensive accounting of the past few months. I've been burnt out on this stuff since Tuesday, but this was too hard to resist. I salute them both.
I want to say up front that it was stupid for Obama to deny this happened, when it in fact did. The "I was dealing with the facts as I knew them" defense doesn't cut it. Bush would say the same thing about Iraq. What I've loved so far about Obama's campaign is the cat's willingness to, as we say in the old country, Man Up. I hope he continues in that tradition and takes responsibility for his mistakes, and remains willing to
Now that that's out of the way, it also seems clear that Obama was basically set-up. Here's a piece in TNR on Canadian conservatives attempts to influence the election:
First and foremost, the U.S. media has identified his chief of staff,
Ian Brodie, as the leaker of the diplomatic cable written by the
Chicago consulate reporting on the Goolsbee meeting. Harper's domestic
political foes are advancing a narrative
that has already angered Democrats, and would be bad news for bilateral
relations: that Harper was trying to do a favor for the GOP by tossing
a piece of political dynamite in front of Obama's train as it was
barreling down on Ohio.
"They will do what is
necessary to help Republicans. They're a nasty, unprincipled bunch, who
are incompetent to boot," Bob Rae, foreign affairs critic and member of
the opposition Liberal party, wroteasked on his blog. "Is it possible that the prime minister himself knew about
this information and authorized the leaks in order to discredit the
campaign of Mr. Obama for president of the United States?" New
Democratic Party leader Jack Layton
Seems the NAFTAgate leak started with -- surprise, surprise -- the
Chief of Staff to Canada's conservative PM Stephen Harper. Only the
first hint wasn't about stuff the Canadians had heard from the Obama
camp. It was about reassurances the Canadians got from the Clinton
campaign. According to a reporter who heard the original conversation,
Brodie said "someone from (Hillary) Clinton's campaign is telling the
embassy to take it with a grain of salt. . . That someone called us and
told us not to worry."
Only somehow this evolved into a story about the Obama campaign giving such reassurances.
Nasty stuff. But Obama better get used to it, and fast.
Well Obama got creamed last night. There's just no way around that. But Marc Ambinder points out that, even after her big ones, the math of Hillary come back is still really hard to see:
It
is a sad irony or perhaps cosmic justice: just as Hillary Clinton
succeeded in reforming her coalition -- older voters, working class
women, self-identified Democrats, Latinos, the less affluent, the less
educated -- just as she's succeeded in raising doubts about the
presumptive Democratic nominee, the claws that are the Democratic rules
tightened, perhaps inescapably -- in that she cannot escape from them.
Forget about momentum. Or press coverage. Or arguments. Or moral claims
to this or that. Forget about the external things that all of us in the
media normally cover.
As the calendar progress, the reality is that the rules have become
the controlling legal authority. When folks say "this ain't over for a
while," they don't have a predicate. Perhaps the scrutiny on Obama will
increase and that he will crash and that 30% of his superdelegates will
crash and that 30% of his pledged delegates will defect and that 60% of
the remaining superdelegates delegates will go her way. That could
happen, but it is still not that likely to happen. I suppose that if we
discover that Obama has a second family in Idaho...
Heard this today from my good friend Ed Park. Gygax, outside of my parents, may be the single most important factor in me becoming a writer. It's hard to explain to people today--hell it was hard then--what it meant to create an entire world inside your head with only some paper, weird dice, and rule-books. But, oh man, that world was so real to me. I later went on to MMORPGS like EQ and WoW, but in truth, nothing that any programmer does could match the limitless possibilities of conjuring a world in my head.
My sessions of Dungeons & Dragons were the most fun I ever had as a child, bar none. And it wasn't like I was the stereotypical geek with a pack of weird friends (really though, who was?). I was a relatively popular, if somewhat awkward black boy attending the public schools of West Baltimore. My brother Malik, who introduced me to D&D, was a similar dude--though a hell of a lot smarter. The great thing about D&D though, was that as fun as it was, it really pushed your abstract thinking skills. I think that abilityto conjure a complete picture, based only on skeletal details stayed with me, and has really helped me as a writer.
And so now I look at my seven-year-old son, who has seen some of my rulebooks and wants me to teach him. What will I do? I was seven when I started. And yet, it's been so long since I've played. I wonder whether it will still feel the same. Time, I guess, to dig out my old gem dice...
