The editor of UVA's conservative paper—a 3rd year in college—rails against @tanehisicoates as an advocate of violence http://t.co/FcnNwzhPfg
— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) January 19, 2015
From the article:
… “The Case for Reparations,” which the University delicately describes as “one of the most talked-about pieces of nonfiction in recent memory,” is a serious argument for something more radical than mere preferential treatment or quotas or financial assistance for past wrongs. Rather, Coates is seeking a coordinated government policy that would not only provide retribution for black Americans, but also severely punish white Americans in the form of active discrimination and taxation…
Yet, what is most confusing and downright revolting about the University’s selection of Coates for the keynote address is his public and active support of a violent resolution to America’s racial problems. Regardless of your opinion of the Ferguson events, the fact of the matter is that Dr. King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and gave his acceptance speech on nonviolence during an exponentially more violent and hostile time in the history of America’s race relations. To the disbelief of a society that was moving towards extremes on both ends of the issue, Dr. King expressed an unwavering conviction in the rectitude and efficacy of nonviolent solutions…
And look how well Dr. King was treated, in response!
My general take on campus ideologues is I hope they can use the resources of university to broaden their knowledge and deepen their views.
— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) January 19, 2015
…. or then again, they — the RWNJ ones, at least — can just perfect their I’M THE REAL VICTIM whinging, and start on a prosperous career of Kochsucking aboard the Wingnut Wurlitzer (see: PJ O’Rourke, Dinesh D’Souza, Ross Doubtthat, et al).
***********
Apart from considering how far “we” have come — and how much further we have to go — what’s on the agenda for the day?
debbie
Having just read some of the comments in an AOL article about the members of Selma’s cast bridge crossing yesterday, I’d say we’ve been moving backwards.
Scott S.
You’d think one of these wingnut morons would eventually actually read Coates’ article and see what it really has to say…
Derelict
How far “we” have come? Really? I look around these days and what I see is that institutional codified-in-law racism is gone. And I see a few more Black people moving up the ladder economically.
But I also see all kinds of subtle forms of racism every day. Worse, I see some of the codified-in-law racism starting to come back in the form of voter ID laws intended to disenfranchise Black people.
“We” haven’t come nearly as far as many White people think, and we’re backsliding at a frightening rate.
Wag
@Scott S.:
You give them too much credit if you think they’d unders anything with nuance.
Betty Cracker
@Scott S.: I had a similar thought as I read the VA Advocate editorial — did the author even read the TNC piece he’s criticizing? If so, he failed to understand it.
Zandar
@Derelict: Allowing black people to get ahead was all fine and good until the Great Recession came along, now it’s “you know we really don’t need civil rights anymore, right?”
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Conservatives have an underground propaganda network. He probably read someone else’s summary of the piece that made these claims.
beth
I wouldn’t get into a war of words with TNC – they are his weapons of choice and he uses them well. I have a feeling this guy’s about to learn just how non-violent, and eloquent, TNC really is.
beth
@Baud: This part –
makes me think you are correct. Straight out of the victim’s handbook.
bemused
I don’t remember conservatives ever not being the “true” victims in life.
chopper
@bemused:
This is just the basic conservative mind at work. TNC argues for reparations. That means white men have it give something up. Conservative white men will refuse, and then the authorities have to be called in and then they imagine that conservative white men are the ones getting the fire hose treatment on the streets. Ergo conservatives are totes the new struggling negroes of the 60s.
It isn’t that far off from the wacky bullshit about ‘obama’s FEMA camps for republicans!!’. It’s just the basic GOP cult of victimhood.
Joey Maloney
I think it’s unfair to P.J. O’Rourke to lump him with D’Felon and Douchehat. For one thing, O’Rourke has managed, from time to time, to be funny. On purpose, I mean.
Bystander
In modern memory?
Joey Maloney
@chopper: Conservative white men will refuse, and then the authorities have to be called in and then they imagine that conservative white men are the ones getting the fire hose treatment on the streets.
Or back in the cells, with a broom handle. “It’s Ta-Nehisi time, whigger!”
Joey Maloney
@Bystander: OK, I’m old. But Holidays In Hell (pub. 1988) can still make me laugh.
Iowa Old Lady
Voter suppression and policies that support income inequality do a pretty good job of keeping the undesirables in their place even without the support of explicit laws.
tybee
@Joey Maloney:
some of his national lampoon stuff was hilarious, too.
Marc
@debbie:
I just found your first two mistakes right there.
Belafon
Remember folks, colleges and univerities turn everyone that goes to them into liberals.
The Ancient Randonneur
Ah yes, another generation of racially tolerant white kids awaits us.
Omnes Omnibus
@The Ancient Randonneur: Yes, let’s condemn a generation because someone is an asshole.
