Between the World and Me

>essay called The Case for Reparations
>fails to make a case for reparations

wew lad

tfw its a private college in the South

>[historical figure] was black
That's such a childish view of history. Black, as a "race" or culture refers only to the former slaves of the United States, who had their previous West African culture mostly wiped clean. Applying the term to historical figures, much less African figures, is anachronistic to the extreme.

b-but, muh kangs n shieet

wait, then who are Africans, if not black? do they just not have a race?

Not all Africans are black you know.

There are South Africans, Egyptians, Ethiopian Semites, Liberians, and Chinese too.

And besides this, there are numerous sub-races that fall under the Negroid type commonly called "black".

>Some people bring up his essays and books like they're quoting the Bible, and if you disagree you're either a racist, ignorant, or both, and they will refuse to continue discussing things with you.

So many weird cults nowadays. Leftism is basically a big ponzi scheme.

I suppose the case is the history itself so he focused on that.
He mentions that reparations have never even been studied, which I'd say is a fair point.

Chinese Africans? Educate me, please, this sounds interesting. But the post I was replying to claimed that "black" only referred to former American slaves, and I can't even begin to believe that.

he has stated his case on nothing but himself

They have, though; MLK actually called for some type of reparations back in the 1960s. His idea was a welfare program for the poor and disadvantaged (black, white or otherwise), something like $50 billion over ten years. He styles this more as affirmative action rather than a settlement of debts, in order to get all Americans on roughly the same base economic footing.

Reparations is one of those things that comes up every 20 or 25 years or so, the debate happens for a few years, it's over, and Americans then forget they had the debate so that it happens again in another 20 or 25 years. Coates just thinks he's unearthing something new because, as others have said, he's not well-versed in history, and the same goes for his audience.

I was being hyperbolic obviously, but if you get in race-related discussions with some people, they'll say stuff along the lines of, "You would agree with me if you read Coates, he really settled the debate. You probably don't even know about redlining." It's a childish argument along the lines of "educate yourself", and if you bring up facts or ideas that run counter to those of Coates, you're just told that you didn't understand him or that you're blinded by racism. I get that black people in the US have a long history of suffering under slavery, Jim Crow, and some other racist practices, but a lot of other groups have had a hard time and been denied things, we can't set the past right for everyone, and trying to do it for just one group will piss off a lot of other people who have just as legitimate gripes about the past and present.

What? Tons of people from other countries are commonly considered black too, with good reason. Do you think that dark-skinned people of sub-saharan African heritage who are born and raised in, say, the UK, shouldn't be called black?
What on Earth do you expect people to call them, given their colour and resemblance to American, African etc. blacks?

Also have to read this for my university. Where you going, user?

I'd rather not say, we can play the obscure details game and give general hints until one of us is sure that we're going to the same place. It'd be cool to find a fellow Veeky Forums browser at such a small university, though.

"Black" as a racial group groups together so many different groups of people from different environments, with different histories and with different genealogies.

Ex: Congolese Pygmies, the Harere people of Ethiopia, the San people and the inhabitants of Madagascar are lumped into one group because they have similar skin tones.

for a lack of a better term, are they not all of the "negroid" race? as in, most northern europeans are caucasoid, most eastern asians are mongoloid. or is that not an accepted theory anymore?

Yeah, the last Egyptian dynasty were Kushites, dark folks who tried to invade Assyria a couple kings in and got counterinvaded and conquered by Assyrians.

So. Oops.

name the state at least?

It's in Tennessee. Yours?

Minnesota

lmao, nevermind then. any stated reason you have to read this?

not necessarily, think they're gonna do a couple seminars on the book or something. Guess that's what I get for going to a liberal arts school.

So, any examples? Also he never says he is a historian half of his writing is talking about all the history books he reads. And he has a strong preference for books the reference primary sources.

Unless your native american I dont think your gripes are close to blacks, in length or depth. Also what is wrong with trying to fix things especially that which is still broken.

All of them are black, this board is infested by /pol/tards who'll shit on anything because of their retarded conspiracy.

Your not a liberal, and Na-Coates is anti-liberal/Social Democrat. I don't see how economic policies enter into this.
>Muh brown people are subhumans.
>Muh racism doesn't exist.

You're being retardly racist right now, when you assume that just because they're not white, Mexicans will behave that way. It's stupid and patronizing to assume that you know what someone else would do.
No, it doesn't. Blackness ( Afro-Centricity) pretty much has as its basis African History.

While Id agree that blackness is a social construct, this is about as real as any other axiom based value system.

no because it makes no fucking sense. what defines a negroid? don't say features, because among the massive group you call "negroid" there are large differences. this is why race is bullshit, it always comes back down to skin color.

dude, come on. wikipedia, miriam-webster, and dictionary.com all give similar explanations.

>"Negroid is a grouping of human beings historically regarded as a biological taxon.[1] The term has been used by forensic and physical anthropologists to refer to individuals and populations that share certain morphological and skeletal traits that are frequent among most populations in Sub-Saharan Africa.[2][3][4]"

So alright, you've got the whole "not all Africans are negroid" thing, but it does exist as a term. I guess 'black' and 'negroid' don't line up 1:1 with intended meaning, though, so you're right with that.

