Ta Nehesi Coates' Bernie Sanders Brain Fart Isn't Even About Reparations | Black Agenda Report

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.

Number one, stay away from Bernie cause he ain't for reparations.
Number two look out for those socialists too, cause they make a point of ignoring and denying the role of white supremacy..
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.

listen

http://traffic.libsyn.com/blackagendareport/20160122-tanehesi-coates-reparations.mp3

2016 presidential election

Berniecrats

Democrats

More Stories

Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti
Remembering Mario Joseph, BAI Managing Attorney
09 Apr 2025
The world has lost a champion of justice with the passing of Mario Joseph, a Haitian human rights lawyer who spent nearly three decades fighting for victims of state violence, cholera negligence, and…
Palestine Chronicle Staff
Sole Survivor of ‘Paramedics Massacre’ in Rafah Exposes Israeli War Crime
09 Apr 2025
Monther Abed, the sole survivor of the Israeli attack on paramedics in Rafah, reveals the details of the crime in which 15 humanitarian workers were killed.
Jehad Abusalim
"It Is Neither Death, Nor Suicide"
09 Apr 2025
For 76 years, Gaza has been has been the defiant heart of Palestinian resistance. Today, as Israel’s genocidal war lays bare the brutal dead end of Zionism, Gaza’s struggle transcends geography,…
Alan MacLeod
Betar: the Far-Right Hate Group Helping Trump Deport Israel’s Critics
09 Apr 2025
Betar U.S., a far-right Zionist organization with ties to violent extremism, is quietly shaping Trump administration policy, compiling lists of pro-Palestine activists for deportation while openly…
Socialist Workers Movement of the Dominican Republic
The march in Friusa failed and the neo-fascist movement was divided
09 Apr 2025
The Dominican far-right’s violent march on Friusa collapsed in disarray, exposing weakness in the movement as racist mobs failed to overrun a working-class community. However, the threat remains.…