Right. And it fails to do that one job, because the analogy it draws (between “lynching” and “the Presidency of Donald Trump”) is an unconvincing one, for which no proof is advanced in the argument here.
Point is that it happens to be true to the targeted reader of this article, which is presumably present-day Democrats, which is no doubt why it was made.
No, I find no part of the quoted argument even mildly convincing. It relies on making bad analogies and the only proof offered is in what you dismiss as the “closing rhetorical flourish”.
It is just a shoddy bit of reasoning - which, unfortunately, is of a piece with the rest of the article.
I say that, noting that the thesis the author advances may well be true, and maybe if I read a bunch of other, better reasoned and supported stuff, I may accept that.
It insults the intelligence to be asked to take shoddy reasoning on faith though.
The article spends dozens of paragraphs explaining that exact comparison. So I don’t know what you mean by “not seeing.” Do you disagree with the historical analysis about the relationship between chattel slavery, the white working class, and the ideology of white supremacy? If not, then where exactly are you having the problem with the analogy?
I’m sure I’m failing so far, but in my explanation of “whiteness” I was trying to at least partially bridge this gap as I saw it. Do you think there’s a better way to explain/summarize it? I don’t want to just give up when folks I think are smart don’t appear to be getting the gist of the argument – I know there are great books to read on the subject, but there must be some way we can talk about this with smart folks who haven’t yet read those books or are unlikely to in the near future.
And I’ll add that I imagine there’s plenty that I don’t understand on the subject as well.
Malthus: The point of that paragraph does not actually depend on your agreement that white supremacy is as involved in the rise of Trump as in lynching. The point is, again, that merely observing the existence of other significant factors is not in itself a rebuttal. If you don’t see that, then you still don’t understand the point of that paragraph. I don’t think that “not seeing” is Coates’ fault.
Right. An argument that can only appeal to the already convinced? How is that ever going to be a “good” argument?
I point out that the weaknesses I identified exist irrespective of the subject-matter of the article.
On a larger scale: if the thesis advanced is correct, and can only be accepted by the convinced who have read extensively of the same authors - well, that brings me back to an earlier point: the whole point of the article is supposed to be about Democrats winning future elections.
If the only folks willing to buy the thesis are those who have read all the right stuff - if even sympathetic folks roughly on the left for some reason can’t see it (maybe their own cultural blindness, as heavily implied in the article) - then the Democrats will never win espousing the thesis, until a significant proportion of voters read that stuff.
Given that is unlikely to happen, accepting the thesis = a prescription for continual electoral defeat.
I only know what worked for me. One of my first encounters with Coates was his exchanges with Jonathan Chait. I was mostly on the Chait side. I was initially pretty skeptical of Coates’ essay about reparations. I felt defensive. That feeling was really hard to overcome, even though I recognized intellectually how wrong it was to feel defensive.
What has opened my mind on some of these issues, and helped me to understand Coates’ writing, was learning more. I would not have understand and appreciated Racecraft, if I had not first read the Warmth of Other Suns, for example.
I honestly think this essay (and something like Between the World and Me), would have been completely inaccessible to me as little as five years ago. What I needed was not message board debate. I needed to be walked slowly, without the defensiveness or argument that occurs in online back-and-forth, through the history of white supremacy in America from 1800 to present. I doubt there is any shortcut for that, at least for someone like me–a naive white guy who could describe Objectivism better than he could Reconstruction.
You have not demonstrated that you understand the argument in that paragraph. Each time you paraphrase it, you misstate it. That’s why I think you aren’t getting it, rather than just disagreeing with it.
Trump wasn’t relevant in the national political picture in 2011 except, perhaps, as an object of ridicule. His rise began with his screed against illegal immigration when announcing his candidacy.
The problem with the quoted paragraph: it offers no argument other than an analogy (and the ‘rhetorical flourish’).
The Argument
Basic question addressed: some people say that racism was only one ingredient in the rise of Donald Trump. Does that disprove the thesis?
Argument: claiming that racism is just one ingredient in the rise of Trump isn’t a valid objection to the thesis.
People could say that racism was only one ingredient in lynching. That is no doubt true. (Not stated but implied: But everyone acknowledges racism was the primary ingredient).
The fact that other ingredients exist, simply isn’t a valid objection. Indeed, such an objection is cold comfort to racism’s victims.
With me so far?
