Will you still be a pussy for $200?

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

So no actual quotes from Coates then?

Also I never called Loury or McWhorter "Uncle Toms." I did however note that you yourself seem to have a rather peculiar habit of only finding black conservatives interesting, insightful, or agreeable, especially for someone who is so resistant to being labeled conservative or partisan at all. Is it merely the case that Loury, McWhorter, et. al. are that much more insightful and rigorous than those that disagree with them, or is it instead because they flatter your own views?

I was hoping we were working with the same recall. Good job compadre.

I find Loury and McWhorter to be reasonable people. Probably some of who I assume you mean with "et al" (I'm thinking Sowell and Larry Elder) less so. But I don't necessarily share their views, certainly not all of them. And I don't think it's peculiar at all to find reasonable people to be more interesting than ideologues who just want to scream in my face.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

It's just really interesting that what you call reasonable people rather than ideologues in terms of black thinkers nevertheless fall exclusively on one part of the ideological spectrum. Whereas someone like Coates is framed as a person who hates all whites (and wants to scream in your face?), despite the still missing quotes to actually substantiate that charge.

I'm sure you're aware of Coates's oeuvre. If you don't think he hates white people, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Pretty lame copout. I think Coates is fatalistic about the persistence of white supremacy in America in a way that isn't especially helpful to solidarity or political action, but to reduce that to outright hatred of all white people is ridiculously reductive and strikes me as either an outright refusal to engage with his work or a bad faith misreading.

It's not a copout at all. You're dancing around him because he's black which I consider racism in itself. But you're the liberal he's appealing to. He doesn't make his money writing for black people. Him being "fatalistic about the persistence of white supremacy in America" tells you everything you need to know about his feelings toward white people. At the core of that is a hatred of people for who they are rather than for anything they have done.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Ah, here it is. I'm the real racist and ideologue merely for disagreeing with the silly charge that Coates categorically hates all white people, whereas you're just being reasonable and objective when you promote the likes of definitely not ideological people like Loury/McWhorter/Hughes/whoever else wants to shift the focus away from systemic racism.

For the record I went back and forth with Nas a whole bunch during the 2016 primary over Coates' criticism of Sanders and specifically made the point that Coates fatalism appeals (not by design IMO) to white upper class Atlantic readers who want to feel good about themselves for recognizing white supremacy whilst doing nothing to actually combat it because it's inevitable anyway (thus his article's appeal and promotion by Hillary supporters, despite Coates himself actually still supporting Sanders). Once again though, pessimism about the willingness of white people to actually do any work to challenge systemic racism does not entail outright hatred of all white people, nor does it entail hatred of them on the basis of who they are rather than what they do (or fail to do).

Zeph, you’re not racist. It would be silly to think or imply that about you.

Sit down and have a few drinks with Jorr. You’ll realize he’s not the enemy. His address is Wrigleyville.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

He's way off if that is indeed what he thinks. The number of whites who willingly go into social services dwarfs any other population, even to scale.

Do you think the act of going into social services is sufficient to say one is fighting systemic racism? Do you think the proportion of whites in social services is a better metric for determining pessimism/optimism on this question than the proportion of whites overall who actually support current social services (never mind the significantly expanded kind of reparations program Coates advocates for)?

I have to laugh that you think you are actually being clever here. Your original point was "real historians" back Coates. Whatever the fuck that means. You can't approach a discussion of the ideas so you attack people. That guy is a gimmick. If you think Coates is intelligent well then I'm sorry you hate yourself and can't see through how transparently empty his ideas are.

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Why are only 14 percent of black CPS 11th-graders proficient in English?

If you believe in "systemic racism" you believe in the boogyman, and there is really no hope for you to be objective about anything.

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Why are only 14 percent of black CPS 11th-graders proficient in English?

Would you stop trying to be peacemaker all the time? Confrontation is okay, denis.

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White virtue signalers are the worst. Most reasonable black people I know will openly admit that part of the solution is for black culture to change and for the community to take accountability for the lack of fathers in black neighborhoods. Even those who believe there is a lot of systemic racism still agree to this.

Likewise, most of the Mexican people I know are against illegal immigration. In fact, some find it insulting that others think they would automatically be in favor of illegal immigration. They worked hard to get here and think everyone should have to do the same. I was just talking to a first generation Mexican the other night who was fully in favor of a wall and thought that the media's portrayal of Trump was sickening.

The only group who mostly won't admit that there is any culpability for these groups are obnoxious white liberals. They hate themselves so much that they blame everything on whites even while the minorities themselves admit that it's a two-way street. It's embarrassing.

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Coates actually engages with the relevant historical and social scientific histories of things like discrimination. Whereas Hughes simply constructs strawmen versions of anyone who takes the racial wealth gap seriously and offers a hilarious ahistorical picture of things like the Civil War. Which of course is why there's hardly been as much of a backlash about Coates on the facts (rather than his normative prescriptions) as Hughes has already generated.

