Why Doesn't Ta-Nehisi Coates Flee Oppression?

Ta-Nehisi Coates's latest installment in his ongoing debate with Jonathan Chait uses tortured logic, perverts history, and systematically rejects reality to present a wholly distorted view of the United States as a racist hellhole.  

Mr. Coates opens with an illuminating discussion seeking to clarify the difference between "black culture" and a "culture of poverty." He contends that the unfairly maligned "black values" are indeed critical virtues for black people in certain walks of life, although they are not necessarily transferable to other walks of life, which is why they’re oft derided.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Mr. Coates launches into a vicious tirade against the United States, going so far as to mock Jonathan Chait's irrefutable assertion that the United States has made tangible progress in terms of race relations since its founding.

How can an ostensibly intelligent man deny the strides the United States has made to eliminate institutional racism?

How can anyone seriously argue that white supremacy is at the heart of contemporary U.S. society, as Coates does without any equivocation whatsoever? Is there a cabal of Freemasons and Jews (to mock a Nation of Islam conspiracy theory) systematically persecuting African Americans?

White Supremacy cannot merely be an amorphous entity or some abstract notion. To persecute African Americans as systematically as Coates imagines African Americans are being persecuted, the white supremacist system must be institutionalized and clearly identifiable.

Are black politicians who run inner cities at all levels of government, black police chiefs, and black city managers members of this white supremacist cabal?  Are there meeting minutes?

What is most disconcerting about Coates's world view is its inherent hypocrisy.

My family fled the anti-Semitic Soviet Union because they couldn't justify remaining in a country hostile to their heritage, not to mention a country that squashed individualism and liberty.

If Mr. Coates truly believes that the U.S. is inherently--and as he makes clear, irredeemably--racist, how does he justify remaining in the United States?

It's irrational at best, cowardly at worst.

I suspect I know the answer.

Mr. Coates enjoys getting paid big bucks to write. Though he won't admit it, he cherishes the freedom bestowed on him by natural law and guaranteed to him by the U.S. Constitution to write scathing diatribes against his country.

Mr. Coates MUST know that he would not have the freedom to write the kinds of things he writes were he living in any country in Africa or the Middle East or most parts of South America.

So he cheerfully collects his check without contemplating the implicit absurdity of a black man choosing to live in a country he purports is dominated by white supremacists, while making good money writing about white supremacy.

Is Mr. Coates really so oblivious as to not appreciate that the freedom of expression he enjoys in the United States is a freedom that so many other countries do not afford their citizens?

It is quite extraordinary that in his tirade against the U.S., Coates never deigns to express even a modicum of gratitude for the Bill of Rights and the Constitutional freedom he has to make a living writing half-truths and lies about his country.

Nor does Mr. Coates dare to mention the tyranny and oppression that pervade his ancestral homeland, from which millions of men and women have voluntarily fled over the last 150 years for Europe or the United States.

Does Mr. Coates ever wonder why so many Africans, Arabs, Latinos and Asians choose to come to the United States, where they will be relegated to "minority" status, instead of remaining in their homelands where they would be in the ethnic majority?

Does the answer unnerve Mr. Coates because it so vividly dispels the myths he spreads about the country in which he inexplicably chooses to remain?   

If Mr. Coates was intellectually honest and truly believed that white supremacy in the United States was not only alive and well, but indeed, irreversible, it would behoove him to escape the United States, to flee this oppressive land, as so many millions (including my family) fled their oppressive homelands (for the United States).