Ta Nehesi Coates' Bernie Sanders Brain Fart Isn't Even About Reparations | Black Agenda Report

Ta Nehesi Coates' Bernie Sanders Brain Fart Isn't Even About Reparations

Bruce A. Dixon, BAR managing editor

22 Jan 2016

🖨️ Print Article

When favored spokesnegro Ta Nehesi Coates urgently warns us that Bernie Sanders doesn't support reparations, but doesn't mention that his presumed candidate Hillary doesn't either, or that the Green Party candidate Jill Stein does, it's easy to see Coates doesn't really want to talk about reparations. Coates just objects to the popularity of socialism, and wants to spread the old lie that socialism and socialists ignore the workings of white supremacy.

Ta Nehesi Coates is a black Baltimore born writer who enjoys prominence chiefly cause the good white folks at the Atlantic give him a column. For the moment, Coates lives in France, and earns his keep dispensing timely wisdom upon us all from across the water.

Coates' latest transatlantic brain fart blasts Bernie Sanders for not embracing reparations. Since changing his own mind or reparations in a long June 2014 Atlantic piece, Coates is presumably qualified to speak on the subject. But in nine hundred words Coates never mentions that his own presumed candidate Hillary Clinton also has no use for reparations, or that the Green Party's presidential candidate Jill Stein does endorse reparations.

So Coates's piece is really not so much about reparations, as it is about Sanders or even something else.

Sanders doesn't endorse reparations, Coates wants us to believe, because Sanders is a socialist, and socialists according to Coates downplay, ignore or deny the existence of racism and white supremacy. For the entire second half of the piece this is where Coates stays and doubles down, repeating nonsense claims that that socialists can't see white supremacy, so presumably black folks in motion ought to avoid it, and calling Bernie Sanders “an avowed socialist”.

That pretty much sums up Coates' weekly dose of disinformation, dispensed from across the water, courtesy of his sponsors.

Number one, stay away from Bernie cause he ain't for reparations.
Number two look out for those socialists too, cause they make a point of ignoring and denying the role of white supremacy..
Number three, Bernie Sanders didn't return my call to explain himself

Even as conventional neoliberal wisdom goes, this is pretty lazy stuff, which Mr. Coates could really have done in three tweets instead of nine hundred words. Maybe his patrons at the Atlantic pay him by the word.

Nice work if you can get it.

In the real world, not the fantasies of Mr. Coates, Bernie Sanders is no kind of socialist. Socialists stand for the working class, the poor, the common man and woman regardless of nation and color. Bernie's socialism stops at the water's edge, as he endorses apartheid in Israel, the Pentagon budget and the global empire of hundreds US bases and vast military industries that eat half the nation's wealth annually. This makes Bernie no friend of the poor anyplace outside the US and not so much the friend of the poor inside it either, really no kind of socialist at all. Bernie know this, and has rarely if ever called himself one in recent years. But he allows, even encourages us to call him that this year because socialism is popular, even though Ta Nehesi Coates thinks it should not be.

As long as they keep paying Mr. Coates, we'll be treated to more of his very conventional wisdom. Get read for it.

For Black Agenda Report, I'm Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com.

listen

http://traffic.libsyn.com/blackagendareport/20160122-tanehesi-coates-reparations.mp3

2016 presidential election

Berniecrats

Democrats

More Stories

Sara Abbas
Sudan: the Second Wave of Revolt
24 Mar 2021
The not-yet-triumphant Sudan popular uprising was both sophisticated and thorough; it tried to learn from past mistakes and internalize lessons from revolutions of the first wave and elsewhere.
Franklin Frederick
Cuba’s Contributions in the Fight Against the COVID-19 Pandemic
24 Mar 2021
The Cuban Revolution has shown that when limited resources are distributed equitably and with an emphasis on people and prevention, public health outcomes previously unimaginable can be achieved.
Dr. David Pleasant
That New Old Spook Show
24 Mar 2021
Savannah is is trying to create a renaissance of profit with live bodies portraying Gullah Geechee, enslaved Africans or immigrant indentures plodding through a mod-gothic spook show.
Reviewed by Michael Steven Smith
Bruce Levine’s “Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice“
24 Mar 2021
Rep Thaddeus Stevens was an unyielding proponent of the nationalization of the large southern plantations and the redistribution of that land to Black people.
Joe Emersberger
To Western Media, Prosecuting Bolivian Coup Leaders Is Worse Than Leading a Coup
24 Mar 2021
The Guardian pretends not to understand the difference between overthrowing a government in Bolivia and arresting someone for overthrowing a government.