What he said

About Ta-Nehisi Coates as the Jack Van Impe of racism

Anybody here know who Jack Van Impe is? 

He’s a now-elderly TV evangelist whose shtick involves reading the daily papers and concocting reasons why the headlines vindicate his interpretation of Biblical End Times prophecy. 

Jack and his wife, the lovely Rexella, can find a sign of the coming Apocalypse in the most ordinary events. 

They’ve made a lucrative career on it, and on exploiting the anxieties of their followers. 

In this sense, Ta-Nehisi Coates has become the Jack Van Impe of woke liberals. 

Everything that happens just goes to show that white racism explains the world. 

A certain kind of person eats that stuff up.

Not the white people who have fled the political party whose members eat this stuff up.

They see this black racism and its white sponsorship, this mythology of omnipotent and racially omnimalevolent white people, as terrifying and as reality-resistant as the anti-Semitism of the Nazis.

And then they flip to the dark side, start eating up the craziness for white folks at Fox and Breitbart, and vote for The Duce and people who sound like him.

This is a fine example of how on the left, anti-white racism is a legitimate mode of discourse. 

I live in a city that’s 51 percent black, and that has a fairly high crime rate. 

The criminals are overwhelmingly young black males. 

Does “blackness” pose “an existential danger to the city”? If I claimed that — and to be clear, I would not do so — I would be professionally ruined. 

But Coates can openly demean whites as a race, and talk about how their very existence threatens the planet, and hit the bestseller charts, win a MacArthur genius grant, and become the darling of liberal elites. 

You wonder why some white people vote for Trump? 

Their eldritch patience with this kind of nonsense has run out.

I would say this, though: blaming “whiteness” for the complex problems of the world and its people of all colors eases the consciences of people who prefer that other people have existential reckonings, not them.

And see this, too.

The rise of Trump isn't all about racism

But this introductory grab of the forelock is crap, an inch from showing the same deference to Louis Farrakhan or Wallace D. Fard Muhammad, as TNC is only an inch away from sharing their racist ideology and fake religion, anyway.

Coates is a stunningly powerful writer, penning essays that are deeply informed historically, animated by a fiery passion for racial justice, and shot through with unshakable sadness at how unlikely it is that such justice will ever be done. 

He writes like a prophet, rendering judgment from on high but with his heart kept low to the ground, in communion with his fellow African Americans and their unending struggles in a land that perennially fails to treat them as equals, and just as perennially fails to acknowledge the extent and persistence of that failure. 

Every American should read and learn from him.

Americans should read some hate literature, I agree.

But not a lot.

It's really depressing, and there is nothing to learn from it, anyway, but the depth and rigidity of that hate.