Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is from the author’s latest book, DEI Exposed: How the Biggest Con of the Century Almost Toppled Higher Education. It has been edited to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines and is cross-posted here with permission.
One of the best assessments of the popular racialist fictioneer Ta-Nehisi Coates was delivered by British critic Douglas Murray:
When students starting out on campuses across the US wonder whether making insincere claims and catastrophizing minute events can be rewarding, they can look to [Ta-Nehisi] Coates and know that it is.
Murray is so spot-on that not much more need be added, and yet I shall try because if any writer in America deserves opprobrium for offering so little to his fans in the guise of cerebral lucubration, it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Few writers boast ignorance as a credential—Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of them. And few persons could get a book into print on the Israeli-Hamas conflict based on a single 10-day visit to Gaza hosted by terrorist sympathizers, but Ta-Nehisi Coates did just that. The result is his 2024 bestseller The Message, most of it his ruminations about himself and his superimposition of crude racialist theory onto a conflict he only dimly understands while timeserving on what has to be one of the dullest travelogues ever penned.
My own expectations of Coates are low, and they have continued to drop with each iteration of a new memoir by this young fellow, who believes he has much to say that is grounded in his “lived experience.” That is to say, the uber-mundanity that is his signature theme that he contrives as he moves his career along—witness his brief terror-tourism in Gaza.
Coates has been a reliable practitioner of a racialist writing methodology pioneered by the late Harvard Law Professor, Derrick Bell. You simply introduce a point you want to make, then you weave an oppression story around it that caters to an audience’s prejudice, add a dash of discount-rack mysticism and . . . presto! As is his habit, Coates has never hidden his ignorance of that which he writes about but rather boasts of his ignorance, considering it a virtue.
As with Ibram Kendi, Coates is at best a pedestrian writer. He is most at home with the comic book form, and he has always centered himself in his narcissistic memoirs. The Kendi-Coates method is to begin with a primitive racialist theory and then conjure up a superficial understanding of major events through this racialism. Racialists call this their “lens.” Facts are not simply curated selectively in this method—facts are irrelevant and filtered out if they are inconvenient.
Sadly, this is not parody. It is the author’s idea of chin-scratching sagacity. You can decide for yourself, of course, and enough readers prefer his goulash of prejudice, ignorance, and hauteur to make Coates the shrewdest of grifters, if nothing else.
I speak of Coates’s writing because, well, that’s his self-professed occupation. And no matter how much I speak of Coates’s writing, be assured that he has spoken more, is speaking more, and will speak more.
He fervently believes that he is a fabulous writer with a “gift,” and he interminably talks about his love affair with words that began as a youngster, about writing, about himself, about the gift he has embraced, and about the young would-be writers he would recruit as disciples. He teaches such writing at Howard University as Sterling Brown Chair in the Department of English and as writer-in-residence.
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This self-referential style is off-putting, not least because he never delivers on the promises of depth, breadth, wit, soul, heart, detail, or romance. Nothing of the sort. Perhaps this has to do with his abhorrence of complexity. Rather, he shoehorns the glorious reality around him into the same pair of frayed rhetorical loafers he’s worn since, well, his last memoir. And the memoir before that.
Quite disturbing is the influence that Coates wields, as purportedly a man in the know, combined with his unrelieved ignorance. Folks on the campuses look to him. Reading groups discuss his books. And what do they learn? Well, in The Message, he manages the feat of pronouncing on the unrest in Israel and its neighbors from the perspective of a tourist ushered around by a Palestinian group called the Palestine Festival of Literature. He is never far from the provincialism that permeates all of his writing, and he exhibits two of the three methodological pathologies I discuss in this book—navel-gazing and yarn-spinning.
All of Coates’s work is characterized by these pathologies. But as I have noted, there seems always a large and receptive audience for this artifice. It’s the same audience that is swayed by the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, The Man Who Cried I Am, The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews, and The Turner Diaries.
Once an author acknowledges up front that he takes liberties with the facts, that he has an innate suspicion of even the possibility of an objective truth, and that he believes that he conveys an “inner truth,” then the entire body of his work becomes suspect—at least for those who think critically.
And when the author is a committed racialist, given license by a credulous public to salve his vanity at their expense, he is prone to serve up what his audience wants in the way of racialist porn. His work is candy for believers, convenient confirmations of the racialist myth. No one outside of his committed circle is convinced of anything because of the dubiety of it all, while those who are already locked in the circle nod stupidly and slap the page at the abstract platitudes marching predictably in paragraph formation.
Is it true? Did it happen this way? Do these people even exist, or are they “composite characters” created to make a point? Ta-Nahesi, have you omitted anything that might substantially transform your conclusions, that might give your readers reason to suspect that what you say is merely a contrivance of your imagination?
This doesn’t matter, of course, because the guiding mantra of Coates and Kendi and Bell and any dozen other DEI gurus is that it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. What matters is that it could be true.
Remember this the next time you’re tempted to join the huzzahs of praise for the race-hustler du jour.
Cover made by Jared Gould using image of “Ta-Nehisi Coates giving the keynote address at the University of Virginia’s 2015 MLK Celebration” by Eduardo Montes-Bradley on Wikipedia.
It’s people like Ta-Nehisi Coates who give credence to things like The Turner Diaries.
He doesn’t even have an earned BA and yet has holds faculty status — something which usually requires a terminal degree.
And as to reparations, let’s talk about subrogation — two of my Great-Great-Grandfathers fought to free the slaves, one came back without his foot, another didn’t return at all.
Hence if he’s entitled to reparations for slavery, I am entitled to seize his reparations under the concept of subrogation.