Ta-Nehisi Coates Cribs From Gary Gygax For His Latest Essay Saying The Same Thing As All His Other Essays

When Ta-Nehisi Coates isn't writing racist diatribes against White Devils for The Atlantic, he's writing racist diatribes against White Devils for Marvel Comics. They gave him a gig writing Black Panther and another book, Black Panther and the Crew, based on his long experience of and passion for Not Being White.

Black Panther and the Crew was cancelled at issue 2, though six issues had already been written.

It's also an astonishingly racist title, probably the most racist book published by a formerly mainstream entertainment company.

If you don't believe me, check out this video, in which Black Panther recruits an all-black team of superheroes (who, by the way, Coates turns into racists) who team up to fight the greatest evil in the world: White interlopers moving into Harlem.

At one point he writes Storm -- hitherto not written as a black separatist racist -- cracking about white people moving into Harlem, "I can smell the mayonnaise trucks already." If you didn't know, black people knocking white people about mayonnaise is like white people knocking black people about, I don't know, fried chicken. Black people often declare they hate mayonnaise, and that they don't get why white people eat it.

Which is fine -- a bit of light joshing won't hurt anyone -- but when such a crack is deployed in a book that portrays white people as evil for "invading" Harlem, it takes on a much more hateful and derogatory air.

This video reviews Black Panther and his gang of super-powered black separatist racist continuing their fight against white people moving into Harlem, and in this one, if I remember right, the masterminds behind the idea that White Devils are permitted to move into sacred Harlem are revealed: the Nazi-like group HYDRA, naturally.

Spoiler alert.

Ta-Nehisi Coates continues being rewarded for his schtick, which is, in the guise of being anti-racist, he spouts off as an out-and-proud racist, but it's okay, because he hates White Devils, who really are an inferior race.

Now in the Atlantic he declares Trump the "first White president," and shows off those writing chops that so impressed the political propaganda company formerly known as Marvel Comics.

It's all a hoot, but let me boldface the most pubescently purple prose:

To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.

Cf. Monster Manual, page 99 and infra. N.B. this amulet will show a visible dweomer if Detect Magic is cast; Qqv. the lich's phylactery or the Mummy Lord's canopic jars.

By the way, if you're not getting all those musty, archaic, academic and/or legal looking cross-referencing abbreviations, Gary Gygax littered his books with them (see, e.g., the Dungeon Masters Guide, most notoriously, et al.).

But that is the point of white supremacy--to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.

By the way, no one reading Ta-Nehisi's books would ever say "My goodness, that guy is working twice as hard as the average white writer." They would wonder if he's working a quarter as hard as the average writer, or if he's just a talentless political hire.

To claim that "white supremacy" permits white people to work "half as hard" as blacks is, get this, racist.

Try it around the opposite way and see how that sounds.

But that's the whole point of racism -- you are claiming one race is superior and therefore permitted greater liberties and opportunities, and/or another race is inferior and therefore deserving of lesser respect and fewer liberties.

Some say Ta-Nehisi Coates is an expert on racism. I agree. He got his Ph.D. in racism not through study, but through practical experience putting theory into practice.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, who works twice as hard as the average writer to get his racist books cancelled twice as fast, will now deploy the n-word a whole bunch, which I will obscure by replacing letters with asterisks, because he gets paid to drop n-bombs, whereas members of Inferior Races instead get advertiser boycotts and website bannings.

...

Replacing Obama is not enough--Trump has made the negation of Obama's legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness. "Race is an idea, not a fact," the historian Nell Irvin Painter has written, and essential to the construct of a "white race" is the idea of not being a n***er. Before Barack Obama, n***ers could be manufactured out of Sister Souljahs, Willie Hortons, and Dusky Sallys. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent--an entire n***er presidency with n***er health care, n***er climate accords, and n***er justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruction or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white. Trump truly is something new--the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific--America's first white president.

Ta-Nehisi Coates plays this game where he denies there is such a thing as a "white race" at all, but then alternates that with attacking whites. If whites as a race don't exist -- fine, but then why did you write a whole comic book title about the white race "invading" Harlem by paying rent to live there?

It's a clown-nose on, clown-nose off thing with him: He can defend against charges of racism by claiming "Hey, I'm not against white people, but whiteness itself, which I maintain doesn't even exist," and the write fantasy revenge stories about black separatist superheroes fighting white people just renting a condo.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about.

What I wanted to talk about was Ben Domenech seizing on Ta-Nehisi Coates' Dungeons & Dragons fanfic writing style, and parodying it.

Taking Coates' luridly stupid line --

"Whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies."

-- Domenech just went off in this thread. The whole thread is worth reading, but here are some of my favorites.

So anyway, that's the real point: The gift of riff. You might have your own reports of the eldritch powers the Amulet of Whiteness has bequeathed on you (or, if you're not white, then the powers of the amulet you've seen exhibited by, say, Jm J. Bullock).

To be honest, it might be hard: Domenech seems to have already mined most of the gold from this, um, mine. But hey -- you do have thost Amulets. You should only have to work half as hard as Ta-Neheshi Coates to produce something twice as stupid.

Apologies: Racist and racial separatist Ta-Neheshi Coates used so many n-bombs I wasn't able to censor them all on my first pass.

posted by Ace at 04:01 PM

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