"The Hard Truths of Ta-Nehisi Coates"

"Morrison’s assistant sent Jackson an email with her reaction: “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died,” Morrison had written. “Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.” Baldwin died 28 years ago. Jackson forwarded the note to Coates, who sent back a one-word email: “Man.”...

in 2008, he was hired by The Atlantic — to write longer pieces, then to blog — and eventually his commentary formed a counterpoint to the White House line. Against the optimism of the Obama ascendancy, Coates offered a bleaker view: that no postracial era was imminent, that white supremacy has been a condition of the United States since its inception and that it might always be...

“You must always remember,” Coates writes to Samori, “that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body." Coates has borrowed this language from feminist writing. For him, it contained a basic truth, that indignity is always physical. The vulnerability of African-American bodies has become a main theme of the racial protests over the past year...

There is a radical-chic crowd assembling around Coates. The oddity is that there is no obvious opposing force. Conservatives have not focused on him; the old anti-structuralist wing of liberalism has faded. In Aspen, even people who actually disagreed with him seemed to want to believe they did not... What a strange, dark, beguiling place America is. It killed Prince Jones. It reveres Ta-Nehisi Coates"
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/07/ta-nehisi-coates-between-the-world-and-me.html

Calling him the New Baldwin feels like a little much. I look to him to have synthesized what everyone is saying in thought pieces all over the Internet - into an article with a title that could be a tweet and that has some great rhetoric in it. But I don't really approach him for truth or scholarship in that way.