#legalise cat boys

[dnp2010]

At 8 am today I learned that dnp have a rail built into their headboard.

#help #dnp #phan #dan and phil #daniel howell #buy the sweater Ig #phil lester #legalise cat boys

[introverted-reads]

#classic literature #hamlet #william shakespeare #shakespeare #books #booklr #im a serious english literature student #no really i am #i promise #i absolutely would not call hamlet the og emo twink #(i would) #cat boy #legalise catboys #dark academia #english lit #english literature

[philsgirlinprague]

The legalise cat boy movement is starting to pick up

#dnp #dan and phil #daniel howell #amazingphil #me talking

[theriddlermademegay]

i also let a boy look in my drawing book today forgetting on the front page i had written ‘legalise cat boys’ (dan and phil fans rise up) , he now thinks i’m a furry

#danandphil #danisnotonfire #amazingphil

[danrifics]

okay so the we know you know comes after the cat boy sweater and they mention revealing your self to the world as wanting to legalise cat boys right and so my rational part of my brain thinks that must be what we know you know means but it would fit better if it was you know we know as in we know that they know we’re weird furry creatures

alternatively mr linguistics degree lester could have once again shown us he knows nothing and it should be you know, we know or you know. we know. as in we know we’re cat furries and they’re cat furries if that makes sense but like surely they’d proof read and grab tone first so i feel like that’s not right

so that leads us to this chaos of what do they actually mean and is it not even related to the cat sweaters even tho it’s sandwiched between the merch image and the merch shop links

like boys wtf are you doing stop messing with us 😭

#dan and phil #fuck i should really give up and go to sleep

[viewerspookyhappenings]

she cat on my boy til i legalise

#things i found in my drafts #dan and phil #dnp #dapg #amazingphil #daniel howell #phil lester

[ferallester]

sorry for so many but 2, 14 and 29?

hey don’t worry mate, that’s not too many at all!

2. what is your dan and phil games comfort video?

it’d be a cop out if I just said ‘almost all of them’, so my actual answer is probably the full Undertale series, the Katamari video, last year’s Halloween baking, and a good chunk of Gamingmas last year, especially the PINOF reacts and the red carpet ranking! they’ve produced a TON of comforting videos in the last several months <3

14. what’s one video you hope they release in 2024?

BOYS. I AM NOT BEGGING, I AM JUST ASKING… PLEASE CONSIDER PLAYING A PERSONA GAME OR STARDEW VALLEY MULTIPLAYER, 3 RELOAD AND POSSIBLY 1.6 ARE COMING OUT THIS YEAR

29. do you own merch/what merch do you own?

having only recently become able to regularly buy merch (job), about half of my current merch is more recent, but here’s the short list:

TABINOF, DAPGO, a TATINOF lanyard that now holds my D+P tickets (whenever I’ve had a physical one), a hoodie from Interactive Introverts that didn’t quite fit rip, the II plushies (complete with phil’s emo hair LMAO), a Dil plushie I found at a retro store (??), YWGTTN (digitally), the WAD PornHub logo shirt (wish I’d gotten the bees jumper/shirt too), the Back From The Dead shirt, the Legalise Catboys sweater, and the cat calendar!

I wish I’d bought something during that mass sale the boys had, but ah well

#the feral answereth #dan and phil #I like answering ask games :D

[theballadoflucygraybaird]

how do I tell my family that I want the legalise cat boys sweater for Christmas

#dani.txt #dan and phil #they watched their videos with me for years so they know how they are. BUT STILL

[jupiter-moonchild]

Dan and Phil fans, I need your assistance.

"Please state the nature of the medical emergency" not now doc. *turns off EMH*

Ok, so the CatBoy Dan doll was inspired by this post on twitter. (I refuse to call it X)

I thought their artwork was really inspiring so I crocheted the boys again and made Dan look like their artwork. (They know, I told them)

Phil, on the other hand, is without attire. He's very much lacking in the clothes and face department and I need some help picking an outfit.

He's got the messy fringe and the cat ears. I don't know if he should also be in the Legalise Catboys merch top or the Adventure Time hoodie he was wearing when he took the photos or something completely different.

Previous dolls.

I've already made the Gengar top so I want a different outfit for catboy Phil.

Feel free to msg me with pics. The more recognisable outfit that just screams "this is Phil" will be the one I create.

Thanks in advance, I love you all.

#art #dan and phil dolls #crochet #crochet dolls #catboys #catboy dan #dan howell catboy #catboy #catboy phil #dan howell fanart #phil lester fanart #phanart #help me choose #daniel howell #phil lester

[buzz-cow-man]

the only thing stopping me from getting the legalise catboys jumper is the fact i'd have to explain to my mum what a cat boy is.

#dan and phil #i cant handle how awkward it would be #like my mum is very chill and has put up with worse #but i had to explain wattpad to her the other day #and i wanted nothing more than to get away from the conversation

[alsjeblieft-zeg]

97 of 2022

All About Me - F-ll -n the Bl-nks

Created by xflirtykaosx

I am 13 or younger. 14-17 years old. 18-22 years old 22-30 years old. Over 30 years old.

