I haven't revisited Coates' civil war essays for the Atlantic since they were published around 2011 and it now feels like the publication has spent the last few years doing all it can to apologize for publishing something this good in the first place - ThreadSky

lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com • 5 days ago

I haven't revisited Coates' civil war essays for the Atlantic since they were published around 2011 and it now feels like the publication has spent the last few years doing all it can to apologize for publishing something this good in the first place

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mgolden7.bsky.social•5 days ago

📌

policegazette.bsky.social•5 days ago

Another opportunity to puff my chest: My great great grandfather was in the front line of the counter-attack on Pickett's Charge. The day before, his regiment stopped the South from winning the entire battle. Here's my son and I at the High Water Mark.

nostaticatall.bsky.social•5 days ago

If there were any justice in the world (and he wanted to) TNC would be running the Atlantic by now.

bobbo.bsky.social•5 days ago

Pickett’s Charge is one of the all-time comedy bits

haredurer.bsky.social•5 days ago

Going from TNC to TCW is self-harm.

victoriascott.bsky.social•5 days ago

this ran in the ATLANTIC?! Holy shit. This doesn’t read like the same magazine even remotely. This is like reading a passage of Fear and Loathing inside of the National Enquirer

nostaticatall.bsky.social•5 days ago

the backlash to these pieces, the case for reparations and others has been ferocious.

fischer.bsky.social•5 days ago

there was a great tweet from that era about how every writer at the atlantic is either a groundbreaking black essayist or a mediocre white centrist so they’ve always had a bit of both angles

victoriascott.bsky.social•5 days ago

kind of disappointing they ended up sticking with the latter lol

robb.doering.ai•5 days ago

At least part of it has gotta be a misread of how mainstream “the civil war was bad” was becoming, IMO. Obama being elected, despite the obvious tea party racism and his own serious flaws, was a pretty damn hopeful narrative.

For northern libs, I could see this reading as mostly non-controversial

victoriascott.bsky.social•5 days ago

I mean that’s fair but this is also much better *writing*, as an art form, than they currently host 90% of the time in that magazine

lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com•5 days ago

a lot of the stuff in the obama era that made the right go insane came out of there, surprisingly, and it makes its near total ideological capture sting all the more

mckaylaf.bsky.social•5 days ago

They have definitely balanced the scales.
And then some.

heres.bsky.social•5 days ago

It seems like they’ve been running “we all agree that there has been too much attention to civil rights” essays for the past 4 years or so.

When no-one agrees lol

naethros.bsky.social•5 days ago

The first article underneath Coates’ essay that was suggested to me:

nurseboystanley.bsky.social•5 days ago

I went to Gettysburg and you stand on the highwater mark of the Confederacy; and how lacking in cover and wide open it is; but you can feel it. a tiny bit of that feeling of "we are telling you, not a step further." And alot of terrible shit happened since, and continues, but its a good feeling.

christybrandon.bsky.social•5 days ago

So much to learn, thank you for sharing this!

cinemashoebox.bsky.social•5 days ago

it really does feel like it was some sort of very lucky, extremely rare failing of the usual containment procedures that allowed Coates to become such a huge mainstream figure, and the desperate attempt now to memory-hole him is The Media Establishment trying to go back and correct this

foxblush.bsky.social•5 days ago

for the briefest moment white liberals in the academy and legacy media saw opening the doors a tiny bit as a potential vector to build their own prestige, and then immediately regretted it when they had to contend with real excellence and the feeling that they weren’t sufficiently patted on the back

foxblush.bsky.social•5 days ago

it’s the same reason they now comply in advance with DEI reversal (read: resegregation) initiatives. they’ll write a thousand op-eds about how it all “went too far” or the importance of merit, when really they just want to get back on that mediocre playing field where no one is mouthing off to them

combaticus.bsky.social•5 days ago

True, but it’s even sadder when you consider black elderly voters also turned their backs against Coate’s explicit and implicit ideology in order to support noted white supremacist Joe Biden

electralyzer.bsky.social•5 days ago

thank you for the recommendation

quillbo.bsky.social•5 days ago

Fuck me, I got some reading to do later

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