The Toxic World-View of Ta-Nehisi Coates


He argues — although that might be too generous a word; it’s more like assertion shrouded in a haze of lyricism — that all that other black people did to hurt or threaten him was ultimately the product of white racism.


Given how large race hatred looms in the world of Coates, I was surprised to find the worst thing that evidently happened to him directly at the hands of a white person is recounted beginning on page 93 of the 152-page book. Coates took his son to a movie theater on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and when they were leaving and got off the crowded elevator, a white woman pushed his kid and said, “Come on!”


This would anger any parent and Coates got into it with the woman and a white man who came to her defense, pushing the guy in the resulting argument. Coates interprets this incident as essentially the telescoping of hundreds of years of racism down to “this woman pulling rank” and invoking her “right over the body of my son.”


Yeah, maybe. It’s also possible that the woman was a jerk (there are at least a couple of them on the Upper West Side) and would have pushed anyone’s kid.


His monstrous passage about 9/11 is a good summation of where he’s coming from. He writes of the police and firefighters who died running into the burning buildings in a forlorn effort to save all the people whose bodies were about to be obliterated into dust, “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”


Really? Firefighters go about shattering the bodies of black people without justification? One doesn’t read about, say, Anthony Rodriguez, 36, father of six, whose last child was born days after he died in the attack, who joined the Navy before becoming a firefighter, who coached youth basketball, and naturally think of the depredations of white America.



 


The full article in the link:


http://www.politico.com/m...


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