Shalimar
@Joey Maloney: I think it is unfair to O”Rourke, too. He really was funny from National Lampoon through Parliament of Whores* and most of his Rolling Stone years. He actually made a good living based on this merit, back when there were far fewer conservatives actually on wingnut welfare. Would they have given him one of those cushy jobs if he needed it back then? Probably. They didn’t have to, though.
O’Rourke changed sometime in the late 90s, even before 9/11. He became more bitter than he was, more self-pitying, I assume from realizing that he would never be as cool as he thought he was earlier in life. His humor changed as a result, more directly insulting and much less above-it-all than he had been before. I wouldn’t doubt that he has sinecure jobs now and couldn’t exist on his writing alone anymore. He hasn’t been funny any time I have seen him in the last decade, just bitter and angry like all the rest of the conservative comedians.
* I haven’t read Parliament of Whores in 25 years, but I remember it being a great conservative view of how government should be. I disagreed with many of his points (being even more idealistic and socialist in college than I am now), but even the most naive de-regulating nonsense was funny.
Schlemazel
@Joey Maloney:
Funny? Was this pre-1972? Seems it’s been all down hill since he left National Lampoon.
Edit: then I read on & see everyone has covered this pretty well. PJ & Dennis Miller should go on tour together now. “We were funny once – an evening of bile and boast”
Southern Beale
My husband works with a bunch of rabid right-wingers. One always make a point of telling everyone that he’s working on MLK day — even though technically his office is closed, HE’S WORKING GODDAMIT. Like, what, you think black people are going to be pissed about that? Who exactly do you think you’re hurting by working on a holiday? So the fuck what, work, don’t work, no one gives a shit. What the hell is wrong with people?
Southern Beale
And today in Second Amendment heroes we have a 14-year Fresno California boy who shot himself in the leg while try to scare his ex-girlfriend. He was shooting a rifle into the air repeatedly outside her house while she was apparently inside with her new boyfriend. The gun jammed and as he tried to clear it he shot himself.
Hope he learned a lesson. Dumbass.
Shalimar
@Bystander: If by modern memory, you mean the time it takes for the average newborn to become a high school graduate, then no, not in modern memory, Not even one good joke that I can remember.
Elizabelle
RE the Virginia “Advocate” article: douche who wrote it is getting schooled in the comments to his editorial. Comments included “This is one of the most mentally incompetent pieces of writing in History”; others asked how many guns TNC was bringing to campus and whether the writer ever even read TNC’s article (which was Betty Cracker’s take upthread.)
From commenter Stephen Matlock:
I think a few other readers are thinking: “egads, this article by this idjit is as much a black eye to UVa as those Rolling Stone rape allegations. Wahoo.”
Shalimar
@Schlemazel: I don’t think Dennis Miller was ever funny on his own merit, not even when he was liberal. He always had a great delivery, and he has a quick and creative mind in a similar way to Robin Williams. The Saturday Night Live News Updates were hilarious when he was doing them, but he didn’t write the vast majority of the jokes. Later, all the odd associations he was known for were clearly the sign of an agile mind making connections most people didn’t see, but there wasn’t really an actual joke in most of them. I think of Dennis Miller as what Robin Williams would have been if he didn’t have a sense of humor.
Elizabelle
@Southern Beale: Ask him if he takes James Earl Ray’s birthday off?
Tenar Darell
@Southern Beale: A stalker 2nd Amendment hero? Blech. Seriously, I hope he gets counseling now or he’ll kill a woman later.
lamh36
A bit of MLK last speeches you may not have heard! A snippet…not quite the “I Have A Dream” MLK most white people are comfortable with
MLK on Economic Justice
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4vdfugMFbg
Iowa Old Lady
@Southern Beale: I got stuck on the fact that a 14-year-old boy has an ex-girlfriend.
I am old.
Patricia Kayden
@Shalimar: “just bitter and angry like all the rest of the conservative comedians.”
Shouldn’t conservative comedians be in quotes? I recall that Fox News tried to air a conservative version of The Daily Show. Not surprisingly, it just didn’t work.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/03/the-plight-of-conservative-comedy-wheres-the-rights-em-daily-show-em/283937/
Patricia Kayden
@Elizabelle: Good to hear that there is push back. Perhaps the author of that ridiculous article will learn something.
Gene108
@beth:
Well whites are the real victims. If a white man and a black man each get a $1.50 in government services, the white man is subsidizing the black man.
You see the white man used to get $2.50 and the black man got $0.50 so making things equal is actually redistribution of wealth, opportunities and everything else from what used to be the white man’s share.
currants
@Southern Beale: The article says he was charged with negligently discharging a firearm, despite the fact he was outside his former girlfriend’s threatening her (‘trying to scare’). Not much more info there, but this sure seems to warrant counseling of some sort, if only to prevent some woman (women/girl/girls) down the road from being less ‘lucky’ than this one.
