Notes on Coates

Below Steve takes up the incredible story of the roiling of CBS News by a morning host’s treatment of Ta-Nehisi Coates as an adult writer rather than the author of holy writ. Coates was peddling his new book attacking the existence of Israel. Having read his old book — Between the World and Me, published in 2015 and celebrated as a masterpiece wherever the left holds sway — I was not exactly surprised by his current turn.

As in 2015, the man has met the moment. Then the moment was racialist and anti-American. Today the moment is anti-Semitic and hateful of the Jewish state.

I read Between the World and Me when it came out in 2015 and found it to be unbelievably bad. I wrote a 2,000-word review of the book for City Journal that was published under the heading “An updated racial hustle.” On Power Line I deemed it “The worst book I have ever read.”

The book is wildly overwritten and choking with Coates’s pretension to grandiosity. The gap between Coates’s pretense to wisdom and the quality of his thought is galactic. Perhaps more than anything else, the book reeks of racial hatred (of course), but also and especially hatred of the United States.

Coates made it clear that he had detached himself from his fellow countrymen. On 9/11, Coates recalls in the book, he was in New York City. “[L]ooking out upon the ruins of America, my heart was cold. I had disasters all my own . . . . I would never consider any American citizen pure. I was out of sync with the city.”

He invoked the death of his college friend Prince Jones (at the hands of a black police officer working in a department under black leadership) to declare: “I could see no difference between the officer who killed Prince Jones and the police who died, or the firefighters who died. They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were the menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could—with no justification—shatter my body.”

Sickening.

According to Coates, “people who believe themselves to be white” have constructed the concept of race and violently subjugated blacks from the beginning of American history. “People who believe they are white” are those who see the United States as an exceptional nation and believe in the American Dream. Coates calls them Dreamers and, unlike President Obama’s DREAMers of old, they are not to be indulged but resisted.

Coates veers weirdly into cosmic consciousness and environmentalism toward the end of the book. In the book’s penultimate paragraph, he expands on his critique of the “Dream” at the heart of the America he hates. This is so bad you may think I’m making it up:

Once, the Dream’s parameters were caged by technology and by the the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. And its vengeance is not fire in the cities but fire in the sky. Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas. The two phenomena are known to each other. It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the methods of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately the Dreamers themselves.

As with the United States, so with Israel. Coates’s current attack on Israel may be the least surprising development of the present moment.