I live in The US. The UK. Canada. Australia. Other. // Europe

My name begins with A, B, C, D, E or F. G, H, I, J, K or L. M, N, O, P or Q. R, S, T, U or V W, X, Y or Z

I have Sisters // just one Brothers Step Brothers/Sisters Half Brothers/Sisters No Siblings

and I have Cat(s). Dog(s). Rodent(s). Reptiles(s). Other(s).

My parents are Married/Together Separated Divorced Never had a relationship/one night stand One/both of my parents have passed away, making the other a widow(er)

I am In a Relationship Just out of a Relationship Single Open Relationship Engaged/Married

and my sexuality is best described as Straight Bi-Curious Bisexual Gay // without getting into details no one understands anyway Unsure

I am 5ft or less tall 5-5'4 tall 5'5-5'8 tall 5'9-4ft tall // I don’t get this measurement, I’m 5′11 in America Taller than 6ft

My hair is Non Existant Short Medium Long Below my Waist

and Brown Black Red Blonde Other

I enjoy Art Chinese Food Reading Food Films

and Sports Writing Swimming Politics Psychology

I have my ears pierced my belly button pierced my nose pierced my lip or tongue pierced nowhere pierced

and no tattoos 1 tattoo 2-4 tattoos 5-9 tattoos 10 or more tattoos

My eyes are Blue Brown Green Hazel Other // grey, omg.

and I Wear glasses all the time Wear reading glasses Wear contacts sometimes Wear contacts always Wear no contacts or glasses

I was born in January, February or March. April, May or June. July, August or September October, November, December

On the 1-6th day 7th-13th day 14th-20th day 20th-26th day 27th-31st day

My favourite meat is Chicken Lamb Beef I don't like meat Other

I am a Girl Boy Woman Man Undecided/Going through a sex change/Transgendered

I am against Abortion The Death Penalty Global Warming Marijuana Legalisation Illegal Downloading

I am for Freedom of Speech Knowing if a sex offender is in your area Recycling Censorship The War in Iraq

I want Kids A good job A nice home to live in To get married

My friends would more likely call me funny loving creative sweet unique

Out of all these qualities, which suits you - A? Adventurous Alluring // no idea why, though Antagonising Approachable Artistic

B Beautiful // again, no idea why Boastful Boring Boy Crazy Brave

C Calm Caring Charismatic Chaotic Creative

D Demented Deep Disorganised Dominant Dreamy

E Eccentic Elegant Emotional Enchanting Egotistical

F Fancy Fearsome Fierce Firm Foolish

G Generous Gentle Gifted Girly Giver

H Hateful Healthy Helpful Homely Hormonal

I Ice-Hearted Innocent Intimidating

J Jealous Joker Jovial

K Kind Kissable

L Lenient Likeable Listener Literate Lovable

M Mad Menacing Memorable Mild Moody

N Natural Neat Nice Nurturing

O Obnoxious Open Outspoken

P Patient Peaceful Persistant Polite Pure

Q Quarrelsome Questionable Quiet

R Radiant Realistic Respectful Right Brained Romantic

S Sarcastic Secretive Sincere Sour Sweet

T Tasteful Tetchy Tiresome Tough Trusting

U Understanding Unkind Uptight

V Vibrant Vicious Vindictive Volatile

W Weird Wild Wishful Worldly

X, Y, Z Xenophobic Youthful Zealous Zany

This survey was... Great! Good Okay Terrible You are my Idol!

#survey #bolding survey #about me survey

[philsgirlinprague]

Legalise cat boys

#dnp #dan and phil #daniel howell #amazingphil #dnp merch #dnp cat calendar #me talking

[go-learn-esperanto]

MCYTblr elections policies

I made a list of the policies of the parties that are running for the @mcytblr-fourth-elections

Not every policy is on here because I put what interested me the most (Almost all parties said that they will legalise arson guys— and Stan Jack Manifold does not affect me in the slightest on the voting lol) So this will have small biased comments in brackets. There are some in which I couldn't find their policies on Tumblr. I don't care if you have them on Discord this is MCYTblr elections they should be on Tumblr. Aaand a party did not account for accessibility and since I couldn't read their policies they aren't on here.

This is not perfect go read their policies if you want! And it's also light hearted. :)

Tapeworm2021:

•Grian friendly

•hermitcraft fans are in it

•no Wilbur Soot but Ghostbur enjoyers

•Art reblog

•Death to C!Dream

Fuckwilbursoot2021:

•Wants Grian in the sewers

•Says fuck you Wilbur but the president is a Wilbur Kinnie or so I have heard. (I believe it, that's a Wilburian move right there.)

•Technoblade cat boy???

•Mumbo is eye candy. Understandable.

•Everyone over 6ft will pay more taxes. (I'm less than 5ft so this benefits me greatly.)

