(So I realize I’ve been shit-talking other writers a bit recently. And hey, that’s actually a pretty traditional way to break yourself as a writer, by tearing others apart. So let’s make that an occasional series. Here’s entries 1 and 1.5 on Fredrik de Boer, 2 on Ozy Frantz. Might as well keep doing it until sempai notices me.)
Ta-Nehisi Coates will never say in 100 words what he could in 300, and will never say in those 300 words anything new or interesting enough to justify 100.
He’s endlessly fascinated with himself, convinced the most banal observations and experiences are transmuted to gold by his involvement. I can’t count how many times he’s invoked “in college I realized my juvenile ideas had been immature and self-flattering” as some mark of distinction rather than the baseline minimum, a foundation on which actual insight can be built.
Or presenting himself as some clear-sighted visionary for reading books on the Civil War and dragging his kids out to battlefields and historic sites - which I’m pretty sure History Dads have been doing since Lee surrendered at Appomattox - and then turning it into who knows how many articles, blog posts, book proposals in which he sucks his own thumb - among other parts - over the brilliant insight that The Civil War Was About Slavery.
The thing is I’ve seen this before. Another thing he keeps coming back to is his childhood, being raised by a black nationalist father - the kind of guy big on discipline, effort, and racial pride who would be easily recognized as a conservative in an environment where his ethnic identity was THE nationality. And I really respect those guys, and a lot of it is for their ability to instill a sense of confidence and drive in their kids that propels them into a solid middle- to upper-middle class life coming from an environment where a lot of people don’t even come close.
But when those kids get there… I’ve run into a few of them. And boy are they convinced they have wisdom to bestow, and boy does it get a little ridiculous sometimes. “Son, I grew up on the streets, so I’mma tell you how to be a creative-class yuppie, son.”
Honestly a lot of time it seems like they’ve absorbed wisdom as an aesthetic, a style, and confused that with actually being wise. Now that’s a trap anyone can fall into - I spent a while mistaking people for smart when they were really just fans of spaceships and Science!, myself - but a big part of the path to actual wisdom is dragging yourself back out again.
Now I suppose the obvious counter would be I’m just repeating an old racist trope, of Black intellectuals as just simian imitators puffing themselves up above themselves. So, then, when you look at, say Spike Lee movies or ‘90s Fox sitcoms or contemporary black feminist blogs where “the ~enlightened brother~” is a stock comic trope, that’s just… internalized racism, right? Pf, nah. What it is is your low expectations, seeing someone go through the motions and taking that as good enough. ☯✟ Follow for more soft bigotry ✟☯
Now that’s his subject matter, when it comes to style - as a person, I’d put him in the 99th or 98th percentile of writers; as a professional writer he’s still above average, but making him the flagship brand of a magazine that’s constantly selling itself on its history publishing the greats of American letters? I think he needed another good five or ten years of polish before he could even contend for that level, but he’s sure not going to get it getting published in front-cover packages for what he’s turning in now, and then praised to the heavens as some kind of Second Coming. When in an earlier one of these I said Freddie de Boer was finding his voice in venom, I’m talking about things like the line about Coates’ “creepshow commenters asking him to forgive their sins”.
You see from the pulpit to the sidewalk to the, uh, movie theater, black America has kept up a tradition and practice of public rhetoric that’s really fallen out of white life. And Coates draws on that. He’s clearly angling to speak with “prophetic voice”, basically in a cadence and idiom derived from the black church, that preeminent organizing institution of African-American life, with preaching as an accessible path to esteem and power for the clever and the loquacious, preachers as a leadership corps in social activism and public life.
The thing is, again Coates is familiar with the preacherly cadence but doesn’t seem to have internalized how and why it works. It’s like when you ask a kid to draw a future airplane and they put wings everywhere, wings where they won’t generate lift, wings that would foul the air of other wings. Honestly, I think it might have to do with picking it up from a father who had in him a captive audience rather than from the actual church from preachers with an eye towards keeping souls in the pews.
You see, the preacherly cadence, like all good cadences, is about rising and falling action, building your audience up and then bringing them back down, concentrating your energy and then releasing it in a focused beam. But Coates knows how to build intensity, but not how to bring it back down again. Instead of escalating from a baseline escalation becomes the baseline, devaluing his starting point by comparison, offering no local maxima and thus no climactic moments. He knows how to build a theme through repetition - his recent work littered with the increasingly stale buzzphrase du jour, “black bodies” - but not how to break or twist the repetition and pour all that energy you’ve built up into an original, novel thought.
The end result is a plodding drone of a tone, piling words on words on words unto infinity, it’s writing as prog rock. The preacherly cadence is at root an oral form, but you can tell his first medium is text, if he ever tried to speak this stuff in front of an audience he’d at least notice them tuning out halfway through, notice that he was just making himself hoarse without eliciting more of a response.
And really, that’s the telling bit. That’s the part that gives away the game, that the promotion of Ta-Nehisi Coates, all the self-congratulatory media attempts these past few years to put black figures up front in the public eye, it’s not about putting power in black hands but as a maneuver in a status games among whites, that these guys aren’t being looked to as thinkers but as mascots.
(There’s an old joke from when the Republicans were the “black party”, but even then more in thematics than in actual power - “What do you call a black man at the [annual fundraising] Lincoln Day dinner? The keynote speaker.” [related])
Because really, what is whiter - what could possibly be whiter - than trying to distance yourself from your whiteness, trying to show how with-it you are, by latching on to some black celebrity, praising him to the heavens, wielding your fandom as a talisman, and not even noticing that you’ve managed to pick a guy with no goddamn sense of rhythm?
