There Are Many Shades of Regret
It was a weird turn of events.
In February 2015, or thereabouts, I wrote a piece on my old blog on fredrikdeboer.com that I didn’t think much about at the time. The post pointed out that, over time, any publication that was not rigidly devoted to a specific subject became indistinguishable from any another, as the lust for clicks pushed editors to grasp for any topic that was currently going viral. This was the era of BatKid, after all. Take Gawker. Once known for its entirely unique perspective, the site had by then been Neetzan Zimmermanned to the point that its posts were indistinguishable from those of BuzzFeed, or the Daily Dot, or any other content mill. And while the more august publications like The Atlantic maintained some formal differences, even in that rarefied territory, there was remarkable uniformity in terms of what was being covered, by which type of person, in which way. Media was in trouble - even the New York Times was not yet a subscription powerhouse - and so much of what was getting published was that which could be quickly and cheaply aggregated by underpaid kids straight out of college, looking for a foothold in the business. Today things aren’t strictly worse, but I wouldn’t call them much better either.
Anyway. In the piece I had a long section in which I said stuff that went something like “Buzzfeed is all the same stuff plus quizzes about which Disney princess you are; The New York Times is all the same stuff plus Tom Friedman talking to cab drivers; Wired is all the same stuff plus claims we’ll all be getting married in virtual reality in six months.” Etc. (Some enterprising reader might be able to find the post in some archive somewhere, but I don’t have the text myself.) When I got the The Atlantic, I had a hard time deciding what to say. This seems silly to me now - “The Atlantic is all the same stuff plus advertorials for Xenu” was just sitting there - but eventually I settled on “The Atlantic is all the same stuff plus Ta-Nehisi Coates’s creepshow commenters asking him to forgive their sins.”
I honestly didn’t think about it that much at the time. Coates’s blog had become a phenomenon, his comment section was extremely active, and I felt that some (some) of his commenters had a creepy hero-worship thing going on. I had developed that opinion over a lot of reading of that comments section, but what had really sealed the deal for me was a recent event where, after a post in which Coates had referred to some of the horrors of slavery, a commenter who identified themselves as white gave some overwrought gloss on all that horror and said “Ta-Nehisi: I’m sorry.” It struck me then - it strikes me now - that whatever this was, it wasn’t adult respect; to ask any individual Black person for forgiveness over the system of chattel slavery you had no hand in speaks not to an adult appreciation for a celebrated writer’s craft, or even adult regret over the crimes of slavery, but to a desire to be absolved of the very guilt you are ostentatiously feeling. And in general there was just this constant sense there that the commenters were not critical readers but supplicants at the feet of a guru. I assumed other people probably felt the same way, and anyway, my readership just wasn’t that big. It never would have occurred to me to think that anything would come of it.
To my surprise, the post went semi-viral, especially the long section in which I had listed various publications and made fun of them, which was clipped and shared on Twitter by several in media with large followings. This should not have surprised me; everybody in any industry likes a good skewering of that industry, and the section was funny because I’m a good writer. Still, though, it didn’t really set up any sort of conflict with Coates, and wasn’t taken as a commentary on his work or value. People chuckled at it, nobody got offended, and the world spun forward. That would change five months later. New York magazine released this profile of Coates by Benjamin Wallace-Wells. As was the style at the time, Wallace-Wells’s attitude towards Coates was almost comically reverential; the closest thing to criticism within it was a passage that read
A community grew in his comments section, but it was a community of a particular type: liberal, wide-eyed, pining for moral authority — and redemption. “Coates’s creepshow commenters asking him to forgive their sins,” the left-wing critic Fredrik deBoer sardonically described it. Last week on Twitter, a woman asked Coates about the pronunciation of his first name: “I’m really curious what the etymology is that makes the ‘hi’ a ‘hah’ sound?” Coates replied, “It’s an ancient, arcane dialect which we like to call ‘hood.’ ” One irony of Coates’s war on white innocence is that he has arrayed against it an army of white innocents.
Those are indeed words I had written, and Wallace-Wells did not misquote me or otherwise represent me in a way I would consider unfair. You can see, though, why it appeared to the readers of the profile - a vastly larger audience than that of my post - that I had simply ripped Coates. And since Coates was without question the most popular person in media, bar none, and I was almost uniquely disliked, the outcome was predictable. People were just so invested in publicly feeling feelings about Coates and his work, and there I was, a guy nobody liked already. I heard from seemingly all of them. As I said, the post was five months old at that point, but I suddenly found myself taking a great deal of shit for it on Twitter, in my comments, and in my inbox. A lot of people seemed very eager to defend Coates’s honor, and now they had their opportunity. A restless person’s most coveted desire is a target, and offhandedly, Wallace-Wells had made me one. You also of course had a great deal of right-wing antipathy towards him (here’s a David French piece from that year referring to Coates’s work as choked out by rage) and some conservatives were highlighting that quote with glee, which only further stoked liberal defenders. Suddenly, for a slice of both supporters and detractors, I was the face of an anti-Ta-Nehisi Coates resistance, thanks to a throwaway joke that I had never thought of as a joke on him.
