Something something neoliberal something
Cornel West decided it would be a good idea to pick a fight with Ta-Nehisi Coates for not being…well, enough like Cornel West.
It started on Sunday, when Mr. West published an article in The Guardian calling Mr. Coates “the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle,” and accusing him of “fetishizing white supremacy” while ignoring “Wall Street greed, U.S. imperial crimes or black elite indifference to poverty.”
It’s a pretty crappy article, frankly. There’s no argument, just a lot of assertion:
Coates rightly highlights the vicious legacy of white supremacy – past and present. He sees it everywhere and ever reminds us of its plundering effects. Unfortunately, he hardly keeps track of our fightback, and never connects this ugly legacy to the predatory capitalist practices, imperial policies (of war, occupation, detention, assassination) or the black elite’s refusal to confront poverty, patriarchy or transphobia.
In short, Coates fetishizes white supremacy. He makes it almighty, magical and unremovable. What concerns me is his narrative of “defiance”. For Coates, defiance is narrowly aesthetic – a personal commitment to writing with no connection to collective action. It generates crocodile tears of neoliberals who have no intention of sharing power or giving up privilege.
See what I mean? It’s just word-stringing…and not always even good word-stringing:
The disagreements between Coates and I are substantive and serious. It would be wrong to construe my quest for truth and justice as motivated by pettiness. Must every serious critique be reduced to a vicious takedown or an ugly act of hatred? Can we not acknowledge that there are deep disagreements among us with our very lives and destinies at stake? Is it even possible to downplay career moves and personal insecurities in order to highlight our clashing and conflicting ways of viewing the cold and cruel world we inhabit?
I dunno, but he could at least have caught that howler in the first sentence.
Back to the Times:
Late on Monday, Mr. Coates, who had more than 1.25 million Twitter followers as of earlier this month, tweeted, “Peace, y’all. I’m out. I didn’t get in it for this.” And at some point after that, he deleted his account.
So that’s productive.
Damn you, Cornel West, you have become such an arrogant, pompous, destructive jerk. Charles Mudede wrote a pretty good fisking of West’s pointless attack. If West had any sense of decency, he would apologize to Coates.
With daily reminders of who the Enemy is you’d think people would get sick of friendly fire…
Nice, another internecine argument serving only to divide an important movement into weaker factions. The racists are going to be delighted with this one.
There are productive ways for the left to criticize the center, and the far-left to criticize the left. West isn’t managing one of them.
And West is so much on the ‘suicidal lefty auto-pilot’ that he can’t help tossing in transphobia in his accusation. And Israel.
Ticking all the woke boxes, I guess.
And also ensuring that he doesn’t get targeted for a hate campaign for failing to address the one, the only, the true oppression that is the greaestest, biggestest, meanestest oppression that has ever happened anywhere in all of human history – not mentioning transgendered folks in a subject that isn’t about transgender, therefore being a TransExclusiveAntiRacist (TEAR).
Except – to be boringly literal – I don’t think that is why, and I don’t think there would have been any hate campaign. Woke people go after women, they don’t go after Cornel West. I’m pretty sure Cornel West is aware of that. No, I think he really did do it as a little woke-flag – aka virtue signaling. That’s often a bogus or mostly bogus accusation, but in this case? When “transphobia” is so completely irrelevant to what he was (however ramblingly) talking about? No, I think this is the real deal virtue signal.
Aka what John calls suicidal lefty auto-pilot. Not a bad name for it – kind of like a train engineer careening into a sharp curve at 80 miles an hour.
Ms. Benson @ #9 – yeeee-owch. Not even 60 hours. I’m still receiving notices from friends that they are safe.
What, you mean that was too flippant?
Well it wasn’t, really; it came into my head because I’ve been paying so much attention to it, and I’ve been paying so much attention to it because it should never have happened.
I could have said “like a driver taking a curve too fast” and it wouldn’t have troubled you, right? That kind of accident is all too common.
Anyway, I hope I wasn’t disrespectful to your friends who were not on the train. I have a lot of friends who were not on the train too. There are what, over a million people in the Seattle-Tacoma corridor? There were 80 passengers on the train? I never thought it particularly likely that anyone on the train was a friend of mine.
(I mean, that’s one of those cognitive things, I forget the name of it, one of those predictable mistakes we all make – that business of thinking a particularly conspicuous accident is more likely to involve us than a more humdrum one. We don’t assume every fatal car pile-up probably includes someone we know, so why do we assume it of a train derailment? I didn’t think I was being insensitive to anyone’s friends or grief with that metaphor. The fact that it’s so easy to drive a train into a sharp curve at 80 mph makes me angry, and that’s why the metaphor occurred to me. That’s all that was.)
Cornel West has always puzzled me. He is adored and revered by many people whose opinions I’d normally value, people who describe him with words like “icon” and “legend”, but when I hear or read him he comes across as a parody.
Maybe he’s slipped as he’s gotten older, or maybe he shone in a particular time period and doesn’t translate well to the current one.
Ophelia #12
The availability heuristic?
Thank you, Ms. Benson, I really do appreciate the replies. Please accept my assurances that your points are well taken, and your allusion was spot-on. I simply have good relations with a number of people who travel that corridor every (I mean every) day for work by several modes of transit, including rail.
clamboy – oh, in that case – argh, my sympathies.
Bjarte – Not exactly, though it’s similar. Maybe I’m wrong and it’s not actually a named one.
Skeletor, same here. I had a sneaking sympathy with Laurence Summers when he was president of Harvard and told Cornel West to quit showing off and do some actual scholarship. If that Guardian piece is typical one can see why he did.