Current Events > is it worth reading some Ta-Nehisi Coates?

(+) Yeah! (+)

went to see The Equalizer 2 last night. one of the scenes has the main character reading some Ta-Nehisi Coates. he then gives it to another character to read.

the scene when he gave it to him was actually quite good. i did some googling and it seems like Ta-Nehisi is a decent dude. i read one of his pieces where he straight up said he doesn't know enough about a subject in order to respond to someone's criticism of something, which was refreshing.

but is his writing unbiased and objective?

Nobody's writing is unbiased, least of all someone paid to write their opinions and viewpoints. But Coates is pretty good, imo. His reading of American history is one I've found informative, and while I have some issues with how his current politics respond to that history, he's just about the best you could ask for out of somebody who was paid by The Atlantic.
---

yea

Yes. Check out "Donald Trump is the First White President"

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/

The stuff he wrote prior to the election of Trump is a bit naive and he admits as much in the forwards to those essays when he collected and released them in a bound volume last year. This is more reflective of his current opinion:

IT IS INSUFFICIENT TO STATE the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trumps predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whitenessthat bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trumps forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above Americas founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trumpa president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.

I'd also read "Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War"
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/02/why-do-so-few-blacks-study-the-civil-war/308831/

For an analysis of the revisionism surrounding the Civil War, and the sense of identity that has developed in it's wake.
---

Damn, I was hoping Balrog or Questionmarktarius or someone else would've been the ones to say yes.