Ta-Nehisi Coates: ‘Washed White’ in The Atlantic
We Shall Overthrow! Occupy-The-Dream Poses a Threat to The Fed
The Atlantic Calls out Its Toms
By Tingba Muhammad, with the NOI Research Group
According to his plantation’s brand mark, Ta-Nehisi Coates “is a senior editor” for The Atlantic magazine, where he writes and blogs about “culture, politics, and social issues.”
Why does a Black man named “Ta-Nehisi” write about “culture, politics, and social issues” at a time when Black people are suffering economically? Perhaps for the same reason Blacks named “Toby,” “Cuffe,” “Millie,” and “Sampson” picked cotton, cut sugar, and cleared swamps in the South—because the white man forced them to. Most Blacks hated every miserable minute of their enslavement and sought every opportunity to destroy their enslavers and gain their God-given freedom. But some believed fully that they were born to serve the white race, to submit all their thoughts, words, and deeds to the white man’s service and his advancement. Ta-Nehisi Coates falls in the latter category.
How else can one describe a Black man who eagerly takes on the assignment to attack the presidential candidacy of Congressman Ron Paul, but who spends most of the article condemning the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan? Coates’ task was assigned to him by The Atlantic’s Jewish editor, James Bennet, the former Jerusalem bureau chief for the New York Times, and the magazine’s publisher, Jay Lauf, who recently arrived from Jewish Monthly magazine, where “he wrote on Israeli politics and Jewish culture.” If one remembers not long ago, there was another presidential candidate surging in the polls who once attended a church that loves and honors Min. Farrakhan. Jewish media branded the candidate an “anti-Semite” and tried through a seedy Jewish whisper campaign to destroy the first Black president. Ron Paul is surging to national political prominence—an unanticipated phenomenon that has alarmed the financial elite of this country—and they strategically solicited a pliable negro voice to speak against it: and Ta-Nehisi Coates answered the call.
But why a negro foil to the Ron Paul candidacy? And why Mr. Coates? The “qualifications” of our branded brother are revealed in his own self-description: he “writes about culture, politics, and social issues.” Yet both Min. Louis Farrakhan and Dr. Ron Paul represent economic threats to Mr. Bennet and his people, the Jews. And here’s why: Ron Paul wants to drastically cut American aid to Israel, and pull back U.S. troops from their mad romp around the oil-rich regions of the world, a military campaign that the neo-conservative Jews have demanded for years. Ron Paul wants to abolish the Federal Reserve—the secretive gang of Jewish bankers that crashed the U.S. economy, locked it into unrelenting debt, and drained its coffers dry. Rep. Paul has also been known to question the involvement of the U.S. government in the 9/11 “attacks.” Similarly, Min. Farrakhan has elaborated on all of those issues and—most significant—he has framed an ECONOMIC vision for Blacks to overcome all of their “cultural, political, and social” ills. Both men have forthrightly addressed an issue that the wealthy have sought to conceal from the American people for almost a century.
As long as Ron Paul remained at the fringe of the political spectrum, his contempt for the international bankers was seen as a cathartic outlet for the restless discontents. But his surge to the top tier of Republican candidates is fueled by a youthful, energetic, and very well organized campaign that is drawn from the true believers of the Occupy Wall Street movement. So tying the candidate to another “scary” political figure—Min. Farrakhan—just as America is becoming acquainted with him helps the bankers divert attention from his core issues of economic justice.
And there is another element on the horizon that must keep Federal Reserve chairman Benjamin Bernanke and the boys up at night. A coalition of Black Christian churches is poised to use the upcoming Martin Luther King holiday to launch a movement they are calling “OCCUPY THE DREAM,” whose stated purpose is to unite American Blacks with OCCUPY WALL STREET to bring economic education and activism to a people that have been pushed through years of mis-leadership into a crippling American economic subservience. On MLK Day (January 16), the coalition intends to lead demonstrations at all 13 Federal Reserve Banks!
