July 18, 2015
HOW TO MAU-MAU:
Why Can Ta-Nehisi Coates Get Away With Racial Slurs? (Daniel Payne, JULY 16, 2015, The Federalist)
[S]adly, at the outset of this piece, we are shown that Coates, for all the adulation he receives, is actually a remarkably narrow-minded and unpleasant person, as we find at the end of the article's third paragraph: "When people who are not black are interested in what I do, frankly, I'm always surprised," Coates said. "I don't know if it's my low expectations for white people or what."It is entirely fashionable, of course, for progressives to speak sneeringly and dismissively of "white people." Coates is not the first person to evince such casual racism, and he will surely not be the last. Common as this low and ugly form of bigotry is, however, it's still a wonder people put up with it to the degree that we do.Imagine, for a minute, if a white writer--for the sake of argument, say, a guy named Daniel Payne, at, say, a fictional publication called the Federalist--expressed surprise that "people who are not white" ever read his work: "I don't know if it's my low expectations for black people or what," he would remark. Would you be impressed at the jaded profundity of such a statement? Or would you think, "Gee, Daniel Payne sounds like a racist jerk?"Your response would obviously and correctly be the latter. So it is worth wondering why we are willing to let a very visible, very popular writer like Coates off the hook for an identical statement. We have become used to leftists and liberals spouting off hateful remarks about "white people" for years, so much so that we've tricked ourselves into thinking such rhetoric is anything other than repulsive prejudice. It is why Coates can utter a perfectly racist declaration in a national news magazine and receive no flak for it whatsoever.
Sadly, Mr. Coates seems trapped in the late 60s/early 70s of his father and to want nothing more than to don the mantle of Radical Chic so he can Mau-Mau the Flak Catchers.
MORE:
The Hard Truths of Ta-Nehisi Coates : After the dreams of Martin Luther King Jr. and the hopes of Barack Obama. (Benjamin Wallace-Wells, 7/12/15, NY Mag)
Coates was born in 1975 and grew up in Northwest Baltimore, in a sprawling family infused with black political consciousness. Paul Coates, who had briefly been a Black Panther and became a radical librarian and independent publisher, had seven children with four different women. Ta-Nehisi's mother, Cheryl, a schoolteacher, was the last.
Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's : ". . . It's a tricky business, integrating new politics with tried and true social motifs . . ." (Tom Wolfe, June 8, 1970, New York Magazine)
Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (Tom Wolfe)
Going downtown to mau-mau the bureaucrats got to be the routine practice in San Francisco. The poverty program encouraged you to go in for mau-mauing. They wouldn't have known what to do without it. The bureaucrats at City Hall and in the Office of Economic Opportunity talked "ghetto" all the time, but they didn't known any more about what was going on in the Western Addition, Hunters Point, Potrero Hill, the Mission, Chinatown, or south of Market Street than they did about Zanzibar. They didn't know where to look. They didn't even know who to ask. So what could they do? Well ... they used the Ethnic Catering Service ... right ... They sat back and waited for you to come rolling in with your certified angry militants, your guaranteed frustrated ghetto youth, looking like a bunch of wild men. Then you had your test confrontation. If you were outrageous enough, if you could shake up the bureaucrats so bad that their eyes froze into iceballs and their mouths twisted up into smiles of sheer physical panic, into shit-eating grins, so to speak--then they knew you were the real goods. They knew you were the right studs to give the poverty grants and community organizing jobs to. Otherwise they wouldn't know.There was one genius in the art of confrontation who had mau-mauing down to what you could term a laboratory science. He had it figured out so he didn't even have to bring his boys downtown in person. He would just show up with a crocus sack full of revolvers, ice picks, fish knives, switchblades, hatchets, blackjacks, gravity knives, straight razors, hand grenades, blow guns, bazookas, Molotov cocktails, tank rippers, unbelievable stuff, and he'd dump it all out on somebody's shiny walnut conference table. He'd say "These are some of the things I took off my boys last night ... I don't know, man ... Thirty minutes ago I talked a Panther out of busting up a cop ..." And they would lay money on this man's ghetto youth patrol like it was now or never ... The Ethnic Catering Service, the bureaucrats felt like it was all real. They'd say to themselves, "We've given jobs to a hundred of the toughest hard-core youth in Hunters Point. The problem is on the way to being solved." They never inquired if the bloods they were giving the jobs were the same ones who were causing the trouble. They'd say to themselves, "We don't have to find them. They find us" ... Once the Ethnic Catering Service was on the case, they felt like they were reaching all those hard-to-reach hard-to-hold hardcore hardrock blackrage badass furious funky ghetto youth
Posted by Orrin Judd at July 18, 2015 9:11 AM
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