Someone told me that this was "so heartbreaking and infuriating and important"

I like his work.

This is likely his best book. It gets perhaps a little too much burn because Coates has stepped into the "anointed public black intellectual" role (more on that here:publicbooks.org/nonfiction/black-intellectuals-and-white-audiences), but he's unquestionably talented.

New Jim Crow is also very good, but The Men We Reaped is really the best if your looking for a work by a young & talented black author. Jesmyn Ward is going to go on to do incredible things even though her first novel was kinda trash

My friend keeps trying to get me to read it, and I might read it begrudgingly just so I'm not being one-sided about my views, but Coates to me seems like one of the bad nigs who sees everything in terms of the eternal victim stance of the Other.

I'm worried that it will be all rage against the machine and no actual discussion of how the black community has deep fucking problems in its own right.

>bad nigs

/pol/ please leave and never return, I beg of you, this is not the board for your kind.

...

>putting Freud on the same level as Sarkeesian

the question was 'what did you think?', not 'what preconceptions about this book and author do you have, regardless of whether you've read it or not'

I'm black.

I'm throwing in more with the OP by asking a similar question, not trying to help OP. I won't be able to read it for a while, so I'm wondering if anyone could clarify what kind of nigger Coates is (the whiny "wahhhh whitey is evil" kind, or the kind that might contain that sentiment/statement but which is not defined by it). I'm only interested in the latter.

Hope this helps you.

>asking a similar question

if by asking a similar question you mean, shitting out your unsolicited opinions on books you haven't read, sure.

Well, I've seen plenty of Coates' other stuff, like editorials and talks, which should have been implicit in my first post. Also implicit was my question: Does he move beyond this shallow viewpoint in his actual books?

I read "Americanah" by Adichie because it was supposed to be an illuminating picture of the black experience by a good writer.

The strongest point for the "white supremacy still exists" camp was Redlining for bank loans (denying loan applications from blacks). It's tragic for the black borrowers who have their shit together, but it's done not because the banks hate black people, it's because black people don't pay back enough loans to make the practice worthwhile. Banks don't say no to money.

I dislike this "blame whitey" trend because it amounts to heaping blame for other people's lives on me, and telling me that my family and I don't deserve what we have. Fuck that, fuck you, fuck Coates and everyone like him. And double fuck the white people who go for this shit.

I digress, they're works are not worth your time, attention, or effort. I just couldn't think of another waste of space of an author so late.

I don't know, How about the Chomsky, Green, and Meyers? Is that better?

>Does he move beyond this shallow viewpoint in his actual books?
No, shallow is something I would put to all his work. It's actually a pretty good way to describe it! Constantly disingenuous, and I can feel the hipster "urban" smug when he writes. Pure sophistry.

On the chance he doesn't actually believe what he's saying, he's just a schlock artist selling shit to dumb SJWs, and dindus.

You'll like it as much as you agree with his viewpoint. Even if you disagree, it might still be worth it to know the arguments and examples being used in the discourse on the issues he confronts.

He's pushed by the chosen people to tell whitey how evil he be.

Why do we even have to humour him by reading his work?

I liked the part where his emotional climax of experiencing racism in a white supremacist culture culminated in his very rich black friend being shot and killed by a lone black police officer near a rich black neighborhood

>Coates to me seems like one of the bad nigs who sees everything in terms of the eternal victim stance of the Other.

Okay! If that's the case, you're just as dumb and uninformed as everyone else on this board who rags on him.

it's infuriating because Coates is a cowardly and small minded man...it's basically "resentment: the book", of course if Coates had actually read Nietzsche in college instead of a bunch of stupid black fantasy history like Cheikh Anta Diop or whatever, he might have realized what a lil' slave he is. It just shows how self-defeating in-bred black nationalist shit is. if i was paranoid I'd think the power that be selected Coates to be a star precisely because he will help keep another generation of African-Americans mentally enslaved. Not only is Coates unlikable as a person, but his ideas are poor.

I have found that, in the African-American oral tradition, if the words are enunciated eloquently enough, no one examines the meaning for definitive truth.