Chris
@Elizabelle:
It’s amazing just how much white people love nonviolence. When it’s coming from someone else.
Something that occurred to me after seeing the avalanche of Nelson Mandela hagiographies which, as with Martin Luther King, were largely about forgetting that he ever said anything other than “turn the other cheek, white and black people should just love each other.” White conservatives and moderates want to turn these people into generic saints and hold up their peacefulness and their refusal to answer violence with violence as the reason they’re saints… and yet, what would their reaction be to a white MLK standing up after the latest terrorist attack or urban riot and telling them not to answer violence with violence because that’s bad and two wrongs don’t make a right? Oh, that’s right – we don’t even need to guess. Fox News already tars and feathers people who have said nothing of the sort for the slightest hint that they might be preaching… the same thing that they consider awesome and saintly when coming from MLK.
There’s something more than a little creepy about the conservatives’ praise for nonviolence among nonwhites, when you realize that it’s basically just a demand for unilateral disarmament.
Woodrowfan
@Southern Beale: sounds like the morons that turn on every light in the house on Earth Day…
Librarian
@Chris: This has become a standard right wing tactic: imply that because MLK was nonviolent, African Americans must never, ever fight back against injustice again with anything except nonviolence, and if they do, accuse them of “betraying” him and so on. It’s a nice way of unilaterally disarming the other side.
Ruckus
@Southern Beale:
What the hell is wrong with people?
Well……
In general liberals wonder whats wrong with people that we can’t get along and work together as a society while conservatives wonder what they can do to get ahead(or at least not get behind) by putting a foot up…… on the neck of someone who doesn’t look like them.
Origuy
@Omnes Omnibus: No, dispelling the myth that racism will disappear once all of us olds die off.
catclub
@Librarian:
Israel always insists that the PLO renounce violence. Anyone ask Israel to renounce violence?
Tiny Tim
Dennis Miller was rarely very funny (though sometimes he was), but people appreciated the somewhat nerdy “reference humor” because until that time pop culture (TV mostly) was a very poor mirror of contemporary society. Just having someone acknowledge that those references existed was entertaining in and of itself because it was refreshing.
Liberty60
@Tiny Tim:
Dennis Miller exemplified for me the dark side of the SNL kind of comedy- comfortable white college kids smirking at the world in general.
While much of the world deserves it, there is a cruelty in it, an inability to grasp the difference between teasing and tormenting.
I contrast it with, for example, the films by Ron Howard or Rob Reiner, where there isn an underlying empathy and fondness for the target.
Joey Maloney
AIUI a lot of Dennis Miller’s fancy-ass convoluted references came from his writing partner, who split sometime after Dennis had his “since 9/11 I’m outraged by Chappaquiddick” moment.
Matt McIrvin
It actually took me a while to even think of what the guy might have been talking about when he claimed Coates was an advocate of violence. But one thing Coates has written about, with his usual eloquence, is the simple fact that it’s unfair to expect black people to unilaterally give up a right to self-defense that white people claim to retain. Very much including some of the same white people who like to chide blacks for betraying the spirit of King.
What King was doing, and Gandhi before him, expecting people to remain nonviolent even while being beaten and murdered… if you think about it, that’s not just common decency at work; it’s pretty weird and radical, and even took a certain amount of hard-heartedness. Under the circumstances, it sometimes worked. But King himself did end up getting killed, as did Gandhi.
Bokonon
Taxation is punishment? Taxation is violence?
Matt McIrvin
@Bokonon: That’s the usual libertarian-ish theorizing that any application of a law is violent, because it’s ultimately backed up by threats of violence if you don’t comply.
They usually apply this notion kind of selectively; contracts and property laws, for instance, are just the mechanisms of freedom.
JR in WV
Just seeing the summary in Google News I suspected the U Va writer hadn’t even read Coates’ article.
Ta’Nehisi is really careful how he uses language, and has the ability and understanding to frame things exactly the way he wants to.
Something Rob Mogni, Editor in Chief of the Virginia Advocate will never be capable of. He can’t get the first and most simple fact straight. His article starts out
But of course today, MLK Day 2015, is January 19th. I charitably assume the article was written (or perhaps edited) on the 17th, which may explain his inability to get the simplest fact in his lead correct.
Mogni goes on to refer to “retribution for black Americans” when Coates never uses that word in his entire essay, selecting it no doubt for its air of vengance. Reparations, on the other hand, are a repayment for theft, fraud or mistreatment, distinctly not the same as retribution at all. Which goes to show Coates’ ability to properly use language.
But probably Mogni correctly uses the word retribution in his attempt to characterize Coates’ essay as vengeful rather than as a call for repayment of resources stolen over the centuries of racial imprisonment in the deep south.
