Concerning the Ta-Nehisi-ist Protest of the Bernie Sanders Rally in Seattle

Charles Mudede, a native of Africa who works for The Stranger in Seattle, has an evenhanded, judicious evaluation of a Black Lives Matter protest which prevented Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders from being heard, in his own rally, in Seattle. What happened at the rally, as reported by Jim Brunner of The Seattle Times:

At Westlake, Sanders was just starting to address the crowd, thanking Seattle for being “one of the most progressive cities in the United States of America.”

That’s as far as he got before two women walked onstage and grabbed the microphone.

“If you do not listen … your event will be shut down,” one of the protesters told organizers, who offered to let them speak after Sanders. After a back and forth with the screaming protesters, organizers relented and said the demonstrators could go first.

Some in the largely white audience booed and chanted for protesters to let the senator talk. A few yelled for police to make arrests.

Marissa Johnson, one of the protesters, shot back, “I was going to tell Bernie how racist this city is, filled with its progressives, but you did it for me,” accusing the audience of “white supremacist liberalism.” (Empasis added)

Mudede's response:

[Concerning] the August 8 disruption of the Social Security and Medicare rally in Westlake Park by Black Lives Matter activists Marissa Johnson and Mara Willaford. ...

I was unnerved by the manner in which Johnson and Willaford took command of the mic during the rally. The screaming was so heated, so shrill, that I found it to be more abusive than productive. I have to  be honest about this. I do not believe such extreme expressions have any place in a democratic event.  ...

I disagree with the BLM action not because Bernie Sanders marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and  therefore clearly paid his not-a-racist dues and should be left alone by black activists. ... My  point is simply that, as imperfect as Sanders is, and as imperfect as white progressives are in this city, it still makes more political sense to form alliances with them rather than risk isolation. As  much as I may agree with the content of Johnson and Willaford's disruption, its context (an event that was not for Sanders but for a very important issue that affects millions of black Americans) and  its brazen disrespect clearly closed rather than opened a lot of people to the BLM cause.

True, some of the people who booed Johnson and Willaford were likely racist, but many were simply  upset by what they perceived, with good reason, as arrogant behavior. The event had been happening for hours, and it had taken months to organize and promote. Speakers knew well in advance the amount of time they were allotted to express their concerns. Then, suddenly, two people break out of nowhere, take the mic, and appear by their actions to claim that their cause is far more important, more pressing than the one many had come to support. This, I'm sorry, is going to rub a lot of people  the wrong way—and not because they are racist but because they are human. Rudely jumping the line rarely excites cheers and applause in any of the colors of our kind.

To censor your opponent tends to legitimize the censorship of your own attempts to be heard; and this was de facto censorship of Senator Sanders and the cause for which he speaks. It deprived the people who attended the rally of information they had every right to hear.

This raises the question, Is liberal political democracy itself "white supremacy," a "white supremacist system that we will tear down," according to BLM-Seattle? What is the limit to what the protesters want? What is the limit to what they would do? Is there an agenda that any sane person could support?

Ta-Nehisi Coates, the loudest voice behind "white supremacy" ideology, has said:

[Jeffrey] Goldberg asked what [Ta-Nehisi Coates] would do if he were in [Mitch] Landrieu’s position — surely there was something, “I don’t know what I’d do if I were mayor, but I could tell you what I’d do if I was king.” [Ta-Nehisi Coates would] let criminals out of prison, he said. “And, by the way, I include violent criminals in that.” Goldberg asked what he meant by “violent.” “Gun crime, too,” Coates said. (Emphasis added)

 Ta-Nehisi has never bothered to define "white supremacy"—it appears to be an all-purpose condemnation of everybody, and everything which is done in his country that isn't black—but he has said that it includes "plunder," and "plunder" includes, as this passage from Between the World and Me states:

But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself.

Do you realize what Ta-Nehisi has just said? Mining for minerals and drilling for gas and oil are characteristic of the white lust for plunder. The claim is so absurd as to be incomprehensible. Every nation on earth which can do so, does these things. And the majority of them are not white.

It isn't Ta-Nehisi and his shrieking followers who are inexcusable. It is those members of the Fourth Estate whose fawning abject praise collaborates with evil.

In The Radical Chic of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Carlos Lozada writes:

In an America consumed by debates over racism, police violence and domestic terror, it is Coates to whom so many of us turn to affirm, challenge or, more often, to mold our views from the clay. Among public intellectuals in the U.S., writes media critic Jay Rosen, he’s the man now. When the Confederate battle flag on the statehouse grounds in Columbia, S.C., seemed the only thing the news media could discuss, my Washington Post colleague Ishaan Tharoor put it simply: Just shut up and read @tanehisicoates. These days, you hear many variations on that advice.

Coates is more than the writer whose thinking and focus best match the moment. With his 2014 Atlantic cover essay on The Case for Reparations, which explores the brutal U.S. history of redlining and housing discrimination, and now with the critical rapture surrounding his new book, Between the World and Me, he has become liberal America’s conscience on race. Did you read the latest Ta-Nehisi Coates piece? is shorthand for Have you absorbed and shared the latest and best and correct thinking on racism, white privilege, institutional violence and structural inequality? If you don’t have the time or inclination or experience to figure it out yourself, you outsource it to Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Lozada names names:

“Between the World and Me is, in important ways, a book written toward white Americans, and I say this as one of them,” writes Slate critic Jack Hamilton. “White Americans may need to read this book more urgently and carefully than anyone, and their own sons and daughters need to read it as well.”

In one of the earliest assessments, New Yorker editor David Remnick described “Between the World and Me” as an“extraordinary” book and likened Coates to James Baldwin. (Actually, everyone else has, too.) Reviewers have hailed it as “a classic of our time” (Publishers Weekly), “something to behold” (The Washington Post), “a love letter written in a moral emergency” (Slate) and “precisely the document this country needs right now” (the New Republic). This is more than admiration. It is an affirmation of enlightenment. New York Times film critic A.O. Scott went as far as one could go, calling Coates’s writing  “essential, like water or air.” Yes, we cannot live without Ta-Nehisi Coates.

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Ted Tonks tells the credulous, "[if you believe that] you deserve to be lied to."

Lozada suggests that Ta-Nehisi's feckless admirers praise Ta-Nehisi and his viciously morally-righteous absurdities precisely because they are so off-the-wall that there is no danger of their coming to pass. As we suggested in our own comparison of the Ta-Nehisi fad to "radical chic" three months ago, the phenomenon is largely the plaything of elites, quoting Wikipedia, "who endorsed leftist radicalism merely to affect worldliness, assuage white guilt, or garner prestige, rather than to affirm genuine political convictions."

Lozada asks,

What does such veneration—especially from a news media that Coates has attacked as indifferent to black America or inclined to view black America as a criminal justice problem—mean for Coates's arguments about the enduring influence of white supremacy? Does the praise disprove him, or to the contrary, does it only suggest that, in an age when liberal elites line up to lament their white privilege, the structures of inequality are resilient enough to accommodate, even glorify, this most radical critic?

But as the Seattle incident above shows, this trashing by a privileged elite of our deepest values and our most fundamental beliefs influences a lot of people who aren't in on the joke. "[It] is toxic. It poisons the national conversation and culture," as Aaron Sorkin has argued. "Fie on virtue" is a call that many are always ready to answer. It has already turned a Seattle event, which should have exemplified democracy in action, into a riot.