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TomCADem

(17,834 posts)
Wed Dec 20, 2017, 10:06 PM Dec 2017

Vox - Cornel Wests attacks on Ta-Nehisi Coates, explained - Cornel West attacking Dems Again [View all]

If you guessed that Cornel West filled in his standard ad libs more leftist than thou essay by professing that he loved, "Brother or Sister So-and-so," then proceeding to use the word "neo-liberal" in every sentence and "racist" and "globalist" in every other sentence, then you guessed right.

Yes, the so-called leftist is once again attacking members of the left while giving the right a free pass. Indeed, his anti-globalist rhetoric would not sound out of place in a Donald Trump speech. It is all the nativism with the white supremacy replaced by black nationalism. Yet, Bernie Sanders chose to put Cornel West on the DNC platform committee, which West then dumped on by endorsing Jill Stein.

Sadly, Cornel West is just an opportunist who cannot resist the attention he gets when attacks members of the left from the left. So, expect him to be featured widely in the upcoming 2018 election cycle. It should be a clue that you are on the wrong side of the argument when Richard Spencer is on your side.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/arts/ta-nehisi-coates-deletes-twitter-account-cornel-west.html?_r=0

https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/12/20/16795746/ta-nehisi-coates-cornel-west-twitter

ut West’s criticisms resurfaced in the past month when he brought up Coates in an interview with the New York Times Magazine. In discussing the “black elite leadership” that has tried to fit into “a neoliberal world,” West cited “[d]ear brother Ta-Nehisi Coates” as an example. Commenting on Coates’s book, We Were Eight Years in Power, West remarked, “Who’s the ‘we’? When’s the last time he’s been through the ghetto, in the hoods, to the schools and indecent housing and mass unemployment? We were in power for eight years? My God. Maybe he and some of his friends might have been in power, but not poor working people.”

West further elaborated on this point in his op-ed in the Guardian on Sunday, arguing that Coates’s analysis of white supremacy neglects some of its worst crimes.

“He represents the neoliberal wing that sounds militant about white supremacy but renders black fightback invisible,” West wrote. “This wing reaps the benefits of the neoliberal establishment that rewards silences on issues such as Wall Street greed or Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and people.”

He added, “The disagreement between Coates and me is clear: any analysis or vision of our world that omits the centrality of Wall Street power, US military policies, and the complex dynamics of class, gender, and sexuality in black America is too narrow and dangerously misleading. So it is with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ worldview.”
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