Behold: An American Genius in Paris!

I hope he's not spending it all in one place*...

Does the class difference between how you grew up and how your son is growing up ever worry you?

No. I feel like I learned certain stuff the way I grew up, and those things helped me later. But the amount of violence in black communities is just off the hook, so I think it’s a net negative. You’ve got to put it on balance. I think everybody who goes through that says, “Well, I’m gonna toughen him up.” See, these white folks ain’t got to be tough. Tough is for people without money.

Btw, didn't we all learn in middle school that mo-fo is a pretty sexist term?

Odd that men like Coates, the son of a librarian working on a campus, and Kanye West, the son of the English Department head at Chicago State, ape the language of the streets still.

How do you spell poseurs again?
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* Something tells me it would be hard to hire him as a writing professor at MIT after his language here.

ADDED: Coates lost me when he argued, in the pages of the whiteman's NYT, that some words were off-limits to white people in America, reserved exclusively for our nation's black stock. Might be nice to think, but once descriptive phrases spill off the reservation onto the corners where white people can all see -- and hear -- you lose exclusivity.

Some elite white people might buy what Coates is selling, but I'm thinking John T. and Catherine MacArthur would be rolling over in their graves to see what genius their foundation money is going to support... It wasn't supposed to be a charitable fund, but an investment. But without a solid educational foundation, this is what you get.

How good do you think you are at writing?
I’m a good writer. I think there are very few people who can do journalism, do history, form an argument, an argument with a brain, and then write in such a way that it gets at your heart also. I’m thinking about Isabel Wilkerson. I think of Nikole Hannah-Jones. I think Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker is really good at that. I’m talking about making an argument that’s simple, with all this evidence, and writing about it in a beautiful way. There are very few people who can do all of it at the same time, and that’s because very few people actually try.

Coming up on hip-hop really taught me the beauty of poetry. Reading comic books taught me the beauty of poetry. Studying poetry after that, I had this obsession with how language sounded. Coming out of my household and being a history major at Howard gave me a deep appreciation for history. Working under David Carr as a journalist gave me a deep appreciation for actually going out and talking to people. So I had a variety of experiences, but it’s not mystical. It’s not in the genes or in the bones.

He ain't got it. And he knows it, despite all the white man's money and praise. That's where the vulgarity comes in... the self-clowning and female degradation.

This is what the white liberals think an educated black man will sound like... sad!