The New Jim Crow: Ta-Nehisi Coates Insists That the Government Conspires to Keep the Black Man Down (The Same Government That Has Economically Dispossessed and Politically Disenfranchised Working-Class and Middle-Class White Americans to Create an Incompetent, Racist, Parasitic, Black Middle Class!)

 

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Future Pulitzer and Nobel Prize Winner, and Harvard President?
 

By Nicholas Stix

Ta-Nehisi Coates is Joe Biden’s kind of a black man: Clean and articulate. He is bound to achieve greatness in the Bizarro World of affirmative action: He will be showered with phony prizes, dishonorable doctorates, and powerful positions. He has already been given book deals. Heck, he has already penned his autobiography. Only in today’s America, can someone 32 or 33-years old, who has no accomplishments to memorialize, get paid to write a memoir! (Actually this has been happening for some time.)

He does not conduct any research, or offer any arguments for his positions, either, but he doesn’t have to. He’s a black man! He’s a victim of white skin privilege!

Thus, it would be beneath Coates to respond to whites who disagree with him, and so he variously silences and ignores them.

I was going to post a rejoinder here to the thing below, but realized that it would end up wasting hours of precious work time.

Were any of Coates’ devotees to read this item, they would likely respond something along the lines of, “Ta-Nehisi silence you? He has no power to do that! As a black man in racist Amerika, he has no power whatsoever, unlike you, a recipient of white skin privilege.

What’s that, you say? Why not post criticisms at The Atlantic? I tried. In fact, I used to be able to post there, until I made the mistake of writing less than slavish comments at one of Coates’ blogs.

All of a sudden, all of my comments were blocked. And my votes, too!

Coates is the censor (“mod”)! That means that he’s the guy who banned me at The Atlantic. So, he gets paid to say utterly ridiculous things about race, and to rig the discussion of his works, to make it look as if virtually all readers agreed with him. Nice work, if you can get it!

Not only does Coates ban his critics from commenting, but from their votes counting. If you have been banned, you will not be told this. You will log in, as if everything were hunky dory. You will vote other readers’ comments variously up or down, and post comments of your own. But when you later refresh the page, you will find that your comments have all been blocked, and that the votes you cast, which initially appeared to have been counted, have been reverted.

What that means is that the initial tabulation of your vote was an illusion that only you saw. The block on your comment also blocked your vote from being counted.

It’s a black world!

For a quick taste of The Great Nehisi, sample the following passage on his indictment of how Jim Crow supposedly never ended:

5) The half-assed social contract continues to this very day with policies under the present administration, like the bail-out of banks that left the homeowners whom the banks conned underwater. The results of the housing crisis for black people have been devastating. The response is to hector these people about playing video games and watching too much television. Or to tell them they've have [sic] "an achievement gap." It is sickening, dishonest, and morally repugnant.

* * *The American Case Against a Black Middle Class
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Jan 22 2013, 10:19 AM ET

I went on a Twitter rant yesterday because I'd finished Isabel Wilkerson's phenomenal The Warmth Of Other Suns. The book is a narrative history of the Great Migration through the eyes of actual migrants. Several points stick out for me.

1) The Great Migration was not an influx of illiterate, bedraggled, lazy have-nots. Wilkerson marshalls a wealth of social science data showing that the migrants were generally better educated than their Northern brethren, more likely to stay married, and more likely to stay employed. In fact, in some cases, black migrants were better educated than their Northern white neighbors.

2) In this sense, the migrants to Northern cities resembled immigrant classes to whom black people in these same cities are often unfavorably compared to. There's a quote in Wilkerson's book which I can't find where a supervisor basically says that blacks are the favored workers because they will work hard at the worst jobs for relatively little money. You would have thought the guy was talking about Hispanic farm-hands today.

3) The black migrants were not immigrants. They were citizens of this country who did not enjoy its full protection. Unlike other immigrant classes, blacks were never able to cash in on their hard work and middle-class values. For all of their work-ethic, education-valuing, and long-term marriages, they received the worst wages in the worst jobs, were limited to the worst housing, and stuffed in the worst schools.

4) What becomes clear by the end of Wilkerson's book is that America's response to the Great Migration was to enact a one-sided social contract. America says to its citizens, "Play by the rules, and you will enjoy the right to compete." The black migrants did play by the rules, but they did not enjoy the right to compete. Black people have been repeatedly been victimized by the half-assed social contract. It goes back, at least, to Reconstruction.

5) The half-assed social contract continues to this very day with policies under the present administration, like the bail-out of banks that left the homeowners whom the banks conned underwater. The results of the housing crisis for black people have been devastating. The response is to hector these people about playing video games and watching too much television. Or to tell them they've have "an achievement gap." It is sickening, dishonest, and morally repugnant.

6) America does not really want a black middle class. Some of the most bracing portions of Wilkerson's book involve the vicious attacks on black ambition. When a black family in Chicago saves up enough to move out of the crowded slums into Cicero, the neighborhood riots. The father had saved for years for a piano for his kids. The people of Cicero tossed the piano out the window, looted his home, torched his apartment and then torched his building. In the South, when black people attempted to leave to earn better wages, they were often forcibly detained, and thus kept in slavery as late as the 1950s.

On a policy level, there is a persistent strain wherein efforts to aid The People are engineered in such a way wherein they help black people a lot less. It is utterly painful to read about the New Deal being left in the hands of Southern governments which were hostile to black people, and then to today see a significant chunk of health care, again, left in the hands of Southern governments which are hostile to black people. At this point, such efforts no longer require open bigotry. They are simply built into the system.

7) "That the Negro American has survived at all, is extraordinary." That is from the Moynihan report, which neo-liberals are fond of touting, while ignoring the report's lengthy policy recommendations.

8) Get the book. Read it now. Today is too late.

[A tip ‘o the fake doctorate to Steve Sailer.]