What makes this all particularly stupid is the fact that I have always felt that Coates is a very accomplished writer and a perceptive journalist. He was (and is) a remarkably talented prose stylist. I don’t give false praise about anything, but especially about that, about this craft, which is the most important thing in my professional life. All I care about in my own life is writing better; all I care about with other people in media is how well they write. That is my religion. Years earlier I had, in fact, included Coates on a list of great prose stylists who were working then. It felt a little dumb to include him, given how well-celebrated he already was - what could my praise ever do for him? - but I simply couldn’t leave him off my list, so great were his talents. I called his writing “appropriate to its mission, defined in its scope, and lit always by history and also by fire.” That kind of ability, again, is the most important thing there is to me, outside of friends and family. I would never say such things about someone whose work I did not genuinely admire. And I think the controversy that was to follow, for as much as it was a consequence of my arrogance and my instability and my general status as an asshole, was also fundamentally a matter of my inability to understand that what meant the most to me did not mean as much to everyone else, that the admiration that felt so palpable to me was not obvious to anyone else at all.
Regardless, the wave of anger really got to me. The post in question was months old, its argument seemed innocuous, it was clear most people hadn’t bothered to read it before yelling at me, and the specific reference to Coates was part of a critique of a particular liberal habit regarding race, not of him. Worse, I felt that the intense response to this one stray quote from an unrelated blog post in an otherwise-fawning magazine profile demonstrated the point - that Coates was not treated like other writers, that he was shrouded in a cloak of protection by people in media, and that this was not a reflection of his work but of the deepening pathologies towards race that had afflicted many white American liberals. (Condescension among them.) When I say “worse,” for the record, I mean worse for me. It’s been a structural problem in my life and my career, in the way that the tragic flaw of characters in Greek drama are structural problems - the tendency of my critics to demonstrate my points in their criticism of me has often left me unable to see anything else. I could not see, for example, that my response to the controversy was going to make me into the asshole in fact, regardless of whatever points I was making, and would make everything so much worse.
I wrote a post. (I would link and quote from it but I think it is, genuinely, nowhere following the malware injection to my old Bluehost space.) I said in the post that I did in fact think Coates was a good writer and journalist. But I also said that I thought that he was overpraised, that it was unusual how his work apparently brought so many people into a state of religious ecstasy, and in particular that this was all bound up in the weird social hierarchies of media and how people attempt to climb within them. If I had stuck to that, perhaps I would have merely been guilty of exaggeration. Unfortunately, I did all of this in a way that was unbearably abrasive, needlessly insulting, and genuinely rude. In the idealized version of this post - and the early drafts were much more like this - the points I felt needed to be made were, simply
The comments on Coates’s Atlantic blog, while frequently eloquent and sharp, were just as often sycophantic and weird, and to me demonstrated a growing tendency among white liberals to treat Black writers and artists with outsized reverence, as secular saints rather than as human beings, which seemed dehumanizing and quietly insulting to me
In a similar vein, Coates’s peers went beyond being appropriately complimentary given his great talent, but frequently treated him as this untouchable sage who had somehow transcended mortal constraints, and again I found this ecstatic praise to be condescending and dehumanizing - in a tweet, NYT film critic A.O. Scott called his writing “essential, like water or air”; I have been moved to incredible heights by writing and writers, but I have never in my life felt that I needed any writer’s words the way that I needed water or air
All of this seemed to me to be part of congealing liberal attitudes towards race that I felt were misguided, in particular this tendency to see resistance to racism as a matter of personal deference and mawkish sentimentality towards prominent Black people, which conspicuously fail to actually help the Black underclass escape the structural inequality under which they suffer.
Unfortunately, to whatever degree I made those points, they were buried underneath an unjustified flippancy and a wounded and childish set of insults that were rightly perceived as jealous. The actual offending text in question was based on the notion that Coates was just OK, a good writer but nothing special, just another guy in the business. I didn’t really feel that way, but it was typical of my tendency in those days to feel a certain depersonalizing energy while I was writing, to become unmoored, getting driven deeper and deeper into a moment or mode that I couldn’t get out of. I was, to put it simply, an asshole. I was needlessly rude and combative, and ended up minimizing the very aspects of Coates’s work that I admired. This was somewhat driven by the actual critique that I had intended to make, but more by feeling aggrieved about getting criticized so much over the line in the New York piece, and by my profound lack of impulse control, and (I’m guessing, given the period of my life in which it happened) by alcohol. I did not, in fact, get personal in the way I would end up being accused of. I was just a garden-variety asshole, and that was bad enough. It was all very childish and stupid and I regret it very much.
