Ta-Nehisi Coates Quits Twitter After Public Row With Cornel West
By Jamiles Lartey, Guardian UK
22 December 17
Harvard scholar called Coates 'neoliberal face of the black freedom
struggle'
Award-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates has deleted his widely followed
Twitter account after a public row with fellow intellectual Cornel West.
Coates tweeted: "peace y'all. i'm out. I didn't get in it for this," to his
1.25 million followers before quitting the social media site.
The Harvard scholar, author and activist West described Coates as "the
neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle" in a Guardian column on
Sunday, launching a furious debate about the two men in black, activist and
liberal circles.
West - a leading and outspoken American philosopher, activist and social
critic - argued that Coates, who has arguably become the most popular and
widely read black intellectual on race in a generation, writes from a
worldview that "fetishizes" white supremacy. According to West, that
preoccupation clouds Coates' perception of other factors that shape modern
society.
"Any analysis or vision of our world that omits the centrality of Wall
Street power, US military policies, and the complex dynamics of class,
gender, and sexuality in black America is too narrow and dangerously
misleading," West wrote. "So it is with Ta-Nehisi Coates' worldview."
The specific trigger for West's Guardian column was Coates' newest book, We
Were Eight Years in Power, a collection of essays from the Obama presidency,
which takes a generally celebratory tone about the 44th president and his
administration.
"Coates praises Obama as a 'deeply moral human being' while remaining silent
on the 563 drone strikes," West wrote, spelling out his long list of
grievances with Obama from the political left.
Before deleting his Twitter account, Coates had responded to West's column
in a thread of tweets pointing out occasions when he had, in fact,
criticized Obama over some of the issues, specifically US militarism, that
West raised.
In an October conversation with the Intercept's Jeremy Scahill, for example,
Coates said of Obama and drone warfare: "Maybe the presidency in terms of
what it is, we shouldn't think of people who have that job as great, ever.
Like, it's not possible to be great. Implicit in it are certain things that
are not possible to salute. Are not possible to reconcile."
In another now unavailable tweet Coates pointed to pieces he had written
that critically examined how Obama addresses black audiences, on "the
specific oppressions of black women", and on abortion and choice.
"In general, I think the public itself can sort this out. But I don't expect
people to be familiar with everything I've written and said. So here's just
a bit of it," Coates wrote, pointing to times he had engaged with most of
this issues that West accused him of ducking.
The debate also pulled in other high-profile black intellectuals like the
New Yorker's Jelani Cobb who said that "no one is above critique", but that
he was "frankly embarrassed by West's threadbare commentary". Cobb pointed
to West's fervent support for Bernie Sanders, who had a tough time
connecting with black voters and was hesitant to discuss race, as an example
of West's hypocrisy.
"In your obsequious stanning for Bernie you must've overlooked the part
where he dismissed the idea of black reparations," Cobb wrote. "Moreover,
those demands were kept alive in the black nationalist grassroots tradition
- not the interracial left you so idolize."
This is hardly West's first public fracas with another high-profile black
intellectual. In 2015, fellow author Michael Eric Dyson wrote in the New
Republic that West's attitude toward Obama had as much to do with personal
feelings of betrayal as it did actual political differences.
After actively campaigning for Obama in the 2008 campaign, West "felt
spurned and was embittered" by Obama, and that marked his shift from
supporter to ardent detractor.
West has since accused Obama of political minstrelsy, insinuated that he was
a race traitor and called him a "neoliberal opportunist" and a "Rockefeller
Republican in blackface".
This kind of "not radical enough" ideological pugilism has long been a
feature of the black freedom struggle. West v Coates is eerily reminiscent
of arguments that date back over a century.
Historically speaking, as black intellectuals gain any degree of
institutional credibility or popular acceptance, they face criticism from
more radical thinkers of traitorous capitulation. The same type of charges
were once levied by WEB DuBois at Booker T Washington, and by Marcus Garvey
at DuBois. A generation later, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were
famously caught up in a similar dynamic.
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