Glenn Loury & Ta-Nehisi Coates

He treats him like a white liberal would.

Hi all,

I assume most of you are following the controversies surrounding the release of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book, Messenger, which includes a section on Israel. In fact, Israel is erased from the book and the land is called “Palestine.” He also ignores the long, tumultuous history behind the conflict and fails to mention Hamas or terrorism in his pages.

Glenn Loury recently discussed the book with John McWhorter on his show and said he “was wrong about Coates.” I’m copying and pasting below a X thread I did in response to Glenn Loury’s reaction to the book:

What I find interesting in Glenn Loury’s praise of Ta-Nehisi Coates' writings on Israel is that he treats him like a white liberal would.

In his videos and writings, Loury consistently demands that blacks be held to the same standards as any other American. He rejects the sins of white liberal/liberal paternalism, often in angry rants.

In the past, he has criticized Coates and other similar writers for "their superficial and occasionally opportunistic analyses of race in America, their failure to reckon with the real problems within black communities, and their calls for institutions to balance the scales of racial inequity by lowering standards for African Americans."

Why then does Loury fail to apply a similar standard to Coates' writings on Israel, his charge of apartheid, and his relentless but flawed comparisons of Israel to Jim Crow south?

Why does Coates get a pass here? Because it is Israel? Why does Coates' talented prose -- not facts -- seem to be the thing that convinces Loury of the argument that Israel is an apartheid state?

(I can't help but think that Loury's praise of Coates' prose is not much different from how Harry Reid and Joe Biden praised Obama as articulate. I doubt that Loury intends this but it comes off this way.)

Why do facts matter when it comes to blacks in America but not when it comes to Palestinians? And if Coates ignored facts to construct the reductionistic, dehumanizing "black bodies" narrative around blacks, why would Loury expect him to be truthful here?

On the same note, why does Loury chastise Coates for stripping blacks of agency and reducing them to "black bodies" but not when he does the same thing to Palestinians to give them the innocence of victimhood?

The one thing I've noticed is that both Loury and Coates put their own moral anguish front and center in this war -- cultural and real.

In his television appearances, Coates often refers to his moral anguish over what he witnessed in his ten day visit. In his book, he makes no references to the terrorism, to Hamas, and erases Israel by calling it "Palestine." He prefers ahistorical optics to create and push the Palestinian victim narrative, the source of his moral anguish.

Loury has written that "one can have it all: anguish for both Israeli and Palestinian victims of what is now threatening to become a full-blown regional war, anguish at the world and regional powers that kill and abet the killing of thousands upon thousands with no end in sight, and anguish at the outrage one receives from deviating even one iota from the 'correct' (correct by whose lights?) position on the conflict."

But this moral anguish in both cases is nothing less than the claim of innocence, and a self-serving one at that. In placing oneself above history and reality, above conflict and evil, the only thing achieved here is the cheap and irrelevant innocence of moral relativism.

My best,

Eli