A Bad Dude

An excerpt from the Washington Post -

‘The first white president’ is a ‘bad dude’
By Jonathan Capehart

I have a confession to make. I have not been as enamored of Ta-Nehisi Coates and his writing on race as some white people, particularly liberals, are. In fact, recently, I’ve discovered that I’m not alone in thinking that Coates’s views on race are too emotional, too dark, too relentlessly pessimistic. As one friend wrote in an email, “I tend not to agree with Coates because the premise of everything he writes is all white people in this country are evil and just look at the history of America to prove it. I tend to be a lot less cynical than that.”

When it comes to race and the United States, I am Martin Luther King Jr. to Coates’s Malcolm X. But ever since the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and the ensuing grim roll call of black lives felled by law enforcement and wannabe cops and others who simply felt empowered, my views on race and our nation have moved steadily closer to Coates’s. With “The First White President,” Coates’s epic examination of and explanation for President Trump’s victory last November in the Atlantic magazine, there no longer is any daylight between me and the provocative chronicler of America’s racial divide.

In paragraph after paragraph, Coates articulates what has roiled my heart and mind since election night. He lays out with precision and data what I knew in my bones. White people, generally speaking, were not and are not going to slip into their impending status as “the new minority” without a fight — a fight successfully waged by a man who ran the most racist, xenophobic, misogynistic campaign for president in memory. And that was after spending years questioning the legitimacy of his predecessor, Barack Obama, by peddling the racist birther lie that the nation’s first African American president wasn’t born in the United States.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2017/09/18/the-first-white-president-is-a-bad-dude/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-f%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.077fef3511cc

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/?utm_source=nl-atlantic-daily-091217&silverid=MzEwMTkwMTQ4ODk4S0