[Peace-discuss] P. Street on "Race v. Class? More Brilliant Bourgeois Bullshit from Ta-Nehesi Coates"

[David Johnson]

Thanks Carl,

Good response ( for the most part )  from Paul Street.

Professor Cedric Johnson at UIC / African American Studies Dept. did a great analysis of Coates a few years ago entitled ; "An Open Letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Liberals Who Love Him "  -  https://www.jacobinmag.com/.../ta-nehisi-coates-case-for-reparations-bernie-sanders-r..

Gus Wood tore into Ta- Nehisi Coates on the World Labor Hour this last Saturday and will soon write a response to Coates's article.

Coates is a neo-liberal propagandist and is well compensated for his efforts. In addition to his annual salary at " THE ATLANTIC " magazine ( a conservative neo-liberal rag of the first magnitude ) he receives $ 625,000 per year from a MacArthur foundation " Genius award " grant and royalties from his books, putting Coates well into the Millionaire annual income category. 

David J.


-----Original Message-----
From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss
Sent: Sunday, September 17, 2017 1:14 PM
To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net
Subject: [Peace-discuss] P. Street on "Race v. Class? More Brilliant Bourgeois Bullshit from Ta-Nehesi Coates"

<https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/15/race-v-class-more-brilliant-bourgeois-bullshit-from-ta-nahesi-coates/>.

Street's essay is a curate's egg. ('The term derives from a cartoon published in the humorous British magazine Punch on 9 November 1895. Drawn by George du Maurier and titled True Humility, it pictures a timid-looking curate eating breakfast in his bishop's house. The bishop says: "I'm afraid you've got a bad egg, Mr Jones." The curate, desperate not to offend his eminent host and ultimate employer, replies: "Oh no, my Lord, I assure you that parts of it are excellent!"’) 

Here are some excellent parts:

~ '...Trump owes his election and hence presidency not to white racism but rather to the neoliberal Democrats’ betrayal of the “white working class” – a betrayal that pushed white workers into the arms of the pseudopopulist Trump.”

~ '...the Democratic Party lost its way when it abandoned everyday economic issues like job creation for the softer fare of social justice [ = anti-discrimination] ... To their neoliberal economics, Democrats and liberals have married a condescending elitist affect that sneers at blue-collar culture and mocks the white man as history’s greatest monster and prime-time television’s biggest doofus ... Donald Trump is not the product of white supremacy so much as the product of a backlash against contempt for white working-class people.'

~ 'Coates’ definition of the “modern left” is absurd. It includes people who aren’t remotely left at all, like the vanguard arch-neoliberal Bill Clinton, “national [neo]liberal politicians” like Obama and Hillary (“proud to have been a Goldwater Girl”) Clinton, and leading neoliberal Democratic pundits and essayists like Nicholas Kristof and George Packer. The radical-leftmost extreme of Coates’ American “left” is the supposed socialist Bernie Sanders, a vaguely social-democrat-ish New Deal Democrat who backs Israel and the F-35 fighter jet boondoggle and who lustily backed Bill Clinton’s criminal bombing of Serbia.'

~ 'Democrats and liberals really did “marr[y] a condescending elitist affect that sneers at blue-collar culture” to “their neoliberal economics” in ways that are highly relevant to the Democrats’ electoral collapse ... The marriage has cost the Democrats the sympathies and votes of working- and lower-class people of all races and ethnicities, including working-class whites. This has quite obviously redounded to the benefit of the Republican Party...'

~ “It is not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me! No, that’s no good enough…One of the struggles that you’re going to see seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we go beyond identity politics.”

~ '...Obama advanced the deadly corporate-neoliberal, surveillance-state, and imperial agendas with a special absence of serious progressive resistance (including left and liberal white resistance) thanks in no small part to the simple fact of his technical half-Blackness. The color of Obama’s skin blinded many on Coates’ broad “left” to the neoliberal/capitalist, imperialist, police-statist, and ideologically white-supremacist content of his character. A Hillary Clinton presidency might well have performed some of the same trick with gender substituted for race.'

~ '...the nation’s savage New Gilded Age class inequalities reached new levels of extreme disparity during the years of the openly Wall Street-captive Obama White House, itself chock full of Goldman Sachs operatives – a presidency that came to end with its fake-progressive standard bearer pushing for the explicitly global-corporatist Trans-Pacific Partnership and (as ... Sanders correctly noted in 2016) the top tenth of upper U.S. 1 Percent owning nearly as much wealth as the bottom U.S. 90 percent...'

~ 'Following in that great “leftist” Bill Clinton’s right-wing neoliberal footstep, Obama’s presidency has epitomized the left-liberal political scientist Sheldon Wolin’s early 2008 description of “the Democrats’ politics” as “the inauthentic opposition.” Wolin prophesied that “should Democrats somehow be elected,” they would do nothing “to alter significantly the direction of society” and to “substantially revers[e] the drift rightwards. … The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts points to the crucial fact that for the poor, minorities, the working class and anti-corporatists there is no opposition party working on their behalf.” The corporatist Democrats would work to “marginalize any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans.”'

~ 'A nominal Democrat was elected president along with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress in 2008. What followed under Obama (as under his Democratic presidential predecessors Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton) was the standard “elite” neoliberal manipulation of campaign populism and identity politics in service to the reigning big money bankrollers and their global empire. The Wall Street takeover of Washington and the related imperial agenda of the “Pentagon System” were advanced more effectively by the nation’s first half-white president than they could have been by any white Republican. New Gilded Age class and race inequality soared to new levels of abject obscenity under Obama’s “progressive” presidency, when nearly all of nation’s income gains went to the top 5 percent.'

~ “I don’t think the role of Coates is to inform us about race and racism; instead, I think his chief goal is to question the relevance of class and class analysis. Is it even true that ‘leftists’ fixate on class struggle over other matters’? The leftists I know are active in Black Lives Matter, BDS, the Confederate statue removal movement, etc…What Coates is doing here, I think, reflects the role that liberal academics and writers have been doing since at least the 1980s: suggesting that those interested in class routinely dismiss other divisions in society. This is not true, as scholarship from Du Bois to the present reminds us. But we can thank folks like Nell Irvin Painter, Joan Scott, some whiteness studies, and now Coates for making these cases. Every few months we get a Coates-like essay telling us, ‘hey, sure we have class, but don’t forget other divisions.’ Do we really need the reminding?” 

—CGE
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