* Ta-Nehisi Coates is the unwitting butt of an extended joke which makes his employers and colleagues snort coffee out their noses every day as they stifle their guffaws when he walks by.
Coates thinks he is a talented, respectable writer. After all, doesn’t he have a byline– and much more importantly, a salary– at a well-known magazine? Don’t his little books garner fawning reviews?
In truth Coates is a pitiable affirmative-action/token hire. He is an ignorant man, a poor writer, and a pompous fool. No one will pop his bubble because they enjoy exploiting him and laughing at him behind his back too much.
The reason Coates has been given a staff-writer gig when thousands of much better writers (including many American black writers) are available and eager is that his employers and the readership they wish to amuse enjoy forcing nearly all white and asian Americans to pretend to respect Coates lest they be denounced as racists. Coates’ manifest incompetence makes the situation more delicious for those who use him as political-correctness bait.
Coates’ best hope is that someone will clue him in and then, in a moment of unusual brilliance, he will parlay his puffed-up status as a magazine writer into a tenured professorship at some HBCU or third-tier state college before he gets laid off from commercial publishing and finds that no one will employ him as a writer because they already have other goads for the politically-incorrect.
* Coates is basically a bright Gen X comic book nerd who’s found himself anointed the new James Baldwin and is uncomfortably trying to fill the demand. Look at some recent videos of him where it’s striking how guarded and closed off he is, then go look at how happy and relaxed he is in this old video where he’s talking about the X-Men with Alyssa Rosenberg and a couple of nerdy white dudes (the convergence of Coates, Rosenberg, and an extended discussion of X-Men: First Class makes it particular Steve bait).
* The thing about Coates is his writing style conjures an image of a man sobbing as he types out his complaints. There’s a strange immaturity to it that I never have been able to describe. The pleading just brings to mind someone writing their own ransom note.
I’ve always suspected he struggles with dis-confirmation. He overdoes his upbringing quite a bit. He did not live in the hard thumping parts of the ghetto. He grew up in what was at the time the black middle-class area. Lots of crime and dysfunction, but not The Wire. He went to Poly, which is an exam school for families keeping their kids out of trouble.
In other words, what he heard at home was and is nothing like what he experienced outside. Dad was always ranting about the blue-eyed devil, but at school the blue-eyed devil was his best friend. He’s a guy trying to keep it real, but living life as a white hipster in the suddenly white Harlem, working with other white hipsters.
* Screw Coates. The Eye of Sailer is upon him and his time, and those of his ilk, is about over. To me, he is nothing more than another black apologist for black dysfunction. And their time is running short. The evidence of black dysfunction being inherent in blacks is reaching a preponderance. Already you can corner liberals and have them responds, “Then what do you suggest? Genocide?” as evidence of their frustration and the dead end nature of the prior position.
I watched Brideshead Revisited (the old miniseries on Granada). And the Jeremy Irons character was narrating that it in 1923 Religion is dead and was it anymore than some quaint superstition or was it a moral code that still should guide society? He said “The answer to both was no.” So among the highest levels of English Society, Christianity was in 1923 a non-starter as an idea.
We are beginning the age of genetic determinism, and anyone that believes anything different will be thought to be an idiot by thinking people. The readership of the Sailer blog is one part of the advance party that will usher in this movement.
* …what Steve says about Jews: when you remove criticism of a group, people behave badly and selfishly. If you read black writing of the pre-civil rights era, there’s a huge emphasis on ‘uplifting the race’ and showing examples of black areas that behave well. There was an old guidebook for ‘Negro motorists’ someone put on Slate and it showed examples of black towns that were well-run, etc. (probably concentrations of the ‘talented tenth’ that now assimilates into white culture).
In the old days, Jews were terrified of being accused of ‘dual loyalty’ and hated guys like Pollard. Now, sadly…
* The anti-bullying school movement is just a way for sodomites to push their agenda in public schools without having to admit they want to reach – literally – young cute boys and convert them to their perversions
