Ta-Nehisi Coates Trades Blackness for Wokeness

There is a remarkable moment in the latest unremarkable woke cash grab of a book of essays by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The single most successful black nationalist memoirist of modern times had taken a trip to Africa, only to discover that he knows nothing about it, and to Israel, to “discover” that he already knows all about it from reading New York Times articles.

And that Israel is racist.

Coates got famous for being able to find racism everywhere, including when a white woman pushed past his son in a Manhattan movie theater elevator. “I was only aware that someone had invoked their right over the body of my son,” Coates whined in Between the World and Me. “There was my own insecurity in my ability to protect your black body… I came home shook.”

The poet of black fragility had filled his Pulitzer Prize finalist book with odes to the exploitation of “black bodies” (primarily his own) by the white people lurking in elevators everywhere.

Even the firefighters and police officers who perished on 9/11 at the hands of the Islamic terrorists whom Coates now covers up for “were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a privileged millionaire, took a break from writing bad comic books and took his incredibly fragile body to Israel where he discovered the racism of black Israeli soldiers.

“There were ‘Black’ soldiers everywhere lording their power over the Palestinians, many of whom would, in America, have been seen as ‘white’,” Coates fumed, discovering that “race is a species of power and nothing else”. Despite damning the black Israeli soldiers, Coates can’t help reflexively capitalizing them as ‘Black’ and decapitalizing Muslim terrorists as ‘white’. Some habits of black nationalist woke language are harder to shake than imagining race as power.

But in this moment, Coates officially makes the sacrifice of trading blackness for wokeness, race as a living reality for race as a subset of Marxist power analysis. It’s every bit as potent as feminists who have spent generations denouncing men suddenly deciding that men can be women as long as they give up their toxic masculinity, put on a pantsuit and identify as ‘women’.

What of the ‘black body’ of Joshua Loitu Mollel, a Tanzanian agricultural intern who was kidnapped and killed by Hamas, who only wanted to return home and become one of Tanzania’s most successful farmers? 

What of Clemence Mtenga, also of Tanzania, another potential hostage, who turned out to be dead? Where did the power lie? Were they white or black?

After Oct. 7, Coates co-signed a letter which claimed that “on Saturday, after sixteen years of siege, Hamas militants broke out of Gaza.” When they ‘broke out’, they killed Joshua and Clemence, along with Adam Brema of Sudan, Wolderaphael Hagos Berhe and Goytum Jabrahiwat of Eritrea, and unknown numbers of other black men.

To Coates though, all the black victims of Hamas must be white, and Hamas must be black.

The ‘whiteness’ of black Jews could simply be put down to inter-race bigotry, but not the whiteness of Africans whose only crime was not being Muslim or the right kind of Muslim.

Or, more aptly, finding themselves on the wrong side of the woke paradigm of history.

In the woke paradigm, Arab Muslims, who control numerous countries and have committed genocide from Africa to Asia, are the oppressed, and Jews, Hindus, Africans and anyone who stands in their way are the oppressors. This defies facts and history, but abides with wokeness.

Coates, like the rest of the woke movement, has to insist on the blackness of the former Muslim slave masters because to do otherwise would expose the Left which has decided to make common cause with the slave masters against their former black and Jewish slaves. And black people have to be fooled into thinking the Left is a movement of empowerment, not enslavement even though all of history and even current events shows exactly the opposite.

Having just visited Senegal, Coates might have consulted with Tidiane N’Diaye, the respected anthropologist whose Le génocide voilé or The Veiled Genocide is the definitive text on the Arab Muslim slave trade in Africans.

“The Arabs have raided sub-Saharan Africa for thirteen centuries without interruption. Most of the men they deported have disappeared, due to their inhuman treatments,” N’Diaye, who was far more deserving of any literary reward, wrote. He estimated that 17 million black men were castrated. That may be more worthy of noting about the ‘black body’ than Coates’ elevator saga.

Saudi Arabia, the heartland of Islam, only abolished slavery in 1962, Qatar in 1952, and Yemen’s Houthis, allies of Hamas and the ‘Palestinians’, hold tens of thousands of slaves.

