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

Jelin Esau Jules
Haiti: A Grassroots Analysis on the State of Affairs Since the Assassination of de facto President Jovenel Moïse
30 Mar 2022
March 29, 2022 - Haitian community activists are out in the streets to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the Haitian constitution, drafted after the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship, and to…
Abayomi Azikiwe
Tens of Thousands Threatened with Property Tax Foreclosures in Detroit
30 Mar 2022
March 31 has been designated as the deadline for Wayne County residents to pay back property taxes from 2019 and before despite the failure to provide adequate assistance to working and impoverished…
Telesur
Colombian Vice-Presidential Candidate Gets Death Threat
30 Mar 2022
Colombian Vice Presidential candidate Francia Marquez is again threatened by right wing groups in that country. She demands that president Ivan Duque protect her and others leaders as well.
Joe Lauria
Pentagon Drops Truth Bombs to Stave Off War With Russia
28 Mar 2022
Leaked stories from the Pentagon have exposed how mainstream media reports Russia’s conduct in the Ukraine war, in a bid to counter propaganda intended to get NATO into the conflict.
Roger Stoll
Divided World: The UN Condemnation of Russia is Endorsed by Countries Run by the Richest, Oldest, Whitest People on Earth But Only 41% of the World’s Population
28 Mar 2022
The UN General Assembly vote on Russia's intervention in Ukraine indicates that most of the world's people do not condemn this action. The reality is a far cry from U.S. claims that Russia is…