Dude, who even knows.
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Hatchet Jobs #3: Ta-Nehisi Coates
(So I realize I’ve been shit-talking other writers a bit recently. And hey, that’s actually a pretty traditional way to break yourself as a writer, by tearing others apart. So let’s make that an occasional series. Here’s entries 1 and 1.5 on Fredrik de Boer, 2 on Ozy Frantz. Might as well keep doing it until sempai notices me.)
Ta-Nehisi Coates will never say in 100 words what he could in 300, and will never say in those 300 words anything new or interesting enough to justify 100.
He’s endlessly fascinated with himself, convinced the most banal observations and experiences are transmuted to gold by his involvement. I can’t count how many times he’s invoked “in college I realized my juvenile ideas had been immature and self-flattering” as some mark of distinction rather than the baseline minimum, a foundation on which actual insight can be built.
Or presenting himself as some clear-sighted visionary for reading books on the Civil War and dragging his kids out to battlefields and historic sites - which I’m pretty sure History Dads have been doing since Lee surrendered at Appomattox - and then turning it into who knows how many articles, blog posts, book proposals in which he sucks his own thumb - among other parts - over the brilliant insight that The Civil War Was About Slavery.
The thing is I’ve seen this before. Another thing he keeps coming back to is his childhood, being raised by a black nationalist father - the kind of guy big on discipline, effort, and racial pride who would be easily recognized as a conservative in an environment where his ethnic identity was THE nationality. And I really respect those guys, and a lot of it is for their ability to instill a sense of confidence and drive in their kids that propels them into a solid middle- to upper-middle class life coming from an environment where a lot of people don’t even come close.
But when those kids get there… I’ve run into a few of them. And boy are they convinced they have wisdom to bestow, and boy does it get a little ridiculous sometimes. “Son, I grew up on the streets, so I’mma tell you how to be a creative-class yuppie, son.”
Honestly a lot of time it seems like they’ve absorbed wisdom as an aesthetic, a style, and confused that with actually being wise. Now that’s a trap anyone can fall into - I spent a while mistaking people for smart when they were really just fans of spaceships and Science!, myself - but a big part of the path to actual wisdom is dragging yourself back out again.
Now I suppose the obvious counter would be I’m just repeating an old racist trope, of Black intellectuals as just simian imitators puffing themselves up above themselves. So, then, when you look at, say Spike Lee movies or ‘90s Fox sitcoms or contemporary black feminist blogs where “the ~enlightened brother~” is a stock comic trope, that’s just… internalized racism, right? Pf, nah. What it is is your low expectations, seeing someone go through the motions and taking that as good enough. ☯✟ Follow for more soft bigotry ✟☯
Now that’s his subject matter, when it comes to style - as a person, I’d put him in the 99th or 98th percentile of writers; as a professional writer he’s still above average, but making him the flagship brand of a magazine that’s constantly selling itself on its history publishing the greats of American letters? I think he needed another good five or ten years of polish before he could even contend for that level, but he’s sure not going to get it getting published in front-cover packages for what he’s turning in now, and then praised to the heavens as some kind of Second Coming. When in an earlier one of these I said Freddie de Boer was finding his voice in venom, I’m talking about things like the line about Coates’ “creepshow commenters asking him to forgive their sins”.
You see from the pulpit to the sidewalk to the, uh, movie theater, black America has kept up a tradition and practice of public rhetoric that’s really fallen out of white life. And Coates draws on that. He’s clearly angling to speak with “prophetic voice”, basically in a cadence and idiom derived from the black church, that preeminent organizing institution of African-American life, with preaching as an accessible path to esteem and power for the clever and the loquacious, preachers as a leadership corps in social activism and public life.
The thing is, again Coates is familiar with the preacherly cadence but doesn’t seem to have internalized how and why it works. It’s like when you ask a kid to draw a future airplane and they put wings everywhere, wings where they won’t generate lift, wings that would foul the air of other wings. Honestly, I think it might have to do with picking it up from a father who had in him a captive audience rather than from the actual church from preachers with an eye towards keeping souls in the pews.
