Race Without Class: the “Bougie” Sensibility of Ta Nehesi Coates
Interesting article on the perspective of the Parisian resident and writer
Article published on JANUARY 20, 2016
by Paul Street at Counterpunch
"In an interview with his longtime friend Neil Drumming on National Public Radio’s “This American Life” last November, the celebrated Black American author Ta Nehesi Coates talked about his new life in Paris, where he enjoys fine food and experiences personal training at “a really nice gym.” Coates described himself as “a snob,” someone for whom expensive things matter. At the same time he hastened to add that “I don’t think I’m bougie.” It was an interesting distinction."
"...Does the jet-setting American writer in Paris Ta Nahesi Coates really believe that he is further “below” in the American System than half-illiterate white people without high school degrees and struggling to get by on Wal-Mart or Tyson slaughterhouse wages and living in a dingy trailer park in semirural downstate Illinois or the hills of eastern Tennessee? Seriously? It’s not often that you find the neoliberal president Obama and the present Marxist writer (one of Obama’s earliest and most consistent critics) on the same page, but here I think the chief executive and I agree: Coates is absurdly wrong about that. His class blindness extends to himself, apparently."
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/01/20/race-without-class-the-bougie-sensibility-of-ta-nehesi-coates/