—Biracial novelist Mat Johnson, Loving Day, 2015

America’s foremost public intellectual, Ta-Nehisi Coates, has published a new best-selling minibook, Between the World and Me, that’s interesting for what it reveals about a forbidden subject: the psychological damage done by pervasive black violence to soft, sensitive, bookish souls such as Coates. The Atlantic writer’s black radical parents forced the frightened child to grow up in Baltimore’s black community, where he lived in constant terror of the other boys. Any white person who wrote as intensely about how blacks scared him would be career-crucified out of his job, so it’s striking to read Coates recounting at length how horrible it is to live around poor blacks if you are a timid, retiring sort.

Coates’ lack of physical courage is a common and perfectly reasonable trait, although writers typically cover it up. For example, Hunter S. Thompson transmuted his recurrent paranoia about impending carnage (which beset him even in venues as family-friendly as the Circus-Circus casino) into hallucinatory comedy in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Coates, however, is humorless. Worse, his fans have encouraged him to believe he is the second coming of James Baldwin, egging him on to indulge in a prophetic-hysteric-postmodern style that is easier to parody (e.g., just repeat endlessly the phrase “black bodies” and the distractingly stupid formulation “people who believe they are white”) than it is to endure over even the course of Coates’ very short second autobiography. (As with the president, both of Coates’ books are memoirs.)

White writers have seldom had the courage to confess their fear of black violence so fully, at least not since 1963, when Norman Podhoretz responded to the hullabaloo over James Baldwin with an essay about growing up in Brooklyn in the 1930s and 1940s:

And so for a long time I was puzzled to think that…Negroes were supposed to be persecuted when it was the Negroes who were doing the only persecuting I knew about—and doing it, moreover, to me…. A city boy’s world is contained within three or four square blocks, and in my world it was the whites, the Italians and Jews, who feared the Negroes, not the other way around. The Negroes were tougher than we were, more ruthless, and on the whole they were better athletes…. Yet my sister’s opinions, like print, were sacred, and when she told me about exploitation and economic forces I believed her. I believed her, but I was still afraid of Negroes.

In the 52 years since Podhoretz’s “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” overwhelming evidence has piled up validating the prescience of his boyhood traumas at the hands of black juvenile delinquents. But it’s precisely because the scale of black violence over the past half century is so blatantly obvious that white intellectuals have been largely self-silenced on the topic—even as the most cunning minds among today’s liberal whites plot to reverse the mistake their grandparents made in fearfully ceding much of the best urban turf to black criminality.

The central real estate question of this century has become: How can big cities drop their hot potato of poor urban blacks in the laps of naive suburbs and small towns? That helps explain the unhinged reaction among elites to Donald Trump publicly pointing out that Mexico isn’t sending us its highest-quality citizens to be our illegal aliens. The unspoken plan is to continue to use the more docile Hispanics newcomers to shove the more dangerous African-American citizens out of desirable cities; thus, only a class traitor like Trump would dare allude to the unfortunate side effects suffered by the rest of the country.

Despite all the violence Coates has suffered at the hands of other blacks, his racial loyalty remains admirably adamantine. Thus, his ploy, as psychologically transparent as it is popular with liberal whites, is to blame his lifelong petrified unhappiness on the white suburbanites he envied for being able to live far from black thugs.

Unfortunately for Coates’ persuasiveness, white people, unlike blacks, have never actually done anything terribly bad to him. The worst memory he can dredge up is the time an Upper West Side white woman pushed his 4-year-old son to get the dawdling kid to stop clogging an escalator exit. She even had the racist nerve to say, “Come on!”

Coates reacted as unreasonably as a guest star on Seinfeld would. Ever since this Escalator Incident, he’s been dwelling on how, while it might have looked like yet another example of blacks behaving badly, it was, when you stop to think about slavery and Crow (not to mention redlining), really all the fault of whites.

The central event in Between the World and Me is the fatal shooting in 2000 of an acquaintance from Howard U. by an undercover deputy from Prince George County, the country’s most affluent black-majority county. Coates refers to this tragedy repeatedly as proof of America’s demonic drive to destroy black bodies. (The dead man’s family, I found, was eventually awarded $3.7 million in their wrongful-death suit, much like the $3 million awarded to the parents of a teen gunned down by an undercover Obama Administration agent in a shooting that I investigated in 2010. You have never heard of my local police blotter item, though, because the victim was white.)

