Lavishly celebrated Atlantic scribe Ta-Nehisi Coates has reproached Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton on separate occasions in the last week. The New York Times wrote about one and not the other. Guess which.
The MacArthur-branded genius and social critic knocked Sanders last Wednesday for his opposition to reparations. The Times, in turn, published a summary of Coates’s post, calling it a “stinging critique”.
A handful of days later, the newspaper’s homepage summarized and linked to another polemic against Sanders that Coates posted Sunday. The Times’s synopsis read, “The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates criticizes Senator Bernie Sanders for calling himself a ‘radical,’ writing that there is dissonance between the title and the senator’s approach.”
Then Wednesday arrived. Coates shifted his attention to Sanders’s rival for the Democratic nomination for president, Hillary Clinton, charging that she got her history about the post-Civil War era wrong. Clinton said during a CNN forum this week that Abraham Lincoln’s assassination brought about the aggressiveness of Reconstruction, “the re-instigation of segregation and Jim Crow.” Had Lincoln only been around, she stated, “he could have very well put us on a different path.”
Coates took a starkly different view, and rebuked Clinton for hers.
“[T]he fact that a presidential candidate would imply that Jim Crow and Reconstruction were equal, that the era of lynching and white supremacist violence would have been prevented had that same violence not killed Lincoln, and that the violence was simply the result of rancor, the absence of a forgiving spirit, and an understandably ‘discouraged’ South is chilling,” Coates charged.
As of Thursday afternoon, the post has been shared more than 10,000 times on social media and elsewhere.
But not by the Times.
Now why would that be?
