I remember reading, years ago, a profile on Chinese-American rapper MC Jin written by none other than Coates himself. Coates, writing in 2004, seemed exhilarated that a “Quick-Witted, Egg-Roll-Joke-Making, Insult-Hurling Chinese-American Rapper” was demolishing black rappers in battles. Then I read Between the World and Me and saw that he did a complete 180. Fascinating to watch play out.
There’s also a mention of Hsa Hsu in there... didn’t know Hsu had been in the writing scene all the way back then.
Interesting. I haven't delved into his pre-2008 stuff at all, but it does scan with what I was saying, I think, though it expands the aperture of his engagement with other races.
I believe this accurately captures many of the nuances of Coates's work, but I'm afraid that liberals are simply too paralyzed by their own anxieties to grapple with, or even to acknowledge, any of the shortcomings of Coates's work. Yes, every writer has shortcomings, even Ta-Nehisi Coates. Unfortunately, liberals' self-inflicted failure to think outside the self-prescribed boundaries of their own ideology leaves them unable to comprehend, much less answer, any of the obvious questions that immediately come to mind when a non-liberal reader encounters Coates's work for the first time.
But the problem is that those reviews don't seem to get Coates at all either. They just substitute a blanket contempt for him and his readers instead of an adulation. I think he's an extraordinary talent, which of course doesn't mean that he's infallible or even right about most of the big things. But to pretend he's just a grifter or something seems just as dumb as acting like he's a prophet. IMO anyway.
The career of Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic was an interesting bridge between early 2000s blogging and the proliferation of newsletters and Substacks we can observe today. Which is to say, he led the growth of auto-didact writing/opining about culture for a passionate niche audience *that is willing to pay*. Many conservative writers (and a few leftists like Cornel West) found him infuriatingly overrated by liberal Atlantic readers, but he was a prelude to everyone getting their own version of that. There was a technological shift going on from older established mediums to intellectual niches (at best) and sensationalism and pandering (at worst.)
Of course, the content of his writing in addition to its medium signified the radicalization of national American politics following Obama's reelection. There was a demand for subversive authenticity and telling it like it is, which people are only now really getting sick of. People would cringe at Obama's earnest 2004 DNC address in 2015, but probably won't in 2025. I don't think of Coates as an intellectual phenomenon so much as a cultural one of that period (let's call it the long 2010s), like the Dark Knight Trilogy. The Coates language of "black bodies and spaces" was a bit like Nolan's screenplay of a playboy millionaire breaking the rules to fight terrorists, it was enticingly dark and brooding then, but people are over it now.
Well I think for me an important distinction has to be drawn between early and later Coates. I thought and continue to think that early Coates was just brilliant on multiple levels, a real generational talent. Of course that intersects with broader trends, and people liked him for all sorts of reasons, good and bad, but just in terms of assessing him as a writer I thought he was extraordinary. And in fact not radical or radical chic in the way you're suggesting, but more old fashioned New Deal/Great Society/Civil Rights Movement liberal in terms of his politics and vibe. My problem with West's take on him has always been that West doesn't seem to have much in the way of literary taste; it's all politics. To reject Coates because his politics are too liberal is to apply the wrong set of standards to someone who defines himself primarily as an artist. The question, for me anyway, is whether the writing is good.
Later Coates I'm hesitant to comment on too decisively because I've set myself the goal of really re-reading his later stuff and then writing about it, but he very clearly did turn toward more radical.
I'd say it's a mix of Butler and Eve Sedgwick for gender stuff (I'm tempted to say that Butler provides the philosophical framework and Sedgewick's actual positions are more important), and I look forward to future posts (maybe a pod episode?) on Coates! I really esteem a lot of his work (his article on black conservatism is something I still go back to again and again) but I haven't followed his career as closely as some, and frankly I hadn't realized until quite recently that he'd fallen out of favor with... whatever political tendency we identify ourselves as: Heterodox liberals? Alienated centrists? Left-neoconservatives? (that last one is a joke!)
I have a pod episode on the calendar! Probably be out in mid-October! Heterodox left-liberal works for me. I think after 2014 or so, maybe a bit earlier than that, Coates leaned pretty heavily into a pretty pessimistic narrative of race/racism in America that I could never get with. He's also been a critic of the kind of class-first social democratic orientation that is where I tend to land. What's weird about him, at least to me, is that whenever I hear him interviewed he often says things that I find interesting and nuanced in the way that I found his early blogging and writing nuanced and interesting, but it no longer seems to make it into his writing. Also, as far as I know he hasn't done any nonfiction writing in years, has been working on comics and a novel and I think a documentary series on MLK. I have a fantasy that a deep immersion in MLK's life and work will bring him back toward where I am on race stuff (which is basically where I take MLK to have been).
I look forward to it! Yes there's a strange disconnection between Coates deep pessimism and the use to which his works have been put by activists and a certain kind of basically optimistic person. On MLK-I'm sure someone has written on this already, but I can't help but be fascinated by the way he's become a synecdoche for any given speaker's views on race, in much the way Orwell has come to stand for a kind of denuded antiauthoritarianism!
