John McWhorter On What I'd Call "Intellectual Affirmative Action"
He's talking about "intellectual whites" and the way they "signal" to somebody like him (meaning somebody black and of the professorial or intellectual class), with their attitude about Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Regarding these people's expected "genuflection to Coates" and the need to see his writing as "scripture," it's "bigotry," he says. And he's right.
What John McWhorter has been waiting two years to say about Ta-Nehisi Coates and racism https://t.co/VSTYXknrmk pic.twitter.com/GyQi6uCAlf
— bloggingheads (@bloggingheads) December 13, 2017
I couldn't get the video to play on your blog, Amy. Maybe it's just my computer. But in case someone else has this problem, I think this is the tirade you're talking about.
Watch the video quickly, folks. He could get hit by a bus tomorrow.
That aside, there's nothing really new about his observations. I became aware of this as a child, watching an episode of All in the Family, when Lionel Jefferson, during one of those silly introspective games, calls out Mike Stivic for his self-congratulatory fixation with black issues. It was quite revealing in that it showed that Mike, in his own way, was just as prejudiced as Archie.
When these liberals who pat themselves on the back for being so 'woke' meet a black person for the first time, their icebreaker probably involves something like, "Love Maya Angelou."
These people would be flummoxed into catatonia if the black person responded, "I can't stand Maya Angelou. Stilted, banal, pretentious crap."
I saw it more recently on a message board when Obama won his first presidential election, and pious whites, in their repulsive, condescending way, we're congratulating black people for having come such a long way.
I remarked that the best thing in the world to happen for them right now is for a self-respecting black person to read their unctious praise and respond simply, "Fuck you."
Patrick at December 24, 2017 5:30 AM
Never been a big reader of Ta-Nehisi Coates. Whenever I've read him, he came across as a pretentious boor, thinking he knows more than his readers and that he is doing them a great service with his merest utterance.
Conan the Grammarian at December 24, 2017 6:18 AM
Thanks, Patrick. That is the video (in your link).
I love this scolding of Coates by Jason D. Hill, a black Jamaican immigrant to America. He came, at 20, with his grandmother and $120 in his pocket. He sees America as a place of possibility and Coates' view as wrongheaded:
http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2017/09/17/the_black_immig.html
Amy Alkon at December 24, 2017 6:55 AM
McWhorter's comments on the fifth column podcast a couple of weeks ago regarding coates were splendid.
Crid at December 24, 2017 7:30 AM
Cornel West on Coats.
Conan the Grammarian at December 24, 2017 10:06 AM
Coates views whites as almost mystical in their powers. He admits that growing up the only time he was beat up was by other black youth, and had to make a big deal about a lady on an escalator being rude to his son in order to find an example of oppression, and can't point to any specific examples of how oppression works, and is well off personally, yet still he is oppressed. His kind of "oppression" can never be cured, not if God himself came down and signed a declaration that whites were no longer prejudiced. Coates would just "but what about the civil war!".
His writing is overly dramatic, sometimes incoherent, and fact-free.
cc at December 24, 2017 2:01 PM
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