I’m an old; old enough to have actually seen those signs on rest rooms and water fountains: “White Only” and “Colored” and wondered what I was seeing. I was probably 8 or 10, and we were on a family vacation traveling through the deep south. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would have trouble believing what I was seeing – an outhouse out back in the edge of the brush for Black Folks, and a clean tiled bathroom with hot and cold running water for “Whites Only”!
Mogni shows his willfully assumed heritage of hate and theft in his nasty bit of work. He accepts that white people took as their due what was not rightfully theirs from black folks who had no legal recourse in the Jim Crow system of the Deep South. Where “a second slavery ruled” as Mr Coates says, and it was so, and is no doubt still so in many places. Like the county where voter registration activists were all arrested for “vote fraud” after the recent election in which black candidates won – clearly a fraud upon the white population in southernmost Georgia. Not.
Those activists, holders of PhD educations, and obviously more qualified for school board positions than their opponents, won their freedom only after three trials, the first two of which ended in mis-trails, with hold out jurors unwilling to acquit even in the face of no evidence of voter fraud presented. I would say Jim Crow tradition is still alive and well in many parts of the deep south, which is still host to a grimy poverty of soul reeking of the days of real slavery past.
boatboy_srq
@Iowa Old Lady: I got stuck on the fact that a 14-year-old boy has a gun.
@Librarian: Interesting how Other People have to completely, unilaterally disarm, and anyone who does not is a Gangsta/Druglord/Terrrrrist against whom any level of violence is justifiable; but Caucasians who own and use firearms are either 2nd Amendment Patriots™ or Lone
CraziesWolves, and no minuscule additional review of any firearms purchase anywhere would be justified by their actions. It’s as if White Ahmurrrca needs to be armed to the teeth just because some (single) Blah Person might have a (single) popgun.Quaker in a Basement
Um, what?
Mnemosyne
@Quaker in a Basement:
Taxation = violence. Therefore, any discussion of raising taxes is exactly like punching someone in the face. QED.
Villago Delenda Est
Fuck this shit. Let’s give these assholes something to be actually butthurt about.
Tumbrels for the lot.
Villago Delenda Est
@catclub: Violence is their God-given right…as is every square inch of land west of the Jordan River.
anon
You know what’s funny is that Rob Mogni is the poster child of White privilege. He comes from an upscale family (dad is a CPA, mom is a pharmacist both employed by the State of Massachusetts). His town is less than 1% African-American and 95% White. He received scholarships (even though his family has an income over 200k) from a fund that is headed by his mother and tax-advantaged. This is the guy who wants to be a small government conservative, but is victimized because his fellow students point and laugh.
KS in MA
@lamh36:
Thanks. What a great speech …
sm*t cl*de
@Baud:
Conservatives
have an underground propaganda networkform a human centipede. He probably read someone else’s summary of the piece that made these claimsFTFY.
Quaker in a Basement
@Mnemosyne: Thanks, m. I was going to suggest the writer was thinking of someone else, but then I felt kind of stupid to propose that he was talking about some other Ta’Nehisi.
Villago Delenda Est
@anon: Self awareness. Critical thinking skills.
Not things you find among types like Mogni.
Frankly, I don’t think a Louisville Slugger upside the head would help much in this case. The damage runs too deep.
JR in WV
Well, I went to that U Va magazine and read the whole thing. The comments were interesting, and so I added one. I got a little message that “Your comment is awaiting moderation.” at which time I decided I wasn’t going to get posted to the whole world, and went away.
Just now I went back, and there was my comment, which I reproduce here so no one has to click over there:
So here it is.
Chris
@boatboy_srq:
Although I’ve also heard NRA types argue that if only black people had exercised their second amendment rights, slavery would never have happened. Right before they go back to claiming that black people with guns are scary and dangerous.
This is why you don’t argue with conservatives; they’re not actually “arguing.” They’re just trying to support the Team by scoring points against you.
boatboy_srq
@Chris: Interesting argument, especially since slavery was a common practice in the Colonies (as well as Jamaica and other territories) well before the Revolution; also, given that the ones the slavers picked up were generally the defeated in wars in West Africa, so they’d already used their 2nd-Amendment-Remedies and those remedies hadn’t won their day so they were off to make the Colonies’ day better. And yes, black people with guns are scary and dangerous – if you’re a
slave-ownerordinary farmer and you’re facingrebellionlabor negotiations, or if your great-great-granddaddy was one and the family hasn’t forgotten whatself-righteous a##holesfine upstanding entrepreneurial citizens you used to be. But you can’t convince these idiots that they’ve illustrated just how wrong their “post-racial-Ahmurrca” statements are, and because you see something in them they don’t you must be the real racist etc etc.