I'd say white racists are worse than white virtue signalers, and there are a whole lot of white people who think it's a one-way street in the other direction (or merely pay lip service to the idea of a two-way street while of course constantly emphasizing only the cultural and never the structural).

First of all, the original knock on the piece by Hughes was that he lacked credentials. Obviously that's something that can't be said about Loury or McWhorter or Sowell. So it isn't really about academic credentials at all. Whether you admit it or not, you're trying to "Uncle Tom" these guys. I think you should own it rather than hint at it.

As far as the idea that Coates hates white people being silly is concerned, I think you're kidding yourself about a guy you like. Which is his entire gimmick. He gets white liberals at cocktail parties to talk about how brilliant he is. I can say good things about Coates, something I haven't seen you do with those to whom you are obviously ideologically opposed in spite of your constant reluctance to commit. The man can really turn a phrase. He really did make a case for reparations. But most of what has come after that is just a screed against the country that has allowed him to make a fortune and the white people who are enabling his "oppression".

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

LOL, no. It's just who I am.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

He "actually engages". You are saying a whole bunch of nothing. Coates is a fraud of singular-causation history.

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Why are only 14 percent of black CPS 11th-graders proficient in English?

I had this very thought the other night when I was watching the No Passport Required on PBS. Marcus Samuelsson was going around to various Mexican restaurants in Chicago. The show was purportedly about food, but seemed more like anti-Trump propaganda. Samuelsson was talking to Carlos Gaytan, formerly of Mexique, and he used a bunch of loaded language that was clearly designed to get Carlos to rail against the current administration. Now maybe Carlos is just a shrewd businessman who doesn't want to unnecessarily offend about a third of his potential clientele or maybe he doesn't see things the way Samuelsson does. I don't know, but the thought did occur to me that Samuelsson was making quite an assumption based on nothing more than the fact that Carlos was originally from Mexico.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Hughes does of course still lack credentials, though that wasn't the charge I specifically made in the first place. And of course he demonstrates those lack of credentials by constructing woeful strawmen, demonstrating little unbiased engagement with the relevant literature aside from constructing said strawmen, and spouting off the same conservative cliches that have been used for literally over a century now to blame black people for their own situation.

You seem rather annoyed that I didn't actually call anyone an Uncle Tom at all here, so you're now going to treat my disagreement with black conservatives as the equivalent of doing so. The only reason I even brought up McWhorter and Loury in conjunction with Hughes in the first place was to make the point that your views on black thinkers appear thoroughly ideological, despite your protestations to the contrary.


Once again, I don't particularly care for Coates much and have said so repeatedly here. I think it's a bit odd how high a bar you've constructed for accusations that thinkers you like are racist, but have little hesitation reaching the conclusion about Coates here, despite the lack of anything substantive indicating that his pessimism about structural racism automatically entails he hates all white people.

I also think it's rather amusing how you don't see how the black thinkers you like are even more susceptible to the audience attack you're launching on Coates here. Do you think Hughes' piece was primarily written for black people to shape up their culture or instead as comfort to readers of Quillette like yourself?

I don't know anything about Hughes other than that he wrote an article "combining his own personal experience, his family's views, and social science" that you don't like. You apparently think it's wonderful when Coates does the same just as Coates thinks it's great when a pseudo-scientist like Malcolm Gladwell reinforces his notions.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainme ... acks/6891/

And Glen Loury and John McWhorter don't make a living talking about race.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

This entire post is a non-sequitur. I have no idea why you want to shift the conversation to personal biographies when your entire critique about Coates was more about who his writing appeals to. And I have asked you the very basic question about who do you think is reading Quillette, other than totally not tribal white people like yourself? If Coates' writing only flatters white readers, it seems to me that charge can apply equally to the black conservative thinkers you like as well.

I likewise have no idea what you think is particularly damning about the Gladwell passage or Coates' citation of it, particularly since it's an actual personal experience with a small amount of social science thrown in rather than a poor attempt at refuting people who study the racial wealth gap.

Other than discrediting everything and everyone that dares to suggest that racism happens to exist what are you really adding?

_________________

Yep. Racism exists but nothing is ever racist.

_________________

Here is yet another example of what racism looks like.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... es/430971/

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One of my friends who is of Mexican heritage will go absolutely berzerk over that stuff, and I don't blame him. Earlier this year, he said that some white woman accused him of being racist against Mexicans because he supported Trump. When he informed her that he was, in fact, Mexican, she did not change her tune at all. She advised him that he was STILL racist against Mexicans. I can think of few things that are more condescending than that.

LTG, if you want an example of racism, that's one. Some white people think minorities are so dumb they can't even have opinions about their own people.

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