Still, what the fuck is supposed to define race, if not features? That's like saying "What makes iron different than oxygen? And don't say protons, electrons, and neutrons, because that's bullshit."

Skin color is not the only definition of...Well, anything.

Skin color, hair, religion, language, dietary adaptations, language, culture, skull shape, facial features, these are all involved in separating people of group A from group B.

There is no "Negroid Race". There is no "Caucasoid Race". Arabs, (Mizrahi) Jews, Ethiopians are all Egyptians. They have absolutely no relation to the Nilo-Saharan Nubians, who have no relation to the Indo-Europeans, who have no relation to the Bantu. All of these groups are different and distinct and are not part of any "-oid" grouping.

>Arabs, (Mizrahi) Jews, Ethiopians are all Egyptians
Arabs, (Mizrahi) Jews, Ethiopians, and Egyptians are all Afro-Asiatic peoples*

I botched that badly

This kind of mentality is why I hate americans

OP here, I've found the true Wewuz section.

>"My working theory then held all black people as kings in exile, a nation of original men severed from our original names and our majestic Nubian culture."

He might contradict this later in the book, but I had a laff.

Did you read my post? I said that features were what defined race. The greentext even says the phrase "morphological and skeletal traits". I was arguing with because he said that features weren't a valid definition of race.

>Mansa Musa of Mali was black
West African
>Shabaka of Egypt was black
Nubian
>Yaa Asantewaa of Ashanti
West Africa

This is all true. However, there are vast differences between Nubians, West Africans, Central Africans, Southern Africans (Bantu), and the modern Black American, as well as the urbanised and westernised black population of any developed country. Particularly Nubians are almost certainly near-completely unrelated to the American Wewuzists - Ethiopia traded in slaves for its entire existence up until after WWII, IIRC, but those slaves were being sold eastwards, to Arabia and India. There was some migration between Nubia and Central Africa, as well as south from Nubia to the East African coast obviously, where there were many city states that became rich off trade with the east. North Africa had long since been conquered and resettled by the Arabs at the time of European colonialism; and further was not a significant source of slaves for the Americas. West Africa did have significant Kingdoms, most notably Mali. But to claim Egyptian lineage as a descendant of slaves imported to the Americas is just retarded. Even if somehow your specific family had some sort of crazy connection to an Egyptian trader a few dozen generations back, that's hardly a basis to claim "WE WUZ KANGZ"

But it's gripes about the past or present, reparations isn't about fixing the past, it's about fixing the present. There are many groups and individuals, including Native Americans, blacks, whites and many others, who struggle with poverty and other disadvantages right now. Focusing too much on the past about making decisions in the present breeds resentment among those who are struggling in the present, and telling them "this group's ancestors had it particularly hard so they need help" isn't going to convince the vast majority of people if you don't also address their issues.

see
for annoyance/keks

>Whines about slavery non stop
>names son after African slaver

He's a black nationalist who hides his wewuzism behind crocodile tears in order to win over pathetic libs.

DUDE BLACK BODIES LMAO

takimag.com/article/the_first_rule_of_white_club_steve_sailer/print#axzz4EV0A9bn5

that was a fun read. the author doesn't seem too excited about being culturally enriched tho.

>Hispanics
>reparations
kek

Anybody who brings up the term "black bodies" in conversation does not have an IQ above 110 IMO.

lrb.co.uk/v37/n23/thomas-chatterton-williams/loaded-dice

>When an irritable white woman leaving an Upper West Side cinema pushes the young, ‘dawdling’ Samori and impatiently screams, ‘Come on!’ Coates, who is a tall, imposingly built man, erupts:

>There was the reaction of any parent when a stranger lays a hand on the body of his or her child. And there was my own insecurity in my ability to protect your black body … I was only aware that someone had invoked their right over the body of my son. I turned and spoke to this woman, and my words were hot with all of the moment and all of my history. She shrunk back, shocked. A white man standing nearby spoke up in her defence. I experienced this as his attempt to rescue the damsel from the beast. He had made no such attempt on behalf of my son. And he was now supported by other white people in the assembling crowd. The man came closer. He grew louder. I pushed him away. He said: ‘I could have you arrested!’ I did not care. I told him this, and the desire to do much more was hot in my throat.

>Coates sees this woman not as a morally fallible person with her own neuroses, but as a force of nature, she is ‘the comet’ in his scheme. It doesn’t occur to him that she may not be an avatar of white supremacy but just a nasty person who would have been as likely to push a blonde child or a Chinese one. Coates doesn’t realise that his disproportionate reaction – ‘my words were hot with all of the moment and all of my history’ – is bound to be seen as objectionable to those ‘standing nearby’. And it doesn’t strike him that as long as black people have to be handled with infantilising care – for fear of dredging up barely submerged ancestral pain – we’ll never be equal or free.

