Obligatory Seriousness on Coates v West

Via Loury & McWhorter. (h/t Bill Benzon)

A couple points written in realtime.

1. Neoliberal doesn't mean conservative, it means pro-corporate in order to raise tax revenues to fund the welfare state. I expect very much that applies to Coates. So what.
2. I'll take West over Coates any day.
3. Yes Coates is more culturally impactful, but I'm not part of that conversation. I don't think much is being said.
4. "There's no politics in Coates, West". Yeah, I think academics over analyze politics.
5. McWhorter: Yes Coates fetishizes White Supremacy. I agree with West's criticism, but again, so what. If Coates is an 'artist' and yeah I generally think he's a creative, not a political figure. He's not refining a politics. West is an agent-provocateur but he's not leading a political party any longer. Coates, is a neo-liberal, just like Obama was.
6. [14:55] Racial essentialism: Loury stretches the size of the scope of the set of problems that can be legitimately synthesized by black intellectuals. Yes, if Coates is a bubble, then West is a bubble. Good comments on capitalism.
7. [19:40] What is the prescription? Biased narrative and development narrative. The issue is performance. Right. Uncontroversial simple facts. Interesting that he has to be so passionate about speaking the obvious. He must be speaking to a world of clueless newbs and willful fools. Afro-studies hustle. Heh. It's a shell game. It's a lie.
8. [25:30] Blackademia. Different planet. Yeah. I know that. I knew that.

 

So by minute 30 I am finding this tiresome. The satirical novel... blah blah. I would probably write it if it made me rich, but I have a better chance by doing something else. So at [31:14] I turned it off, because now they're getting hopeful. But thinking about the satirical novel reminds me that if Coates can be made a star, anybody can, and somebody will next. And then we'll have a new coterie of HNICs to maybe snipe at each other for nickels of publicity. It's all theatre, but it's not a black owned theatre. So what else is new? I feel like the Nigerian physicist program manager at JPL in all this. Who cares about African Americans? Africans don't. Perhaps it's time to close the door on the black intellectual promise. It's like Toqueville. Everybody goes back to Toqueville and everybody goes back to DuBois. There will never be another and there's really not much else to say, than a kind of black weather report in a warming economic climate. In that regard, if West is right, then Coates believes in White Supremacy's global cooling of race relations, and he's playing his role to try to keep that idea alive against all reality. Here's the black weather report for today. Coates can be the weatherman with a bow tie. It's all shtick.

The weird thing is that I'm not hungry for any of that participation. Occasionally it attracts my curiosity, and sometimes I hold out hope for a new take. But the most interesting thing I've heard about race in the past few years is that 'douchebag' is the perfect way to describe that kind of bad actor we all know and hate. It's not the Nazi. It's the douchebag, and everybody has the ethics to punish him. But I suppose this black intellectual is supposed to change the way we behave so no douchebag can ever make it past the first trimester? Again I say, black Americans are doing, every day, exactly what they want to and nobody is stopping them. Not even the other black Americans who try so desperately. Not my monkey. Not my circus.