Ta-Nehisi Coates deletes Twitter account amid feud with Cornel West
Twitter feuds claimed another high-profile casualty Tuesday when the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates deleted his account after sparring with the Harvard professor Cornel West.
It started Sunday, when West published an article in The Guardian calling Coates “the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle,” and accusing him of “fetishizing white supremacy” while ignoring “Wall Street greed, U.S. imperial crimes or black elite indifference to poverty.”
West, a professor of philosophy at Harvard (and a sporadic Twitter user), then posted about his article, calling Coates’ views about race in America “dangerously misleading.”
.@tanehisicoates fetishizes white supremacy. His analysis/vision of our world is too narrow & dangerously misleading, omitting the centrality of Wall Street power, US military policies, & the complex dynamics of class, gender, & sexuality in black America https://t.co/FytA7mLmNV
— Cornel West (@CornelWest) December 17, 2017
The tweet drew hundreds of responses from friends and supporters of Coates, including the New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb, who picked apart what he called West’s “threadbare commentary.”
https://twitter.com/jelani9/status/942581868012204035
West’s tweet also drew plenty of agreement, including from supporters on the political left. But it was also retweeted by the white supremacist Richard Spencer, who added, “He’s not wrong.”
It feels like this might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back for Ta-Nehisi Coates — Richard Spencer endorsing Cornel West’s criticism of him. pic.twitter.com/GrlZEcnzMj
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) December 19, 2017
Late Monday, Coates, who had more than 1.25 million Twitter followers as of earlier this month, tweeted, “Peace, y’all. I’m out. I didn’t get in it for this.” And at some point after that, he deleted his account.
Richard Spencer agreed with Cornel West’s article about Ta-Nehisi Coates, and TNC had enough, said, “peace, y’all. I’m out.” Then deactivated. pic.twitter.com/bIdkozg9hs
— Joe’ad’Dib (@gdigitalzsmooth) December 19, 2017
It was not the first time that West had taken aim at Coates. In 2015, after Coates’ book “Between the World and Me” was published, West, a fierce critic of President Barack Obama from the left, posted a critique on Facebook, calling him “a clever wordsmith with journalistic talent who avoids any critique of the Black president in power.”
Coates’ latest book, “We Were Eight Years in Power,” collects some of his columns from The Atlantic and reckons with Obama’s presidency.
In his thread Sunday, Cobb suggested that West’s argument was driven less by intellectual differences than by professional rivalry.
Others expressed dismay that many Twitter users were focused on what the writer and sociologist Eve Ewing described as “some dudes being mad at each other,” rather than deeper issues.
https://twitter.com/eveewing/status/942411932874797056?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2017%2F12%2F19%2Farts%2Fta-nehisi-coates-deletes-twitter-account-cornel-west.html