Since I’m a horrible person, my immediate response to Coates’ tale was…okay…black-run county, affirmative-action hiring, and poor police decision-making…you know, I bet the shooter cop was black.

And sure enough, the Carlton Jones who shot Prince Jones turned out to be black. Coates eventually gets around to briefly admitting that awkward fact, but only after seven pages of purple prose about people who believe they are whites destroying black bodies.

In fact, I discovered Coates himself had written about this tragedy before. Seven years ago he explained in The Atlantic in a poorly proofread but less pompous prose style:

I am going to try to be fair about this. The cop was in an unmarked car, and wasn’t wearing a uniform. According to his own testimony, he basically cornered Prince’s car pulled out a gun—but no badge—and IDed himself as an officer. Prince. whose vehicle was hemmed in, rammed the cops car. The cop shot him Prince and he died. The officer was presumably in pursuit of a “suspect.” But the suspect looked nothing like Prince, except that they were both black. All I could think when that happened was about what I would have done. The way we come up, if a black dude with dreads (which is how officer Carlton Jones looked) is following you and then he corners you, pulls a gun, but doesn’t have a badge, you don’t assume he’s cop. You assume he’s trying to rob you.

In other words, the two black men racially profiled each other as dangerous criminals and then violently attacked each other.

Why did the two blacks profile each other?

Oh, sorry, I forgot: because white people.

Wait, my mistake: because people who believe they are white.

Occam’s razor suggests that the reason blacks tend to fear violence from one another is because they tend to be violent.

But you are forgetting something: The first rule of White Club is: You do blame White Club. The second rule of White Club is: You do blame White Club.

Coates has thus elaborated a theory of history in which everything bad ever done by blacks is the fault of American whites (whom he describes—metaphorically, I hope—as “cannibals”).

Unfortunately, Coates, a 39-year-old Howard U. dropout, doesn’t actually know much about history because, even though he frequently reads history books, he lacks a retentive mind. He reminds me of another autodidact who is always amazed by whatever he is currently reading: Glenn Beck.

Coates is unable to keep in his head a coherent timeline of the past, which means he is frequently clueless about what could possibly have caused what. For example, when recounting his arrival at Howard U. around 1993, he complains that outside his HBCU “black beauty was never celebrated in movies, in television…” Personally, I watched a lot of television in 1993, and my recollection is that the beauty of Michael Jordan’s black body was rather often celebrated. But who can expect the New James Baldwin to remember 1993?

The intellectual limitations that have helped Coates achieve his level of conventional wisdomhood include his lack of interest in races other than blacks and whites. The country has 55 million Hispanics, 17 million Asians, and 4 million American Indians, yet Coates has barely deigned to notice their existence, much less ask himself why they have their own problems, which are on average quite different from black problems.

History, for Coates, began in 1619 with the first blacks to arrive in America. He has no interest in what blacks brought with them from their tens of thousands of years of evolution in Africa. (He appears wholly ignorant of science.)

And history sort of peters out for Coates and his admirers about 50 years ago, when liberals took charge of race in America. For instance, Coates is convinced that redlining by the FDR Administration explains why the West Side of Chicago is like it is. But he had no interest in learning from, say, Alyssa Katz’s 2009 book Our Lot, which documents how Chicago’s once crime-free Austin neighborhood (from which my wife’s family was driven in 1970 after the third felony committed against the children by blacks) was destroyed by the liberal 1968 Fair Housing Act.

There are tens of millions of Americans who remember being shoved out of formerly functioning urban communities by black criminality. But who speaks for them? Will they ever be allowed to publicly commemorate the injustice that was done to them?

thanks for killing the thread by spamming that article we all read a long ass time ago!

It was a bad thread that needed to be put down, and the article says all anybody will ever need to say on the topic

polite sage

Just read the damn book it is not that long.

They definitely don't think we deserve what we have. Coates wants white people to pay trillions in reparations to black people, in perpetuity.

If people like Coates have their way we're the ones who are going to be "double fucked"