When a lib turns on their movement’s idol, something must be very wrong indeed. So when Ta-Nehisi Coates blamed the Obama administration for allowing white supremacy to happen, one has to wonder if their common sense left them completely.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, the race-obsessed National Correspondent for The Atlantic, gave an interview on August 15 to taxpayer-subsidized Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now, where he offered his opinion on Trump, racism (of course), Charlottesville, and white supremacy, as a plug for his new book, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. And, while Republicans of course are the biggest culprits for allowing racism to continue, Coates stated that even former President Obama was in some way responsible.
“The Obama administration helped to feed white supremacy,” he told host Amy Goodman. Because Obama, as the perfect politician, had a “belief in the heart of white people [which] blinded him to believe in the appeal of Trump.”
And of course, Obama was too perfect, because part of white supremacy movements involve fear. Coates said, “Folks fear the ease with which African Americans can be integrated because it assaults the idea of white supremacy.”
Coates didn’t even argue that Trump or Republicans were racist, taken those opinions as facts. He then accused the Republicans in power during the Obama administration of “stoking the party’s base and allowing Donald Trump to become President.”
That’s a bit far-fetched, since the GOP primaries in 2016 had over 15 candidates running for the Republican nomination. The GOP is still heavily divided over Trump’s policies.
He didn’t want to defend Trump, but felt that the outrage over the president's apparent two day wait to specifically condemn Nazism and white supremacy was to be expected. “The notion that Donald Trump, who has folks who provided that alt-right platform for his campaign, would give some sort of a statement, is … I don’t know where that expectation comes from.”
However, even Jeff Sessions’s federal investigation into Charlottesville isn’t enough for Coates in the Trump administration. The Atlantic correspondent said, “What I would like to see him [Trump] doing is resigning and leaving the White House.”
Coates also stated that he was “happy to see” grassroots campaigns that were working to take down Confederate statues across the country, but in his mind, it wasn’t enough. “There is some danger if it simply stops at taking down statues and there is a real lack of understanding of what the Civil War was. I just want to make sure we are not skipping over the necessary conversation."
