
The long (16,600 words) goodbye. For a black view of Obama as he departs the presidential stage, you might be moved to try the article by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the current (Jan./Feb. 2017) issue of The Atlantic. [My President Was Black]
If you are so moved, best set aside an hour for the reading: Coates' piece is 16,600 words long.That's longer than
A Midsummer Night's Dream. Supposing you have that hour to spare, it would of course be shamefully reactionary of you to give it over to one of
William Shakespeare's productions rather than to a work by Coates, who
is after all the
recipient of a
MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant — which
Shakespeare never was!

Like Obama, Coates fits precisely into some hungry receptors in the brains of many white Americans. Different receptors: Coates is not quite the Nice Black Guy. He actually comes across as rather sour and surly, although at a low and unthreatening level.
The fit must be a precise one none the less. Coates' books and articles are required reading in high schools and colleges across the nation. I am sure that at any given moment in today's U.S.A., far more people are reading Coates than Shakespeare.
Coates' appeal is even more incomprehensible to me than Obama's. I can at least see the attraction to others of what Obama's selling, even though I don't buy it myself. I can appreciate Obama's appeal at second hand, so to speak. I don't get Coates' appeal at all, at any hand.
A few weeks ago I did a telephone interview with
an academic who was
writing something about the
Alt Right. We went over the usual ground amiably enough, then got stuck on something I had written somewhere that the interviewer thought was disrespectful to Coates. For some reason he thought this particular heterodoxy of mine — out of so many! — was especially flagitious.
I responded with something like:
"For goodness' sake, Coates is an utter mountebank. He has no topic other than his own blackness, which is not interesting to me. His prose is dull and humorless. He's not well-read, has no math or science, and possesses no original insights into the human condition. His anecdotes are trivial and frequently, I suspect, bogus."

The interviewer asked how did I know all that, since I've confessed to never having gotten very far into one of Coates' pieces. I can't recall what I said in reply, but I hope it was something about not needing to drink a whole bottle to know the wine is
corked.
After this latest Coates effort I could have added that when a "piece" is 16,600 words long, not getting very far into it can still cover a lot of wordage.
Coates has attained fame and wealth in the U.S.A., though — far above anything he could have attained in
a black country. Try getting him to admit that.
Escalator race stories. Ta-Nehisi Coates' best-known anecdote about the sufferings of blacks under the iron heel of White Privilege in present-day America is
the escalator story told in his book Between the World and Me. Addressing his son, Coates writes:
Perhaps you remember that time we went to see Howl's Moving Castle on the Upper West Side. You were almost 5 years old. The theater was crowded, and when we came out we rode a set of escalators down to the ground floor. As we came off, you were moving at the dawdling speed of a small child. A white woman pushed you and said, "Come on!"
A rude New Yorker — who could have imagined it?
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