Why the argument fails:
Straw Man: the argument assumes that the only objection is that racism isn’t the only ingredient in the rise of Trump. Not so: the objection is that racism isn’t the primary ingredient in his rise - that there are a lot of other factors of equal, or greater, weight in his rise. This may be true (or it may not) of Trump.
Begging the question, bad analogy: the argument provides no evidence that the proportion of racism to other factors in events such as lynching is anything like that in the ascendancy of Trump - which is the very objection the author ought to have addressed.
Incoherent: the “rhetorical flourish” at the end. It literally cannot matter how racism impacts on its victims, in an argument about whether racism was responsible for Trump’s rise.
Not to the convinced, to the aware. If I wrote an argument in spanish, would you consider it to be a poor argument on the basis that you cannot read it? That you do not agree with or connect with some of the basic premise of the article is as if you were speaking a different language.
I have not heard of half the authors mentioned, and have barely read the others. It can still be accepted on its own merits. There were parts that made me have to actually stop and think about preconceptions I may have had coming into the article that make me want to dismiss it, but challenging those preconceptions, while not easy, is necessary, if any forward movement in understanding the changing political climate and its relationship with racial issues is to be made.
I think the article was a description of some of the reasons for the continued electoral defeat of the democrats. Refusing to understand it is a prescription for maintaining the status quo.
Huge portions of the Republican electorate believed, and still believe, that Obama was born outside of the US. Trump was by far the most prominent player of that tune. I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that this wasn’t a very big part of his recent rise.
I certainly would, if the intention of the argument was to convince unilingual English folks of the value of reading Spanish.
In this case, the intention is to convince Democrats of the value of accepting the author’s thesis. If it can only convince the already convinced, it is a bad article because it will not do what it is supposed to.
The “aware”? Well, to my mind, that’s the language of faith, not reason.
Yes, if one accepts the author’s arguments. Though as I point out, if it isn’t even convincing to other Democrats, it is unlikely those arguments are true.
In order to write a persuasive article you have to accept the author’s premises or be argued into accepting them. Coates never tries to argue his premises and so is not persuasive. If your one of those who are already convinced that everything is racism then it does not take much for Coates to convince you that whatever subject he is currently writing about is racism. If you don’t think everything is racism then his writing is unpersuasive.
He harped on it for years after that correspondents’ dinner, up to and including his presidential campaign. He was asked about it multiple times and refused to say, until Sep of 2016, that Obama was born in the US.
You really don’t think the fact that so many Republican voters believed that Obama was born outside the US had anything to do with Trump’s early success? That’s a position that Trump alone (among the candidates) held, in concert with so many Republican voters.
But that is a poor analogy of what this article is about. If you are continuing the analogy, it would be like explaining something entirely different, like why people like grapes. If we are going to use a different analogy then, wherein the reader is to be convinced of the value of reading spanish, then it would be as if the article were 97% english, with just a couple dozen words that you may need to look up, if you had not been exposed to them already.
Awareness is about fighting your personal ignorance. Faith is about being willfully ignorant. Reason is a different subject.
Yes, if one accepts the author’s arguments. Though as I point out, if it isn’t even convincing to other Democrats, it is unlikely those arguments are true.
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I think part of the problem is that you are thinking that the author wrote this as a persuasive piece, not as an informative piece. He is not trying to convince you what is happening, he is trying to explain why it is happening.
If you do not accept some of the basic premises, like the idea that white supremacism was a thing, and is trying to make a comeback, then the author is certainly going to fail in convincing you of the reasons why that is.
LOL…Remember how much of an elitist, sexist, racist we all thought Romney was for his comments about the 47% or “binders full of women”.
Not directed at you specifically. More about how I see the term “white” (or WHITE as you wrote it) being frequently used as a disparaging shorthand for “entitled”, “over-privileged”, “generic”, “arrogant”, “boring”, “naïve”, or “oppressive”. i.e. “Bunch of white frat guys.” “What does some white girl like Taylor Swift know of blah blah”. Your differentiation between “white”/“black” and “WHITE”/“BLACK” reminded me a bit of people who have, at great length, explained to me the difference between a “Nigger” and just some “black person”. Not that I’m implying you are one of those people. Just that there seems to be a need to assign a racial component to people who act like jerks.
Take Trump for example. Why is he the first “White President” and not the first “Male President” as America appeared to elect the world’s biggest most incompetent jerk over a woman?
And what if you take a reasonable position, and while not believing that everything is about racism, but that there are indeed many things that are about racism?
