Who Is Ta-Nehisi Coates?

I have never read a word of Ta-Nihisi Coates. I consider myself a better person for as much. Coates trafficks in anti-white prejudice, and has made a career out of accusing everyone of racism. He has won many awards and has sold many books. Regrettably, he has given race-baiting a good name. 

Now Coates has written a new book and Coleman Hughes offers a clear and succinct review in The Free Press. 

His new essay collection, The Message, is a masterpiece of warped arguments and moral confusion. But it is important to take it seriously, not because Coates’s arguments are serious, but because so many treat them as if they are. 

Coates is not a deep thinker. He is not really a thinker at all. He lays an extensive guilt trip on people of pallor, the better to sell books and to present himself a paragon of moral virtue:

And the specter haunting this book, and indeed all of his work, is the crudest version of identity politics in which everything—wealth disparity, American history, our education system, and the long-standing conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors—are reduced to a childlike story in which the “victims” can do no wrong (and have no agency) and the “villains” can do no right (and are all-powerful). 

For the simple minded everything is simple. For Coates racism explains everything, beginning with wealth disparities between Northern and Southern hemispheres. He blames it on colonialism:

The essay relies, for emotional weight, on Coates’s assumption that Western nations are rich, and African nations are poor, because of colonialism. This framework makes the West morally responsible for the poverty of countries like Senegal. 

But economists have long exposed the problems with this theory. For starters, five-hundred years ago, the whole world was poor. 

Hughes has a more cogent and far more intelligent explanation:

Wealth was created only when certain nations began to adopt a set of key institutions: property rights, honest government, markets, rule of law, and political stability. These institutions rewarded productivity and, in particular, innovation. Every nation that has adopted these institutions has grown exponentially as a result. Every nation that hasn’t has remained in the default state of poverty. 

Insofar as African nations would like to have “growth miracles” of their own, they will need to import the political institutions that reliably create wealth. Most of those institutions are “Western” in origin. Thus, it does no one any good to nurse in Africans a hatred of the West and its institutions—except perhaps Western liberals, many of whom derive a perverse pleasure from castigating themselves, their countries, and their ancestors. 

But, Coates does not just demonize the United States. Apparently, his nemesis in this book is Israeli Jews. He learned it from his anti-Semitic father:

In other words, Coates inherited an anti-Israel bias—based on crude, inaccurate analogies to American racial politics—on father’s knee. (His father ran an unsuccessful publishing house called Black Classic Press, which “took food off our table,” as Coates writes in The Beautiful Struggle, but was “another tool Dad enlisted to make us into the living manifestations of all that he believed and get us through.” Coates’s father recently republished The Jewish Onslaught, an antisemitic screed about Jews and the transatlantic slave trade.) 

Coates warps the history of Israel in order to make it fit his anti-racism narrative:

In The Message, Israeli policies are (inaccurately) parsed over, while the fact that Mahmoud Abbas still pays the families of suicide bombers who kill Jewish civilians through his so-called “Martyrs Fund” is not mentioned. Nor is the Hamas Charter, which calls for genocide against the Jewish people: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews. 

When the Jew will hide behind stones and trees, the stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslims, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ ” Why discuss the mainstream policies and mission statements of the most important Palestinian organizations when you can caricature Israeli policy and cherry-pick quotes from early Zionists?  

You might ask what this can accomplish. In truth, it accomplishes nothing, beyond fomenting anti-Semitism:

Still, no serious historian doubts the big picture: Jews had successive kingdoms in the land of Israel, and maintained a continuous presence there even after the Roman Empire destroyed Jerusalem in the first century, and renamed the region Palestine in order to punish the Jews who had rebelled against colonial rule.

It’s a sad story, but it is indicative of what happens when the intelligentsia wraps its mind around a dimwit who makes them feel guilty for being racist. Once they anoint him, people take what he says seriously, to their detriment.

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