I remember reading, years ago, a profile on Chinese-American rapper MC Jin written by none other than Coates himself. Coates, writing in 2004, seemed exhilarated that a “Quick-Witted, Egg-Roll-Joke-Making, Insult-Hurling Chinese-American Rapper” was demolishing black rappers in battles. Then I read Between the World and Me and saw that he did a complete 180. Fascinating to watch play out.
There’s also a mention of Hsa Hsu in there... didn’t know Hsu had been in the writing scene all the way back then.
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/magazine/just-another-quickwitted-eggrolljokemaking-insulthurling.html
Interesting. I haven't delved into his pre-2008 stuff at all, but it does scan with what I was saying, I think, though it expands the aperture of his engagement with other races.
Great ending.
Yeah I was immoderately proud of that.
I believe this accurately captures many of the nuances of Coates's work, but I'm afraid that liberals are simply too paralyzed by their own anxieties to grapple with, or even to acknowledge, any of the shortcomings of Coates's work. Yes, every writer has shortcomings, even Ta-Nehisi Coates. Unfortunately, liberals' self-inflicted failure to think outside the self-prescribed boundaries of their own ideology leaves them unable to comprehend, much less answer, any of the obvious questions that immediately come to mind when a non-liberal reader encounters Coates's work for the first time.
https://www.takimag.com/article/the_first_rule_of_white_club_steve_sailer/
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/beyond-hope-beyond-change/
But the problem is that those reviews don't seem to get Coates at all either. They just substitute a blanket contempt for him and his readers instead of an adulation. I think he's an extraordinary talent, which of course doesn't mean that he's infallible or even right about most of the big things. But to pretend he's just a grifter or something seems just as dumb as acting like he's a prophet. IMO anyway.
The career of Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic was an interesting bridge between early 2000s blogging and the proliferation of newsletters and Substacks we can observe today. Which is to say, he led the growth of auto-didact writing/opining about culture for a passionate niche audience *that is willing to pay*. Many conservative writers (and a few leftists like Cornel West) found him infuriatingly overrated by liberal Atlantic readers, but he was a prelude to everyone getting their own version of that. There was a technological shift going on from older established mediums to intellectual niches (at best) and sensationalism and pandering (at worst.)
Of course, the content of his writing in addition to its medium signified the radicalization of national American politics following Obama's reelection. There was a demand for subversive authenticity and telling it like it is, which people are only now really getting sick of. People would cringe at Obama's earnest 2004 DNC address in 2015, but probably won't in 2025. I don't think of Coates as an intellectual phenomenon so much as a cultural one of that period (let's call it the long 2010s), like the Dark Knight Trilogy. The Coates language of "black bodies and spaces" was a bit like Nolan's screenplay of a playboy millionaire breaking the rules to fight terrorists, it was enticingly dark and brooding then, but people are over it now.
Well I think for me an important distinction has to be drawn between early and later Coates. I thought and continue to think that early Coates was just brilliant on multiple levels, a real generational talent. Of course that intersects with broader trends, and people liked him for all sorts of reasons, good and bad, but just in terms of assessing him as a writer I thought he was extraordinary. And in fact not radical or radical chic in the way you're suggesting, but more old fashioned New Deal/Great Society/Civil Rights Movement liberal in terms of his politics and vibe. My problem with West's take on him has always been that West doesn't seem to have much in the way of literary taste; it's all politics. To reject Coates because his politics are too liberal is to apply the wrong set of standards to someone who defines himself primarily as an artist. The question, for me anyway, is whether the writing is good.
Later Coates I'm hesitant to comment on too decisively because I've set myself the goal of really re-reading his later stuff and then writing about it, but he very clearly did turn toward more radical.
I'd say it's a mix of Butler and Eve Sedgwick for gender stuff (I'm tempted to say that Butler provides the philosophical framework and Sedgewick's actual positions are more important), and I look forward to future posts (maybe a pod episode?) on Coates! I really esteem a lot of his work (his article on black conservatism is something I still go back to again and again) but I haven't followed his career as closely as some, and frankly I hadn't realized until quite recently that he'd fallen out of favor with... whatever political tendency we identify ourselves as: Heterodox liberals? Alienated centrists? Left-neoconservatives? (that last one is a joke!)
I have a pod episode on the calendar! Probably be out in mid-October! Heterodox left-liberal works for me. I think after 2014 or so, maybe a bit earlier than that, Coates leaned pretty heavily into a pretty pessimistic narrative of race/racism in America that I could never get with. He's also been a critic of the kind of class-first social democratic orientation that is where I tend to land. What's weird about him, at least to me, is that whenever I hear him interviewed he often says things that I find interesting and nuanced in the way that I found his early blogging and writing nuanced and interesting, but it no longer seems to make it into his writing. Also, as far as I know he hasn't done any nonfiction writing in years, has been working on comics and a novel and I think a documentary series on MLK. I have a fantasy that a deep immersion in MLK's life and work will bring him back toward where I am on race stuff (which is basically where I take MLK to have been).
I look forward to it! Yes there's a strange disconnection between Coates deep pessimism and the use to which his works have been put by activists and a certain kind of basically optimistic person. On MLK-I'm sure someone has written on this already, but I can't help but be fascinated by the way he's become a synecdoche for any given speaker's views on race, in much the way Orwell has come to stand for a kind of denuded antiauthoritarianism!
Very true about MLK. The best stuff I've read about him recently is by Brandon Terry, who is pretty brilliant.