The Ta-Nehisi Coates Chronicles: Episode 2a; Workers of the World; and The Paul Coates Chronicles, Episode 1

My family is slightly obsessed with the Coates family, and other thoughts.

Workers of the World, Divide

I have a review out in Airmail of Timothy Shenk’s new book Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics. Short version of my review is that I liked the book okay. It doesn’t quite have a core to its narrative or analysis to anchor it as an aesthetic object, which I why I’m not more bullish on it, but it does a very good job of making the case that the standard explanations we leftists and liberals reach for, when we try to understand why social democratic politics have struggled so much over the past few decades to sustain an electoral majority, don’t seem to cut it. I write:

The obvious temptation, for left-wing and liberal writers looking to explain why their parties have lost support among workers, is to find someone nefarious to blame. The party politicians sold out to big money. Activists sacrificed class politics on the altar of identity politics. Corporations and rich conservatives devised and funded a long and ultimately successful war of ideas and power against activist government and organized labor. Etc.

There are elements of truth in each of these stories, but Shenk wisely resists the temptation to accept the implicit premise of all of them, which is that working people naturally belong to the left, and that only the intervention of bad actors prevents this natural alignment. Instead, he makes the case that a more structural shift is taking place. The left has struggled to hold on to working people because, among other reasons, “working people” has lost a great deal of coherence and gravitational pull as a political identity.

As it happens there are two other quite good reviews of the book that have been published recently.

Geoff Shullenberger

writes about it in Compact, and Ben Metzner writes about it in The New Republic. Of the two, I prefer Shullenberger’s review over Metzner’s, but both repay reading. After you’ve read mine first, of course. :)

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The Message

In 2013, the well-known but not yet celebrity writer Ta-Nehisi Coates came to Austin to give a talk at the university where I happen to work. I remember finding out about the event only at the last minute, on the day it was happening, and being surprised that it wasn’t a bigger deal. Coates was still a year or so away from publishing “The Case For Reparations,” which was the piece that really rocketed him to fame, but he was already a staff writer at The Atlantic and pretty clearly the young Black political writer of the moment. The room was full to the gills, but it was a smaller room than I would have expected, given the charge around him.

Coates’s topic was “The U.S. Political Scene and the Emancipation Proclamation 150 Years Later,” but for the life of me I can’t remember a thing he said in his lecture. What I do remember are two things. One was the force of his presence. He held the room in a way that I haven’t encountered too many times in my life, and he did so without being a particularly amazing speaker in the conventional sense. He just said what he had to say in a very down to earth way, without any great style or noticeable flourishes. You could feel, however, the vitality and originality of his mind in everything he said. It was electric.

One comparison that comes to mind for me, in understanding that kind of charisma, is the experience I’ve had in reading George Orwell, the great master of the plain style of Anglo-American essay writing. It feels, reading Orwell at his best, as though he simply sees the world more clearly, with less clutter, than the rest of us, that what we’re getting from him is the truth unvarnished, and though it is plain in its wrapping, it has an elemental force. Listening to Coates was like that, like he had a more direct conduit to the source than the rest of us. 

The other thing that I remember about that evening, and this cuts slightly against what I just said, is that Coates was significantly more generous and open when responding to those in the audience whose questions were coming from the left. You could see his amazing mind unfolding and engaging when he talked to them, even when what they asked was poorly framed or thought through. With the few of us whose questions were of a different sort—not conservative at all, but not left–the tone was different. He was polite, but he wasn’t interested in taking in what we said and putting it into the mix, in his brain, with everything else, allowing it to marinate and germinate. The guard rails were up. Our ideas were to be fended off, protected against.

I bring this up, now, because this has been a pattern with Coates, for a long time, in how he takes in or deflects critical perspectives, and it is the tragic flaw of his new collection, The Message, which I’ve just finished reading.

I’m planning to write more about the book, and its strengths and weaknesses, in future posts, but if you want to get a sense of what I mean, listen to Coates’s recent conversation with Ezra Klein.