You see, the preacherly cadence, like all good cadences, is about rising and falling action, building your audience up and then bringing them back down, concentrating your energy and then releasing it in a focused beam. But Coates knows how to build intensity, but not how to bring it back down again. Instead of escalating from a baseline escalation becomes the baseline, devaluing his starting point by comparison, offering no local maxima and thus no climactic moments. He knows how to build a theme through repetition - his recent work littered with the increasingly stale buzzphrase du jour, “black bodies” - but not how to break or twist the repetition and pour all that energy you’ve built up into an original, novel thought.
The end result is a plodding drone of a tone, piling words on words on words unto infinity, it’s writing as prog rock. The preacherly cadence is at root an oral form, but you can tell his first medium is text, if he ever tried to speak this stuff in front of an audience he’d at least notice them tuning out halfway through, notice that he was just making himself hoarse without eliciting more of a response.
And really, that’s the telling bit. That’s the part that gives away the game, that the promotion of Ta-Nehisi Coates, all the self-congratulatory media attempts these past few years to put black figures up front in the public eye, it’s not about putting power in black hands but as a maneuver in a status games among whites, that these guys aren’t being looked to as thinkers but as mascots.
(There’s an old joke from when the Republicans were the “black party”, but even then more in thematics than in actual power - “What do you call a black man at the [annual fundraising] Lincoln Day dinner? The keynote speaker.” [related])
Because really, what is whiter - what could possibly be whiter - than trying to distance yourself from your whiteness, trying to show how with-it you are, by latching on to some black celebrity, praising him to the heavens, wielding your fandom as a talisman, and not even noticing that you’ve managed to pick a guy with no goddamn sense of rhythm?
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Been playing the new Witcher.
Mechanically, it hits the sweet spot between Dark Souls and Dragon Age.
Thematically, it is Polish as hell, holy shit. Most of our RPGs derive their worldbuilding from a British tradition, we actually get a bit of German by way of Japan (lancers, dragoons, 2h knights, one-city realms and threatening emperors and conniving chancellors), Dragon Age was bidding for novelty by doing French.
But this is definitely Eastern European. It’s not just the questlines and bestiary out of Grimm’s and Slavic legend. Part of it is the peasant’s-eye view. There may be great wars and cosmic forces at play but to a significant extent they just account for why a questgiver is in a particular location.
The more common viewpoint expressed is of a peasant - not even in a castle keep! in scattered villages and hamlets! varying from squalor to bucolic! according to their economic position! as you can tell from the actual productive activity the environment and animation design dramatizes! - who just desires that as few of his fellows suffer and die as possible.
Witcher got some knocks for having such a monoethnic world, especially by comparison to DA, because of course it did. But I think both routes *work*, creatively - DA only showed you a thimbleful of villages and two blocks of a capital city and called it a great civilization, venue for ageless deeds, and the range of accents and skin tones and styles helped sell that.
In contrast, just the *sameness* of Witcher, these dirty poor farmers and THESE dirty poor farmers, you can have a much bigger world but it still leaves the machinations of kings coming off as detached and pompous, and the dirt where you work as the *real* world.
And you want to talk races, human/nonhuman racism is the in thematic in “gritty” fantasy these days, but a lot of games play that as a supercharged version of the refugee/immigrant experience - you live in the REALLY bad quarter of town, and people stand around in public having conversations about how TERRIBLE you are, or walk through your streets for the SOLE purpose of calling you names.
Because I suppose even the most branched multi-release choice-consequence tree has a hard time making a dramatic antagonist out of a guy being polite and charming in working with you and then going home and spending three decades NOT spending energy on your behalf to upset a settled order that has already been mythologized as proper and on which he and worthy institutions he values materially depend.
But the Witcher, yeah, this clearly comes from a culture that KNOWS a thing or two about how ethnic conflict in a feudal society works. There’s a bit in the playroom zone with a dwarven blacksmith that does it great. People will know you’re different, but they’ll accept you as part of the community. But know you’re different.
And when things get stressful they might link you to the stresses. And want to take it out on you. And convince other people they gain from your loss.
But wait, there WILL be people that value you. Authorities that will protect you, put your contribution to the community above petty bigotry.
