Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire
  • bandar togel
  • maincuan
  • neko77
  • omnibus
  • raja slot
  • situs bandar togel
  • slot gacor
  • slot qris
  • slot zeus
  • slot777
  • slot88
  • stm88
  • stm88
  • winsgoal

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.

  1. Number one, stay away from Bernie cause he ain't for reparations.

  2. Number two look out for those socialists too, cause they make a point of ignoring and denying the role of white supremacy..

  3. 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.

Your browser does not support the audio element.

listen
http://traffic.libsyn.com/blackagendareport/20160122-tanehesi-coates-reparations.mp3
2016 presidential election
Berniecrats
Democrats

More Stories


  • Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
    Propaganda Watch: Kagame Is Not Traoré
    21 May 2025
    A recurring social media trope casts Rwandan President Paul Kagame as a defiant African hero, like Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traoré, resisting the West’s dictates, but nothing could be further from the…
  • Jon Jeter
    In DC, A New ‘Mayor 1 Percent” This Time in Blackface
    21 May 2025
    Muriel Bowser is proving that Black faces in high places don’t break systems, they grease them. While slashing wages for tipped workers and handing billionaires stadium deals, D.C.’s mayor is the…
  • Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright
    Temerity, Tartuffery, and Toxic Identity Reductionism…the Latest Democrat Party Hoggwash
    21 May 2025
    The Democratic Party would rather silence critics like Hogg than fix its own rot. Their reliance on Black Misleaders to do the dirty work exposes once again that the Democrats care more about power…
  • Djibo Sobukwe
    Malcolm X: Foundational Black Internationalism and the Anti-Imperialism of the Black Alliance for Peace
    21 May 2025
    Malcolm X didn’t just fight for Black liberation—he waged war on empire itself. As U.S. militarism tightens its grip on Africa and beyond, his revolutionary internationalism burns brighter than ever…
  • ​​​​​​​ Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist
    Malcolm X and Human Rights in the Time of Trumpism: Transcending the Masters Tools
    21 May 2025
    Malcolm X understood that “oppressed peoples must commit themselves to radical political struggle in order to advance a dignified approach to human rights.” What’s needed is a bottom-up mass movement…
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us