Excerpts from the podcasts have been pulled out, by bad faith actors, to make Coates sound much worse and more incurious than he remotely deserves. He still has a mind to be reckoned with. He still has fascinating things to say. And the conversation, as a whole, is a great example of how illuminating it can be when two smart people who disagree with each other are willing to engage in good faith.

It is clear, though, in listening to how Coates deals with Klein’s challenges to his narrative of Israel and Palestine, that he has chosen not to really engage with critiques that might trouble his conclusions, and that his thinking suffers as a result of that. His writing too, as two recent reviews of The Message conclude. In the Washington Post,

becca rothfeld

writes:

The Message is frustratingly abstract, full of personal revelations and grand pronouncements without much in the way of concrete (or especially stylish)observation. Few of its arguments are unfamiliar, and it is full of platitudes that do not shock but dull.

And in the New Yorker, Jay Caspian Kang (of Time To Say Goodbye) writes:

Coates is still a courageous and important figure, but, on a formal, stylistic level, it’s hard to reconcile the humility required for critical writing with the grandiosity of his recent prose, which too often feels turgid and sanctified. The blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates would have read ten books about Israel and Palestine and reflected on each in his inimitably brilliant way. The oracular Ta-Nehisi Coates would have you believe that there is some great truth to be gleaned from a writer discovering late in life what so many others, including countless Black activists and thinkers, already knew.

More to say on this, including on the parts of the book that aren’t about Israel and Palestine, so to be continued…

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The Paul Coates Chronicles, Episode 1

Over at Arc, my brother

Mark Oppenheimer

has a new piece looking at the independent press founded and run by Ta-Nehisi Coates’s father, Paul Coates, and its not-so-great record of publishing anti-Semitic and homophobic writers. Mark writes:

on Sep. 27, Jewish Insider published an article by reporter Matthew Kassel, with the headline “Paul Coates, father of journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, republishing antisemitic screed ‘The Jewish Onslaught.’” “But even as Coates has been celebrated for nurturing such contemporary authors as Walter Mosley and reissuing works by W.E.B. Du Bois, among other luminaries,” Kassel wrote, “his company has also recently chosen to spotlight an antisemitic screed that seeks to uphold a widely discredited conspiracy theory alleging Jewish domination of the Atlantic slave trade.”

…On Oct. 11, two weeks after his Jewish Insider article, Kassel reported on X that Black Classic had removed The Jewish Onslaught from its online store.

…At this point in the story, one could imagine that this was all something of an accident—that, in acquiring Tony Martin’s back catalogue of books, which are in fact mostly Marcus Garvey–related, Coates thoughtlessly included Martin’s The Jewish Onslaught. Even the fulsome blurb, whitewashing the book’s antisemitism, could have been ported over from an old Majority Press website, perhaps by a clueless intern. At a small press, all hands on deck, mistakes get made.

Except that the closer one looks at Black Classic’s store, the more problematic texts one finds.

Mark, as is his wont, has stepped into a really tricky area here.

The reason that Paul Coates is in the news at all, given that he has never been a major intellectual player in the discourse, is that he’s being awarded a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation, the folks who also gave a National Book Award to his son for Between the World and Me.

I think among journalists there’s been a gentleman’s agreement, to this point, not to look too closely at Paul Coates’s work product, though I’m sure there have been suspicions that some of the books his press has published have unsavory elements. If you know anything about the outsider world of books from which Black Classics Press is drawing its texts to reissue, you can be pretty sure that it will include some works that have nasty ideas about race, gender, etc. But Paul Coates hasn’t been the story; his son is. And it’s bad practice to go after low visibility people in general, and really bad practice to use people’s families to score political points against them.

Now, however, the National Book Foundation has made Paul Coates the story, by celebrating him as an important part of the discourse, and so the flaws and vulnerabilities that were off limits when he was an underground figure are now fair game. On top of that, his son has recently ventured into the mix on the issue of Israel and Palestine. So here we are.

I’m going to have Mark on the podcast soon to talk about the article, as well as about the complicated influence that I believe Paul Coates’s career and beliefs have had on his son’s writing (see above). So stay tuned. This is all such incredibly fascinating stuff.