Jelani Cobb brings receipts

I’ll start by saying I’m not a disinterested party. @tanehisicoates is one of my oldest friends. We go all the way back to the days when we were both aspiring writers at Howard and his pops was a mentor-figure to the young activists and thinkers on campus.

2. And also, given what I do for a living and the necessity of intellectual engagement I should say up front that no one is above critique. It’s an indispensable part of growth. But I was frankly embarrassed by @CornelWest’s threadbare commentary.

3. It’s one thing to challenge and interrogate. Quite another to cloak petty rivalry as disinterested analysis. Neoliberal? What part of neoliberalism demands reparations @CornelWest — and places that demand squarely within the history of racist American public policy.

4. In your obsequious stanning for Bernie you must’ve overlooked the part where he dismissed the idea of black reparations. Moreover, those demands were kept alive in the black nationalist grassroots tradition — not the interracial left you so idolize.

5. Your disregard for capitalism was curiously absent when your boy Tavis (rest in peace) was helping Wells Fargo hustle ghetto loans. Or when he was tied to Walmart — an actual force for wage stagnation in poor communities.

6. But even more curious to me is your selective disdain. You speak about Malcolm’s legacy and the blood he shed on behalf of black people, yet at the Million Man March you embraced Farrakhan — the dude who helped kill Malcolm.

7. Twenty-one years ago when white leftist at the Nation went after you for attending the MMM you defended it on principle — you engage with people despite their areas of intellectual disagreement. I remember admiring how adroitly you shut down your critics. But it wasn’t true.

8. You had Ta-Nehisi’s number. You know his pops well. You could’ve debated with him about whatever the issues were. But you didn’t. Because this isn’t really about intellectual differences.

9. This points to a broader concern I might as well air. One of the more fascinating things I’ve observed as @tanehisicoates has become more prominent is the unifying contempt of a striking array of black intellectuals.

9. I found it striking that people as intellectually diverse as John McWhorter and Glenn Loury are mad at the same dude as @CornelWest and Adolph Reed. I can’t tell you how many times black academics have tried to turn me against my friend on the low.

10. One who sniffed indignantly to me “He hasn’t written anything that’s not on my syllabus.” Then you should’ve sent your syllabus to @TheAtlantic. But underlying all this is another dynamic. Plain classical elitism.https://twitter.com/jelani9/status/942587109315137536 …

11. That MacArthur? Good god. I don’t know how many people were whispering about how he didn’t really deserve it, etc. Again, there are valid critiques to be made of anyone’s work. That’s not what a lot of this is about tho.

12. Straight up: many people hate the fact that the person being hailed as possibly the sharpest black intellectual writing about race is an HBCU dropout. They prefer their self-made intellectuals to be of the deceased variety (Baldwin, Cruse, Malcolm.)

Frankly I preferred not to say any of this. @tanehisicoates is a grown man. He can fight his own battles. But it’s a little tiresome to see and hear the hypocritical bullshit of academics who would prefer the community not be defended if doing so means accolades for someone else.

Honestly, I feel like it’s best to keep Malcolm’s name out your mouth if you running around with the dudes who killed him. Just talk about Paul Robeson instead or something.

Black Lives Matter had to disrupt Bernie (TWICE!) to even get him to talk about race. Let’s not talk about the sketchy race dynamics inside the campaign that black folk were telling me about. Ain’t heard a word from you about that neither.

Sorry. I don’t know how to thread. Anyway, that’s enough of this.

Betty Shabazz spoke. Farrakhan had also just declined to pursue charges against her daughter who was implicated in a plot to kill him. Wasn’t hard to see the transaction there. https://twitter.com/jinx26oo/status/942597295127826438 …