The entire review is like this, but essentially, Coates is completely nuts. He's been so isolated from white people that he's lost touch with reality but white leftists suck him off because he write in flowery language. He's uniformed and totally useless, but the sort of people who prop him up either can't actually understand what Coates is saying and assume it's really good, know better but have an agenda to push, or are similarly mental.

>There was the reaction of any parent when a stranger lays a hand on the body of his or her child. And there was my own insecurity in my ability to protect your black body … I was only aware that someone had invoked their right over the body of my son. I turned and spoke to this woman, and my words were hot with all of the moment and all of my history. She shrunk back, shocked. A white man standing nearby spoke up in her defence. I experienced this as his attempt to rescue the damsel from the beast. He had made no such attempt on behalf of my son. And he was now supported by other white people in the assembling crowd. The man came closer. He grew louder. I pushed him away. He said: ‘I could have you arrested!’ I did not care. I told him this, and the desire to do much more was hot in my throat.

Since I didn't mark it well, this is an exert from Coate's book.

OP, give his review a read, it's a nice take-down of Coates by someone capable of penetrating the fog he throws up by means of being verbose.

This is what I thought about Coates. He's clearly a talented writer, but his worldview is far too myopic to be writing about history, current events, politics, or any other nonfiction. He would be better served writing fiction, and from what I understand, he is doing that now, doing Marvel Comics (Black Panther I'm guessing?).

Frankly, he's so delusional, and enough people still look to him as some sort of authority, that I'd rather he not write at all.

I've done that now, and you're right, its some good perspective. Now my issue becomes answering the prompt from my university, but that's gonna be more fun that it is challenging.

Vanderbilt?

>Are any of these statements true?
Yes.

They were all black, even the Egyptian. That's a foreign nigger pharaoh.

LOL! Wewuzism!

Compare what he wants his son to feel to Hitler's delusions of victimhood to the Jews, and talk about how you can make the campus better by ending the culture of victimhood. Feeling done wrong is extremely powerful and very dangerous.

Using that review I gave you I'm sure you can go into how Coates is basically full of shit and misdirected victimhood can be extremely dangerous.

Note that the guy he named his son after was a slave owner, talk about how he's raising him to be insecure so that he'll make unrealistic demands of white people to give him shit for things they never did to him.

Perhaps bring up how he wants reparations as an apology for white supremacy, but also considers white supremacy inherent to America, and how although he doesn't directly state this, the only way in his mind that white supremacy can be ended is if America is brought to an end. This will sound like a stretch so you may ignore it if you feel it weakens your argument.

Between the fact that his education doesn't qualify him to speak on anything with real authority (he isn't a sociologist or historian or criminologist or lawyer, he doesn't know shit about any relevant topics beyond his very limited personal experience) and the fact that he doesn't actually know any white people, this is just a monument to how his education has made him insecure that he's dressed up with $10 words.

I doubt anyone actually cares, so you may as well be honest about the fact that you know he's full of shit.

Non-American here. From a Latin American country with a huge black population.

According to U.S. census data, blacks comprise 13% of the population of the United States. How, then, can they have such a monopoly on public discourse on race issues? Why do people have to read inflammatory racial pamphlets by black authors as if they were actually important? Why every institution, sport, cultural artifact must have at least 50% black members in order to be considered diverse when they just aren't that numerous?

Really, the history of the United States is bigger than the history of the enslavement of Africans. They are just not that important and the more the intelligentsia indulge their self-worth by making shit like Coates required reading at universities, the more unrealistic demands they will make.

the real question isnt weather its true, it probably is, numerous african rulers were in fact of dark skin, as one would expect on a continent of darkskined people

the real question is what in a hundred hells makes that unfortunate author think he can identify with those historical figures?

skin color?

if the author is a 'african-american' then he is a descendant of slaves, and those people wouldnt see him as fit to wipe their feet on his face if they steped in goatshit, unles he washed his face first at least

dont afrocentrist understand that all those fucking ''''''''''kangs'n shiet'''''''' were just motherfuckers who ruled the lands, themselves being slavers, slaveowners and slavetraders, dont they understand that their misfortunate ancestors themselves were basicaly export product sold for the profit of those very same individuals, and that the intensity and methods of conquest, domination, exploatation and subjugation only get worse the farther one goes down into african history?

how come they dont ask reparations from the nigerian state considering it is a historical descendant of the same kingdoms and fiefdoms that actualy captured, enslaved and exported them in the first place?

>How, then, can they have such a monopoly on public discourse on race issues? Why do people have to read inflammatory racial pamphlets by black authors as if they were actually important? Why every institution, sport, cultural artifact must have at least 50% black members in order to be considered diverse when they just aren't that numerous?
You know the answer.

Some pretty based ideas for a response, honestly. However, the student-faculty ratio at this particular school is about 4:1. So there's a probable chance that the advisor who reads my response will approach me about it as well, regardless of what I say. I like your ideas, I'll probably have to make them sound softer to avoid 'muh feelins' arguments with the people who grade my work.

If you're worried you could try to bring up a different black author who isn't as full of shit as Coates is to suggest as a replacement.

I wouldn't have a good suggestion because I'm a racist, but I'm sure it can't be that hard.