If the black Israeli soldiers whom Ta Nehisi Coates complains are ‘lording’ it over Arab Muslims were trying to make the trip today from Senegal to Israel, they would face potential slavery in Mali, under an Al Qaeda Islamic insurgency, genocide in Sudan, torture and death by the Muslim Brotherhood in Libya, and casual abuses by the Hamas allies in Egypt.

There are the remnants of a black slave population in Gaza. Why are they not armed and patrolling checkpoints? Where is the representation for Iraq’s 2 million black population, also descendants of the slave trade, in the Iraqi Shiite militias bombarding the Jewish State?

Faced with a choice between Qatar, which held slaves within living memory and sponsors Hamas, between the Arab Muslims who castrated 17 million black men, and black Israelis, Coates decisively picks the castrators and slave owners over black Israeli soldiers.

And that says it all.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is not a black nationalist, like the BLMers he’s a sellout who exploits black nationalism to push leftist agendas. Even if it means siding with the non-black murderers of black men. Why sell out everything he claimed to believe? It’s the latest thing.

Coates’ recent books have been fading. After the BLM moment had passed, the public had a limited appetite for his brand of narcissism, family history and black nationalism. The Message, his latest collection, relaunches Coates around the ‘latest thing’ which is Islamic terrorism.

The Atlantic had launched Coates’ career back in 2014 with an essay arguing for reparations. Coates had exploited the Holocaust of six million Jews to make that demand.

A decade later, Coates denounces Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, as “a grand narrative of conquered ancestors built by their conquering progeny”.

“This putative ‘Jewish democracy’ is, like its American patron, an expansionist power,” Coates sneers, “and every expansionist power needs a good story to justify its plunder.”

The Jews are guilty of “an enormous con”, he storms, their history is “a poorly wrought fairy tale” and a compensation of “violent impotence” for the Holocaust.

None of those lies is true; what is true is that Coates doesn’t really believe in anything.

A decade ago, Israel and the Holocaust were useful to Coates; now they are not. A decade ago, advocating for the fragility of black bodies was in; now advocating for fragile Hamas bodies is.

Coates cloaks his sellout in his trademark narcissism. Some variation of “feel”, “felt” or “feeling” occurs in the book hundreds of times. The rest is made up of cut and paste anti-Zionist quotes, many of them badly mistranslated or taken out of context, and clearly hand fed to him by his pro-terrorist allies.

Ta-Nehisi Coates doesn’t know anything about Israel. Nor does he actually want to. He checks into an Israeli luxury hotel and ‘suffers’ there. He makes a few brief outings, sees a 3D show of biblical times being advertised and decides everything Jewish is fake.

It’s the childish bigotry of a childish mind too in love with its own feelings to touch reality.

But the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of Ta Nehisi Coates is also a paradigm for that of his movement and of so many other leftists and black nationalists who have adapted to the latest thing, who will sacrifice whatever they claim to believe in to be part of the newest trend, who will allow black suffering to be appropriated by the Arab Muslims who sold them into slavery.

Antisemitism is not a surprising thing. It never has been. Neither is corruption. And Coates is only the latest in a long list of feted black nationalist writers willing to take a trip to Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union and come out singing the praises of their murderous sponsors.E. B. DuBois had praised Hitler who “showed Germany a way out when most Germans saw nothing but impenetrable mist.” He suggested that the Nazis weren’t really bigots and that their anti-Semitism “is a reasoned prejudice, or an economic fear.” In The German Case Against the Jews, he defended Nazi bigotry. Under Hitler, he claimed that there was “more democracy in Germany than there has been in years past.” Coates is an even worse writer and a worse liar.

Tracked for a release on the anniversary of the Oct 7 genocide, The Message deliberately makes no mention of Hamas, and Ta-Nehisi Coates makes a point of visiting the site of a ‘Rabbi Meir Kahane Park’, but not the sites of any of the Hamas atrocities which he calculatedly looks away from even as he exploits the attention brought by them. But the inherent lack of decency in such behavior is not extraordinary, but an entirely predictable abomination from Coates.

That Jewish lives have no value to a man who viewed even 9/11 firefighters as “not human” is unsurprising. In his essay, Coates reveals that black people also have no value to him.

And hopefully after this Coates gives all his prattle about “black bodies” a final resting place.

Black bodies fell on Oct 7 without a single expression of concern from Coates. And when seeing black Israeli soldiers preventing another massacre, his only thought is they’re really white.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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