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Why is Ta-Nehisi Coates shouting an obscenity at me?

He writes:

Ta-Nahesi Coates. Fuckin' Althouse. My name's at the top of the blog and I still can't get Ann's respect.

The link on "Fuckin' Althouse" goes to this post of mine:

Hey! That's sexism against Sarah Palin!

When Glenn Beck says it.

My post links to Coates calling out Glenn Beck for sounding like a sexist. It's phrased to imply that Coates probably wouldn't call out a liberal for sexism, but now that there's an opportunity to slam Beck, he's up for defending Palin. Now, explain what set Coates off in this new post where he curses me. Maybe he didn't understand my post and thinks I didn't realize I was reading his blog (since I didn't use his name in my post ? I just linked). I'm not really sure. Perhaps he's so ready to hate me that he didn't pick up my bloggerly comic concision. But ? wow! ? there he is on The Atlantic website spewing an obscenity at me for...  nothing.

As if to cover up his brutishness, he combed through my comments section and found something offensive that one person said. He quotes someone named "grapp" ? with no available profile? who said "I might respect Ta-Nehisi Coates more if he has less of a jackass ghetto name and was more of a serious thinker." Grapp ? who claims to be a black woman ? wrote at the end of a long thread, and 2 of the 4 comments left on the thread take Grapp to task. Nevertheless, Coates goes on to say "She'd respect me more if I "has less of a jackass ghetto name." He says he finds the comment hilarious ? presumably because of the typo/grammar error. Because of the way he began his post by weirdly accusing me of some sort of disrespect related to his name, he's cued his commenters to trash me, which they basically do.

I guess to be like him I should select the nastiest comment to make him look even worse than he made himself look. But I'm not going to do that. I'm going to quote a sensible commenter there:

Come on, TNC, just a couple of days ago you rightfully chided people for talking at strawmen, and here you're writing as if Althouse herself, and not a commenter, made the crack about the name. It looks as if a number of the commenters here have not realized it wasn't Althouse herself who wrote it. The commenter is not the blogger.

There's no rule that says a blogger has to police her comment section and delete offensive posts; some like an open comments policy and some like a moderated comments policy. Althouse has an open comments policy and as a direct result attracts some odious commenters as well as some very good ones.

Come on, Ta-Nehisi Coates. A very serious apology is in order.

ADDED: Now, I see that the problem was that I had a tag for his name and I misspelled it. That brought an obscenity... and a connection to a commenter who took a racial point of view. What a jerk.

IN THE COMMENTS:  AC245 said:

I was curious to see how many other places on the net misspelled his name in the same way (as "Nahesi") that Althouse did.

1. Salon's Glenn Greenwald has it spelled that way on his blogroll.

2. Here's a post by "Bitch Ph.D." praising him as wise.

3. Mark Hemmingway has a post on The Corner mentioning Coates, Obama, and hip-hop.

4. This post on Pandagon "corrects" Coates that one cannot be both a feminist and a PUMA.

5. It's also spelled "Nahesi" on the blogroll of The New Yorker.

6. There's a post by Enchanting Juno who says "Ta-Nahesi Coates - who may just be my favorite blogger of all time..."

And that's when I got bored, after browsing through just the first 3 pages of the over 20,000 Bing results for "Nahesi".

I didn't go through any of the 256 instances of "fuckin'" on ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com that Bing found, so it's possible that he's also hurled the vulgarity he graced Althouse with at every other person on the internet who's dared to dis him by unintentionally misspelling his name when linking to his blog. But for some reason, I rather doubt it.

The New Yorker, eh? Ha ha. Apparently, the topic of sexism is like the topic of having your name misspelled for Coates. (AC245 provides links for his 6 items. Go inside if you want that.)

And grapp came back and said:

Althouse, I apologize for leaving a comment that caused Ta-Nehisi Coates to cuss you out.

Yes, I am a black woman. Really. Moreover, I'm heartily sick of names that no one can pronounce, and fed up of people in the community who get angry cuz they seem to think that ALL blacks automatically know how to pronounce the crazy names.

Coates has demonstrated to you why I have no respect for him as a thinker. Ah, there I go, marching out of lockstep again!

And:

I had a typo with 'has' which should've been 'had', I think. Coates, that great mental giant, seems to think that a typo is worth crowing over. Lame.

I assume he found it funny because it gave you the appearance of speaking like a stereotypical black person while you were making fun of his name for being stereotypically black. It's like correcting spelling while making a spelling error.

AND: My own first name is also hard to spell, even as it is easy to spell.

IN THE COMMENTS, PART 2: Susan said:

I'm a TNC reader, but what a weird issue for him to flip out over, given that his grammar and spelling are atrocious.

[Link.]

[Link]

Jim Treacher said:

Ann, I can't believe you showed such fuckin' disrespect to Ta-Tasilly Coat.

Full post as published by Althouse on December 10, 2009 (boomark / email).