Mr. Ta-Nehisi Coates,I find polarity towards what you have to say. I woke up discouraged by the criticism being sent your way. I just started tweeting, and you were the first person I looked to follow. And then found that you shut your's down. I wanted to throw out into the inter-verse how important it is that you antagonize the strugglers. I ask you to keep asking our veteranos , uncles, and elders to be more clear and productive with how they'd like us to be clearer.
Dr. West's reasoning makes little sense because it seems like what he is asking of your messages is a perfectly complete discernment for all racial injustice. His idea that your passion for demystifying White Supremacy is fetishism, is rude. Would he describe Dr. Kings focus on civil rights as a fetish. Would he minimize Cesar Chavez's commitment to labor laws a fetish. This response lacks love, encouragement, and a growth mindset. Dr. West's response is more like toxic endearment. It is abusive to care so deeply that you want for the other something so unreachable. The moving target of social justice will grab the perfectionist by the hair and drag them into their imperfections. It is toxic endearment to galvanize my understanding of shared pain by inflicting a painful denial of your understanding.
I am learning that your effort to heal your pain is an insightful and inspiring to the ways I can also address my cultural pain. The abusive kind of endearment that leads to any effort rarely being enough is a tool of White Supremacy. And sadly we are reminded by two Black leaders how it doesn't take skin color to invoke this oppressive and tarnishing tool. Arguing over who knows a more accurate suffering, who has authority to define the truest implications, and what constitutes a bona fide advocate is exactly what we don't need. This arguing is the tradition that sustains White Supremacy. I need you!
I need to know that the complex social pain within my Chicano life is not an isolated incident. I need to have tools and strategies for improving my sensor for how my New Mexican communities' cultures are being disenfranchised, overlooked, and exploited. You give my thoughts this improvement, by the thoughts you share and the implications you creatively explore. The work you put into following today's pain into history's illusions have given me the courage to do that same for my Albuquerque peoples. I ask with the upmost respect for you to remove your defenses, delete the doubt, but please put back your voice.
Dr. West might have the expertise and aptitude to assess the competency of race matters, but what he doesn't have the authority to do is to complicate you from reaching me. He cannot define how your experiences help me resonate with my similar wounding. The racially disenfranchised can't afford a delay in unraveling this pain. The healing, I believe, will create this wholesome, accurate, and bona fide definition of thorough "freedom struggle". I don't know if you left the twitter platform for larger reasons than this fiasco, but If your reasons are due to this fiasco, please return.
As Tupac Shakur sings it best, "you are appreciated"!