But authority - whether established or upstart-aspirant - has enemies, and if those enemies either win, or the authority ever needs to buy their favor cheap…
Other than that, I like the pulpiness of it all - it clearly comes from the kind of book that could be described as “rollicking”. A ridiculously OP protagonist - magical Han Solo Batman, basically - threading a plot advanced by femme fatale teases, with eventual consummation… James Bond was pulp.
Pulp - stories that just exist as off-the-shelf daydreams, no higher pretensions - I dig pulp.
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TV Pilots 2015: Ethnic Casting Trend Hits Peak | Deadline →
Yeah that is a big change. I worked for LA talent managers for a while and I’d spend all day reading breakdowns (descriptions of roles to be cast in upcoming productions) to flag ones to submit clients for. You’d see a lot of roles listed white, a few various types of brown, but the majority were unspecified. This being America though, unmarked race is implicitly white and while you can often get a nonwhite actor an audition for an unmarked role it’s rare to get a callback, let alone cast.
So all those cast at once for unmarked (or even other-marked!) major roles, yeah that is huge.
That said I guarantee you she’s right on the money when she chalks this up to the success of Empire and other minority-led shows last season, and if we don’t see any more such hits who knows. Hollywood output is easily 80% attempts to pattern-match to recent hits (and even that more the window dressing than the load-bearing elements).
The one exception though, the DisneyLodeon empires had very carefully engineered diversity, the ethnic mix of shows was calibrated before the concept was even fleshed out. (DisneyLodeon is the closest thing to the old studio “star system”, where roles and even whole productions are less important in themselves than as opportunities to “break” a member of your talent stable as a star, then to have lead roles and movies and music careers crafted around them).
Like, if a Disney show was written with roles for asian girl A, black girl B, and caucasian girl C, they might consider reworking B around a particularly good-fitting asian actress, but then A would definitely be reworked black to rebalance.
Back around the casting of the Wizards of Waverly Place pilot, we had a client, girl of 14 (but you might not have guessed it - among teen actors, boys tend runty so they can play younger than their age; girls tend short but precociously developed so they can play hotter than their age). She was maybe a quarter Mexican so we had two headshots and contact sheets, one with her real name and everyday blue-eyed appearance for white or unmarked roles, one with brown contacts, black hair, and a Spanish surname for latina roles.
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Pretext, Past, Posterity
I don’t think the question of what really actually truly happened in Ferguson - at any stage - is really even all that important, the whole thing was just a pretext anyway.
- = - = -
Benghazi. I swear this loops back in in three paragraphs in a productive way, stick with me. The official Republican complaint about Benghazi - what even was it? Something about not sending backup, or a coverup? Whatever.
But fundamentally it’s a pretext. I mean some people sincerely, unkshakeably care about the pretext. But the actual issue is about the Arab Spring, the actual issue is “Who Lost The Maghreb?”. With the implied answer “the Democrats, by doing that dumb Carter thing where you only support foreign allies who are nice and polite and democratic and don’t repress and torture and massacre their citizens, and then when the ones you abandon fall and the people who replace them - the people who had been being repressed and tortured and massacred - come to power and start doing shit that you hate, that is completely incompatible with the things you most emphatically and sincerely want, go ‘Oh shit, right, that’s why we were supporting that guy in the first place’”.
But the awkward thing, the reason they run with this pretext instead of saying it explicitly (like they did with the original “Who Lost China”), is that going Carter in the Ummah didn’t start with Obama, this started with Bush the Younger and the neoconservatives, and a lot of it that happened under Obama’s watch was under the influence of holdovers from the Bush era - Robert Gates and all that. And in any case unlike Carter, Obama had a second term in which to reverse course himself, and now the military is back running Egypt and Mubarak was just released scot-free.
- = - = -
Ferguson, Mike Brown, all that’s a pretext. And a lot of people sincerely, unkshakeably care about the pretext, but the actual issue is that even as the civil rights movement of the 1950s-70s has been institutionalized as a sacred part of our national history, the actual gains made - “let’s flip the national switch away from repressing black people, and towards helping them” - have been allowed to gradually erode. Because white people found that completely incompatible with the things they most emphatically and sincerely wanted, and remembered why they had the switch on repress in the first place.