This alarming transition from lunch counter sit-ins to confronting international bankers is troubling enough to the 1% super-rich. But the last time they saw the coalition’s leader and organizer, Dr. Benjamin Chavis, was in 1995, at the greatest gathering of human beings in the history of America: the 2.2 million Black men at the Mall in Washington, D.C.—the Million Man March. He had been appointed by Minister Farrakhan to be its executive director. Hip Hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons is the celebrity presence in the new unified OCCUPY WALL STREET movement, and he is unashamedly “such a big, big fan of Farrakhan’s….The people who are taught by him and who listen to him today are told to love, to operate from love, everyday.”
OCCUPY THE DREAM’s targeting of the Federal Reserve as the very root of economic injustice in America is a scary proposition for America’s ruling class, and their rhetoric is surprisingly strident and uncompromising: “Our political, economic, and legal systems have become wholly corrupted through a system of political bribery. Through campaign finance, lobbying, and the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street, our wealth has been consolidated into the hands of the few at the expense and suffering of the many. …. [We] say ‘enough is enough.’ Our families have endured economic oppression for too long.”
A long list of prominent Black pastors has signed on, and their promotional video effectively blends the imagery of the 1960s freedom marches, water canons, and German shepherds, with the video of the recent police violence against young whites, including the unprovoked pepper spraying of peaceful protestors—all over the solemn intonations of the Reverend Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Make no mistake about it, the Wall Street/Federal Reserve gangsters are facing a potential perfect storm of politico-racial ideologies coming together and coming to life before their very eyes. But the OCCUPY THE DREAM movement also represents a maturity of leadership that Min. Farrakhan has engineered for decades. Long, long before the formation of this coalition, The Minister was crystal clear (MAY 16, 2006):
“Black leaders have never met with the people who really exercise power, like the head of the Federal Reserve, bankers, heads of multinational corporations, neo-conservatives and Zionists that control the government. If you do not meet with these people, then whatever promise you receive from figureheads cannot be fulfilled without their approval. The sooner you recognize your impotence, you will understand that you have to go somewhere else to get the power to deal with the real powers that control government.”
OCCUPY THE DREAM has gotten that message! The specter of a regeneration of the youthful, multi-racial civil rights energy in an election year—but with a singular, laser-like focus on the real banker culprits—is a frightening, unexpected, and uncontrollable new force in American politics! So the elite institutions have struck back through a forever trusty and compliant American media. That is why, in the days leading up to the Iowa Caucuses, the world heard an avalanche of stories about Ron Paul’s racist history and his anti-Martin Luther King holiday sentiments. But even “the race card” could not stop his surge in Iowa, where he came in a close third behind two traditional cookie-cutter politicians. His New Hampshire showing could be even bigger.
This economic-centered supernova is far, far over the head of the “cultural, political, and social” “senior editor” Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose assignment is to dispirit and divert the youth of the new multi-racial OCCUPY movement. Nonetheless, the clumsy Coates forecasts how the super-rich will be deploying the worn out standbys of racism and anti-Semitism to undermine OCCUPY THE DREAM’s growing juggernaut. But this is surely glass house rock-throwing at its most despicable. Coates attacks Dr. Paul for his racist past statements, yet he does this on behalf of a magazine whose racial history is hopelessly bigoted.
Two of The Atlantic magazine’s most notorious founders are Ralph Waldo Emerson, who thought that “It is better to hold the negro race an inch under water than an inch over,” and James Russell Lowell, who thought that freed Black slaves were “dirty, lazy & lying.” Lowell thought that the Black vote could be controlled by “the white race,” whose “intellectual and traditional superiority, will retain sufficient ascendancy to prevent any serious mischief…” But wait, there’s more. The Atlantic’s founder thought the Jews were an “insidious race,” and claimed from the pages of The Atlantic that “all bankers were Jews” and so were most of the great financiers! Jews, he believed, had gotten possession of the press, and they were poised to do the same in politics. Lowell went on and on and on—as did Emerson—in ways that neither Ron Paul nor Min. Louis Farrakhan would ever countenance.
James Bennet and Ta-Nehisi Coates do not repudiate or atone for The Atlantic’s founding fathers or the putrid principles they publicly promoted to the American public; instead, they deem themselves best qualified to judge others. Not only does James Bennet embrace this ugly legacy, he has taken the advice of The Atlantic’s founder Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The way to wash the negro white is to educate him in the white man’s useful & fine Arts, & his ethics…” Oh, yes, and then make him your “senior editor.”
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