It was also the case that, though I am responsible for all of it regardless, it was all happening during a period of particular personal instability in my life. Grad school was great for me, intellectually and socially, but I was also unmedicated and out of control. I get into trouble whenever I suggest that I was dealing with my mental health challenges during any particular controversy, but, well - I was. It’s all on me either way; I am responsible. But it’s impossible to write in retrospect about my career and not speak plainly about the influence my condition has had on my ups and downs. I know people would prefer I never mention it, deride doing so as excuse-making, but I don’t have the luxury of just waving that part of my life away.
The response was swift. The Twitter storm that followed was the third biggest of my life so far, but at that point the largest to date. I had been a big enough dick to the most beloved writer of his generation that whatever nuances of my argument were understandably lost. There have been many times when I have gotten into a lot of trouble I didn’t deserve for things I didn’t say; this was a time when I got into a lot of trouble that I did deserve for something that I definitely did say, and got into some trouble I didn’t deserve for things that I didn’t say. Predictably, I was accused of being more than a shithead; Max Read of Gawker immediately pronounced me a racist, as did others, though there was little specificity about what exactly had been racist about my post. To a lot of people, racism was a vibe, and the vibes of what I had written were very very bad. Eventually Coates himself weighed in on Twitter, issuing a perfunctory smackdown on me, and the prophecy was complete. It felt like it was a big day for a lot of people, a day where the order of things was pleasantly reinforced. Me being me, there was a certain satisfaction in being the villain of the moment; it flattered my self-conception. But of course it also hurt.
The fact that the specific criticism of the post devolved into phony allegations of racism, rather than focusing on the fact that I was being an abrasive cunt for no reason, and the fact that the intensity of the backlash was, in a certain sense, proving my point that Coates was protected from criticism in a way that was unusual and unnecessary…. It all made me unable to see, or unwilling to see, that being right about some things didn’t make me not an asshole, didn’t change the fact that the post was pointless and excessive, didn’t mean it wasn’t insulting towards Coates, an act of unprovoked aggression. It didn’t make it a good idea. As I have so, so often failed to see, the fact that Media High School and its social order responded in its usual corrupt and selfish way couldn’t excuse my own behavior, and the fact that I was critiquing a guy who had seemed untouchable didn’t make my criticism an act of integrity or courage. In fact my fixation on the fact that he was so popular made my criticism an act of obvious self-regard. As I had done so often, I chummed the waters around me and then got self-righteous when I was bitten by the wrong fish.
In time, the idea that a lot of the praise for Coates was something decadent and bizarre, something performative, became less controversial. The Washington Post published an essay to that effect by Carlos Lozada, which ended with the fear that Coates would “grow increasingly radicalized before a lovely, enlightened audience that continues to read, continues to applaud and continues to do nothing.” Here’s something Zeeshan Aleem, a great fan of Coates, had to say later.
His fans had formed a religion around him and his work…. The kind of critical acclaim Coates had received before he left The Atlantic was very strange. The fervor of a lot of Coates fans — most prominently, white liberals — suggested that his writing achieved something superhuman, something akin to levitating or seeing the future. His fans displayed unbelievable theatrics online in response to his essays and seemed to find something either otherworldly or life-sustaining about them
“Unbelievable theatrics” is exactly right: what was often striking about the praise ladled on Coates by both impressionable liberals and paid-in-full members of the media kaffeeklatsch was how competitive it seemed, how they so often appeared to be most interested in outdoing each other. To me, it appeared that he was being instrumentalized, used for other people’s purposes, in a way that felt gross. And that kind of heavenly praise was unnecessary given that the mortal writer’s skills were so abundant. He had more than enough ability to generate praise for his actual work. Besides, if you didn’t like Coates, you should have been able to just not like him and say so, without ceremony, just as we’re mostly free to dislike any particular writer working today, with a few notable exceptions. We should have been extended that freedom just as Coates should have been extended the freedom to not live under the weight of that strange burden. The way that your attitude towards Coates came to be seen as a symbol of all of your racial politics, in certain circles, was more unfair to Coates than it was to anyone else.