And the awkward thing, that makes this difficult to address head-on, is that it was “First Black President” Bill Clinton that blessed the erosion. The Democrats had, since LBJ, been the party of “let’s keep the switch in the helping position”. And between LBJ and Clinton, 1968 to 1992, 8 whole terms, the Democrats only won one term as President. Carter. With the whole Vietnam, Watergate, Nixon tailwind at his back.
And Clinton got elected, and more significantly got re-elected! By taking the Democrats’ hand off the switch. Federal funding for 100,000 more cops. Welfare reform. (Subtextually, federal funding for how many fewer black babies?) School uniforms, which was rinkydink but was the idea was “yes, we are willing to walk back ‘60s-style freedoms in order to further discipline urban black kids - you know, the gangbangers, the crack babies, the superpredators.”
Sister Souljah - I used to wonder what that was even about, I’m no rap genius but I at least recognize big names and I’ve never even heard of her in any other context. Does anyone cite Sister Souljah as a musical influence? But I’ve come to realize that was the point - deliberately picking a fight with someone who didn’t actually matter (and thus bore no cost) - just to make a point, a branding point.
“The Democratic Party: Once Again Willing To Tell Uppity Blacks To Stuff It”
“First Black President” Bill Clinton took the Democrats’ hand off the switch and at least let other hands pull it back to “repress”. And under actual first black President Barack Obama, of the Democratic Party, who owes two elections to being black, and at least one to black votes entirely, putting it back hasn’t even been on the agenda.
And I can see how you’d get upset.
-=-=-
“What we really need is for everyone - black, white, whatever - to respect each other.”
Okay, that’s correct, and that’s impossible, because here’s the thing. When people say they want “respect”, what they mean is they want other people to acknowledge their own conception of the world, where they’re the protagonist, and their story is the main plotline, and everyone else is, I guess, NPCs? Or at least, at least for those other people to not explicitly challenge that conception, to allow them to maintain that fiction to themselves.
Which doesn’t necessarily set you at odds, a good share of NPCs are allies, or questgivers, or shopkeepers, or background characters, and most people prefer the paragon path, and in the normal course of things you get along fine.
But only as long as there’s nothing important at stake that can only be resolved by conflict. If that NPC is the only source for a good drop, and you’re sure they’re not going to be critical to any of your future quests…
“He was murdered for jaywalking!” Even accepting that framing, here’s the thing. Physically being in the street is important. The inciting incident of the Hamburg Massacre, back during Reconstruction, was white guys angry about black guys standing in the road blocking traffic.
Because two objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time. The fundamental example of something that can only be resolved by conflict.
You know, if you look in the right parts of the web, where white people complain about black people in complete, properly spelled, passive-aggressive sentences, one of the most commonly recurring stories is black guys walking, or having a conversation, in the middle of the road, and they can see I’m waiting, and they don’t get out of the way, don’t even make an effort to let me through.
(There’s a tumblr post with half a million notes on it. Right here.
i know i give white people a lot of shit but u guys are really nice. like when the light turns green and there’s a white pedestrian that’s almost across the street u guys always do that jog thing. i know it’s kind of insignificant but i appreciate it white people. u and ur half jog thing.
)
The flip side of that story of course is “what the fuck this is a public road and I’m as much the public as you are so why the hell would you think it’s my duty to stop using it how I want so you can use it how you want, Mr. King Shit of the World?”
(“Mr. King Shit of the World” is the hostile way of saying “protagonist”.)
And you know how much you fucking hate it, how much of a personal affront you take it when NPC pathfinding is so fucked up that they block a door and you can’t get through? (Alternately, when collision detection is set up so that random NPCs can force you out of the way, maybe knock you out of a dialogue tree or screw up a quest?)
Gives you the unshakeable sense that this world was not properly designed for you, for the purpose of furthering your plotline.
And if these issues came up in the last update, you’d want a patch to revert them. You’d go on the devs’ forums and bitch forever, it’s like the devs don’t even care about the players, and you’d threaten to never support anything they did again, take your money and give it to some other devs, and devs, WHERE’S THE FUCKING PATCH.
