There is, as I mentioned on the most recent Bonjour Chai podcast , a meme I think about a lot: Guy who has only seen The Boss Baby, watching his second movie: Getting a lot of 'Boss Baby' vibes from this...
— Boots, 'with the fur' (@afraidofwasps) September 26, 2019 If this all looks like gibberish to you, allow me to explain: If your reference point is limited, everything you encounter looks like the one thing you know about. It’s a bit like the adage about, “ If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail .” Ta-Nehisi Coates is the bestselling author of, most famously, 2015’s Between the World and Me , as well as his 2014 opus published by The Atlantic , “ The Case for Reparations .
” After a break from non-fiction, he’s back with The Message . I bring up the Boss Baby meme not because I’m under the impression that Coates has seen only one movie (he is a screenwriter , in addition to being an A-list American public intellectual), but because of my frustrations with two things happening at once in Coates’s latest project. One is the American tendency to transpose U.
S. racial history onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The other is the more global tendency to place Jews and, now, the Jewish state at the centre of events, such that when Jews err, it isn’t human fallibility but rather some sort of cosmic timeless oppressor manifesting itself.
What I’m responding to in this column isn’t the book, which I haven’t read but would like to. Ra.
