Like a lot of people in the bad thing community, I have recently discovered Ta-Nehisi Coates. This means I have not been reading the Atlantic for a long time. I used to be an avid reader, when it was the symbol of educated taste and I was a young guy trying to acquire educated tastes. I lost interest in it at some point, but I did return when Michael Kelly took over for a while. After his death they fell back into the old bad habits and I drifted away. There’s only so much blank Progressivism you can take.

Anyway, I discovered him when he was described as an important new public intellectual in a lefty publication. Looking at his blog, I saw some interesting stuff and read up on him a little bit. There was enough there to see the familiar markings. The Left will start with the idea of the ideal intellectual and then find some guy to dress up like the model and repeat the slogans and sing the songs popular with the Left. It’s like the Left has central casting where they find these guys to plays these roles on TV and their websites.

This bit from the Coates blog jumped out to me:

When I was young man, I studied history at Howard University. Much of my studies were focused on the black diaspora, and thus white racism. I wish I had understood that I was not, in fact, simply studying white racism, but the nature of power itself. I wish I had known that the rules that governed my world echoed out into the larger world. I wish I had known how unoriginal we really are.

Notice it is possible for someone to major in white racism. By the time you are a teenager, you have a pretty good idea how racism works, whether it is white-on-black, black-on-white or any combination that strikes your fancy. America is a big country. Whatever your race, we have someone who hates you for it. The other thing that jumps out here is the conflation of racism, however defined, and power. It is an interesting concept because it explains something of the black view or the Western world and is entirely insane.

people naturally are attracting to people who look like them and share their heritage and culture. This is obvious to anyone who has been outside. That means they are less likely to be a threat. Developed within the evolving social networks of humans over ten thousand years, it is not hard to see how distrust of the other is baked into the cake. It is a useful survival strategy and it is useful as a group survival strategy. This innate sense of trust among similar people is well known to anyone who has traveled.

Notice also that race is not real, but racism explains everything that makes people like Coates angry at the world. It’s a weird contradiction, but these are not people basing their claims in Aristotelian logic. This dualism about race is simply a way to claim they have a right to your stuff and to rule over you. On the one hand, you got yours through racism, which is bad, but blacks can never be racist, as they don’t have stuff. It’s pretty much just a tarted up statement from the black guy who robbed your house.