Return of a Race Hustler
The recent assassination of Charlie Kirk has been a lightning rod for new controversies and provided fresh opportunities for limelight seekers to grab headlines. Race hustler Ta-Nehisi Coates did not disappoint his fanbase.
First, in a Vanity Fair piece, Coates classed Kirk’s political views as nothing more than “a loathing of those whose mere existence provoked his ire.” “He held disagreeable views,” Coates shrieked. For example, he was pro-life and supported the death penalty for pedophiles. He “reveled in open bigotry.” The evidence? Kirk referred to heterosexual marriage and home ownership as “the American way of life,” pointed out that Kamala Harris and other high-profile Democrats are in favor of school policies that would keep parents from knowing if their children are being misled by radical trans culture to the point of changing genders at school, and noted that large amounts of Muslim migration to Western countries will almost certainly disrupt the traditional cultures of those countries. Later, in an appearance on a podcast, he called Kirk a “hate-monger” and Turning Point USA a “haven of hate.”
Intervening in matters of public importance with no accurate information is, more or less, a summary of Coates’ professional activity. Last year, he published a book on the conflict between Israel and its Muslim antagonists that somehow avoided mentioning any of the deep historical context of Muslim-initiated violence, war, and terrorism against the Jewish state. When he was called out on the fact that his book reads like an apology for Palestinian terrorism, he had nothing coherent to say in response. He did not need to respond, it turned out. The entire left did that work for him by melting down in outrage that anyone should dare ask the great man such a question. The offending journalist was, of course, spanked.
Coates’ star began to rise among progressives about a decade ago with his book Between the World and Me. He became one of the early go-to writers in the antiracist/Black Lives Matter portion of the American far left due to the simpleminded moral blackmail of this book. Couched as a letter to his son, it gives a view of black life in 2015 America as one of unrelenting oppression and victimization. (And sympathetic readers have had to overlook the fact that the book made its author a rich celebrity—which rather disproves the central claim of the book that no blacks can succeed in racist America.)
In Between the World and Me, Coates wrote of how the racist American system had tried to keep him down, labeling him constantly as an intellectual failure:
…the classroom had always been the site of my most indelible failures and losses…. I wondered then if something was wrong with me, if there was some sort of brain damage…. And like almost every other lesson administered to me in a classroom, I don’t remember a single thing said that day…I’d felt like a failure all of my life—stumbling out of middle school, kicked out of high school, dropping out of college……my chief identity, to my mind, was not writer but college dropout…Kenyatta and I had been together for nine years, and during that time I had never been able to consistently contribute a significant income.
This is how it is in racist America Coates explains. Blacks are systematically kept down, their innate talents deliberately ignored, misclassified, and their futures denied. Yet somehow there is a long tradition in this country of black ideologues—very much like Coates—who have managed to make a living endlessly talking about how impossible America makes it for any black man or woman to succeed at anything. Their ranks today are filled with those who, like Coates, profited from the George Floyd Revolution of 2020 and secured lucrative deals for books, speaking tours, antiracist centers, and the like.
The smallness of Coates’ intervention on the Kirk assassination is a good reminder of the moral caliber of just about every offering this man has made to public affairs. Coates would have us believe that Kirk was so morally corrupt no one with his heart in the right place can mourn him. Kirk’s supposed moral corruption came from having noticed too many things about the world that we’re not supposed to notice. Particularly that the Civil Right Act of 1964 rapidly morphed, thanks to the interpretation of progressive judges and the administrative state, from an intended reiteration of constitutional rights to the perverse and racist doctrines of disparate impact theory and straightforward racial quotas. And let’s not even mention the unmentionable fact that blacks commit violent crime at rates wildly out of proportion to their representation in the population or that the meltdown of American marital and family culture has had profoundly negative effects for its victims, especially children and women.
An objective reading of what Coates has contributed to our public intellectual life winds up taking us back to his own self-description in Between the World and Me and to the realization that it might be the most accurate prose Coates has ever produced. Maybe there was a reason for Coates’ failures in the scholarly world, and that reason was not racism, but the low quality of his reasoning and dialectical ability.
Maybe he was unable, for much of his adult life, to meet the most basic task of a man—supporting his family—because he was trying to do it in a craft for which his talents were so evidently limited. Maybe his success of the last decade has nothing to do with any belated recognition of his hidden talents, but is solely the product of his seizing—with unrivaled opportunism—a cultural space that was created by a few high-profile cases of unfortunate police interactions with black suspects. Maybe his success is better explained by his hitting upon the clever idea of mouthing falsehoods about those cases to sell to simpletons and hateful, sanctimonious elites trying to cover up their status with fake righteousness.
In a recent appearance on Ezra Klein’s podcast, Coates made a statement about Kirk that he was not sufficiently astute to realize applies to him in spades:
When I hear or see people who are honored and commemorated in such a way that they almost become a national religious figure, and then I see their content, and I see that their content is actively destructive to humanity, I have to draw a line there.
Me too, Mr. Coates. Me too.