Time passed. The mob moved on to other things. Personally, I plugged along. It got harder to get freelance work for awhile but ultimately everybody seemed to forget it all. In 2017 I set fire to whatever was left of my own reputation, and in a strange way escaped the cycle of communal disdain. Since then I have lived somewhat outside of the concept of peer approval; once you hit a certain floor of public opinion, there’s a unique kind of freedom available to you. I’ve wondered, at times, if it was that sort of freedom that Coates was pursuing when he walked away from blogging and his particular public spotlight. I can’t say that any of this was on his mind when he left The Atlantic in 2018, but he had reacted with impatience and unhappiness towards a particularly sycophantic profile not long before. He’s gone on, as I understand it, to considerable success in writing comic books and fiction and for the movies, and if he should care to return to the world of shortform argumentative nonfiction, he’ll find a chair waiting for him at the NYT or back at The Atlantic or pretty much anywhere he chooses. He’s fine.
Whether the neediness of his white liberal fans that (it’s been speculated) he chafed against would still afflict him, it’s hard to say. Suddenly, it feels like there is no center to the media world anymore, no watercooler where the whole profession gathers and sorts heroes from outcasts, these days. Nor does The Atlantic host comments any longer. America’s racial politics, obviously, have gone through a sudden spasm of attention and passion, which then gave way just as suddenly to a feeling of exhaustion and a desire to talk about other things. More positively, I’d like to think, liberals have perhaps moved on from viewing combatting racism as some sort of holy sacrament one performs while holding back tears, and instead finally understand that work to be a long unsentimental slog towards a little more racial justice, day by mundane day. Maybe the current political and media landscapes are better equipped to play host to what Coates does so well than they once were.
Coates used to be routinely compared to James Baldwin, which I always found terribly strange; stylistically, politically, aesthetically, they’re profoundly different writers. You could, though, look at Baldwin as the ultimate avatar of how Black writers are sanded down into unthreatening caricatures of themselves by well-meaning white liberals, as (I have argued) happened to Coates. Media people, as a class, do not read books, so perhaps this strange comparison is not so hard to understand. Baldwin did write and say a lot of things that fit snugly into the modern progressive conception of race and racism, but on the whole he was a fractious, unruly writer and person, someone who refused precisely the kinds of simplistic pieties that dominate left racial politics today; he would have been terribly offended to see his life works bent into the rote Great Black Thinker routine it’s so often confined to today. I personally think it’s beyond bizarre to read the corpus of modern “anti-racism” and the essays of James Baldwin and say “ah yes, these are complementary, these are the same.” To pick an obvious example, Baldwin was vehemently opposed to using political metrics to judge the artistic value of a work of art, while there is nothing the modern anti-racist likes more than to do just that. But of course for many people who endorse him, Baldwin is just a symbol, and I think that happened to Ta-Nehisi Coates too.
And, indeed, it turns out I’m as guilty as anybody. Because as I look back to that little controversy eight years ago, the really sad thing about all of this was that, while I was scolding white liberals for instrumentalizing Coates, I was of course doing the same. In identifying other people’s use of him and his work as a stand-in for their own racial politics, as a shield against their fear of being racist, I also made him into a symbol, a tool for my own uses. I dehumanized him too. It’s a strange thing, being a public figure; even as someone with a far smaller audience than Coates’s, there is not a day that goes by that I don’t read something written to or about me and think, who is this person that you have made of me, for your own purpose? Who is this character that you think I am, that you would like me to be? Just the act of reacting to a writer in the personal terms that are inevitable and necessary feels like an act of aggression; Coates’s name appears dozens of times in this essay, but of course he’s not really here. We are all of us giving a vision of ourselves over to some greater public who then do with us what they would like. It happens that for fifteen years I have, through my action, by my own hand, built a little effigy of myself, handed them a length of rope, and lamented while they hang me. And even today I uselessly wonder if they’ll ever decide that I’ve had enough time to swing.
I’ve done this for far too long but have foreclosed on other possibilities with my behavior. For all of that regret - and there is so much more that I never told to anyone - I am still defiant in all of it, and my critiques of media and the people who populate it are still necessary and true. Whether anything of this world will exist enough to matter in 10 years, I can’t say. I don’t know; it always felt like cowardice not to die on every hill. The industry is still full of shit, and it still feels hard to apologize for anything without fearing that I’m apologizing for so many things that I shouldn’t have to. But I don’t have much of a career left, outside of this little corner of the internet, and I have no reputation to rescue, and enough time has passed that I can hardly remember why so many things matter to me the way they once did. I can remember, though, that eight and half years or so ago I wrote something shitty about a person that didn’t deserve it, burying every actual point there was to make until only instability and insult remained. Eight years later I can say that I too know what it’s like to be made a symbol of by strangers, and I tell you, Mr. Coates: I’m sorry.