And the patch, of course, is white supremacy. (It also buffs your class so you’re not grinding for fucking ever just to spend your loot on repairs and potions, and reduces your random encounter rate in safe zones.)
“But this isn’t a game, this is REAL LIFE!”
If you ever end a sentence with “REAL LIFE” in all caps you are being an idiot, I guarantee it. Yeah, the fact that the stakes of this game are real, that’s gonna make you more willing to let things slide? That’s not how people work. Not enough of them to hold a coalition together.
- = - = -
The activists are worked up! There’s a new civil rights movement coming! We! Will! Fight!
The veneration of the civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s, that makes people think that’s the only and inevitable way this can play out. Let’s set aside the way those gains eroded with time (same as the movement of the 1860s-70s, as Reconstruction gave way to Redemption). You know what I’m reminded of? The civil rights movement of the 1910s-20s.
You didn’t hear about that one? The founding of the NAACP, Garveyism, W.E.B. DuBois, black troops returning from European service in WWI, sharecroppers moving north to work the factories, pumped up to reclaim the promise of Reconstruction. Meanwhile, a countrywide surge in leftist radicalism, and new wave of immigrants asserting their claim on America. You don’t hear about it, because it didn’t win. The Palmer Raids, the First Red Scare, the Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa Riot, the founding of the Second KKK.
Well, let them try, it won’t matter because trends suggest the, aah, “Coalition of the Ascendant” will gain overwhelming dominance in the intermediate future, right? Yeah, white Americans noticed that back then, too. That’s why they cut off immigration and started pushing eugenics.
Not convinced things’ll turn out like that this time around, but they could. Learn your history, kids, it keeps you from looking the fool.
- = - = -
I grew up in the Huxtable ‘80s and the End of History ‘90s, I kind of expected the two classic nations of America to merge, black into white, just as the white ethnics had the generations before.
Who knows what we’d call the amalgam, maybe still “white” just to play up the ridiculousness of it all, maybe some hyphenated neologism to bridge the gap, like we played up “Anglo-Saxon” to meld the English and German populations that originally formed the white American nation, or coined “Judeo-Christian” later on.
But I’m less and less certain of that. You look at the people saying interesting things about race these days, they’re pushing other possibilities, each with their three-letter acronyms. The left-racebloggers pushing “PoC”, “Persons of Color”, the idea that there’ll be white on one side and on the other this black-hispanic-asian-amerindian coalitional nation. The right-racebloggers “NAM”, “Non-Asian Minorities”, suggesting a white/asian against black/brown split.
And then there’s always the possibility that things’ll go the classic American route, where there’s black on one side and everybody else eventually joins “white”, earns a spot specifically defining themselves against “black”. Given a choice between the two, it’s an awfully appealing option.
- = - = -
Race is the fundamental tragedy of American history. A tragedy being where everyone’s understandably, sympathetically human, even (especially) in their failings and shortcomings and trespasses, and the inevitable consequence is suffering.
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American Twitter is disproportionately black, Vine seems even more so.
Give it a few years, we’ll work up the mythology by which brevity is an innately black thing. Like rhythm, or cool.
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The proposition that “whiteness” dates to the 17th century seems reasonable, but it’s not that before then ethnic distinctions weren’t made, but rather that they were made in religious rather than biological terms. Between the turn-of-the-millennia Christianization of Northern and Eastern Europe and the overseas missionary work of the European Age of Exploration, Christendom had, with the noble (but quite peripheral) exception of Ethiopia, basically the same borders that would later be rendered as whiteness
The parallels hold pretty well even for distinctions within Christendom/whiteness - Protestant/Catholic/Orthodox maps imperfectly but sufficiently to Nordic/Mediterranean/Alpine.
The Spanish Inquisition against mariscos and marranos is passed down to us as a confessional conflict, Catholics against (suspected) crypto-heathens, but a modern Northern Italian/Iberian effort to subjugate and drive off people of Moorish and Jewish heritage would be read as racial conflict.
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When exactly did the stereotypical Cadillac driver go from being an old/rich white guy to being an old/rich black guy?
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Sitting in a bar in Missoula, watching Animal Planet. The rebranding of white in place of red as the outdoorsy, nature-skills race is perhaps the most interesting development in recent American race relations.
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