Glitchfire2021:

•Very art oriented

•small creators support

•Claim to have no simps in the cabinet

•Claim to draw your minesonas if you vote for them

•Will add guns to Minecraft

•Welcome Twitter refugees

•Art reblog

Anemone2021:

•focused on the reblog like ratio

•Doesn't accept hermitcraft slander

•the only mcyt accepted on Tumblr are SophieTexxas, Editor Larry and Eret(recently). (I hope they are aware that Shelby is here too. Could tag her 👀)

•will give mermaid tails and the ability to breathe under water if you vote

•Promiss to get Ghostbur out of Limbo

Dteamblr3-2021:

•(complicated ass name)

•maybe on hermitblr?

•no tags?

•(that is literally all I could find)

Ptide2021:

•Will personally drag CC!Wilbur to his own limbo of ace race (not sure how that holds up now) and will let any Ghostbur enjoyers punsih him how they see fit without any representation. And will also let them use Wilbur's Reddit account.

•Ghostbur will be taken out of Limbo but they don't promise to abolish Ghostbur angst. Friend has infinite lives.

•Tubbo Glock

•Character analysts will get new fountain pens, nap and gold star (and it's now that I become a character analyst. I want the pens!)

•twitter refuges will be accepted if they pass the test (go read the full test on their post if you wanna know more)

•Will end the Dream SMP in the end of the presidency

•Will recruit members to help with the presidency and that includes the opposition

•reblog art

•C!Dream should die. The rest get good arcs.

•CCs on Tumblr will be treated like normal Tumblr users.

•Will ask of CCs on Tumblr to not mention their usage of the website so to not attract a lot of mcytwt

•small creators rec

Apple2021:

•Mumza gets a gun

•Wilbur is prohibited from using his Reddit or writing stuff about Ghostbur

•Philza and Tubbo get one murder each. C! or CC.

•Found family content

•Tommy is Teletubbies sun (amazing policy. Wow.)

•egg arc will be brought back

•Hermiblr gets a annual purge

DT2021:

•Pink

•Dictatorship I mean, "strong leadership"

Lorekeepers2021:

•????

CSMP/ChaosSMP:

•Hunt down Butch Hartman (very good policy yes)

•fan and small creators appreciation

•CCs on Tumblr will be treated with respect and won't be obliged to provide opinions on fandom debate

•Ao3 tag division (This is great. I think @timedeo is already working really hard to make this happen but more help could be great so that's cool)

•rb ratio/A safer place for marginalized people/respect for any MCYT fandom be it big or small/accessibility features (You will later see why this is necessary 👁️👄👁️)

•A party in honour of the loosing parties in the end of the elections

Swamp2021:

•Watch Kakujo

•Watch obscure series/MCYTs

•Crossovers are encouraged

•moss

BlueTNT2021:

•Ghostbur gets care packages

•Crack fic will be written by the President with suggestions of the public

•kick Butch Hartman (very good policy)

•more tnt and underrated duos content

•C!Tommy gets a hug if he wants

•therapy (good policy yes)

•Wilbur will be forced to apologize to Ghostbur and Friend

•If you vote you might get drugs

Writers2021:

•Hear the community and try fix the problems in it (a bit vague imo)

•Twitter refuges are welcome

•angst and fluff propaganda

Revolution2021:

•abolish MCYTblr government or prevent purposes of tyranny (anarchist party? Oh)

•Mumza gets Mum of the year award

•Wilbur will be hunted and Ghostbur will be in a Scottish farm limbo with Friend.

•Ramboo will be prohibited from using "Fallen Down"

•More literacy to the fandom

•Ao3 tag separation

Fakecokie2021:

•Cookies and hugs for everyone

•Tumblr and mcyt tagging guides

•Encouragement but not enforcement of use of proper tags

•fanartists appreciation

•MCYTblr as a nice place for fans and CCs alike

•A blog for fandom events (That's cool!! I like the idea)

•custom hats

CatJam2021:

•Can't read anything for lack of accessibility. Everything is in images with little letters. I'm sorry (but you proved Csmp point with this one)

Anarchy2021:

•Abolish MCYTblr prision

•Empower cat people in all forms

•Wilbur is going down

•Abolish weedstreet

•Legalize weed

•Respect SophieTexxas

•increase literacy

•stream Fundy's dad (?

•remove people from business who are not wearing masks (a very sexy policy imo)

•Dissolve MCYTblr presidency

DiversityWin2021:

•???

Archive2021:

•???

—

This was mainly made for myself so I could keep track of the parties' policies.

#mcytblr elections #mcyt #mcytblr

[eldritchsurveys]

776.

What’s the grossest thing you’ve encountered in/at a fast food joint? >> Roaches, I guess. Do you swallow chewing gum? >> I’ve done so, but I don’t make a habit of it. Do you ever get goosebumps while listening to songs? >> I don’t know, I’ve never noticed. Some songs do give me a sensation that I might equate with “chills” or “goosebumps” based on how people describe that, though. Have you ever seen monkeys with underwear on at the zoo? >> I don’t think so. Are there any amusement park rides you refuse to go on? Why? >> Yeah, any of those ones that fuck around with your vestibular system real bad, like the “teacup”-type rides.

What is the best roller coaster you’ve ever been on? >> I’m not sure. Nitro at Six Flags Great Adventure was pretty cool because of that epic first drop, which is almost straight down. Don’t you think black jellybeans are icky? >> No, I really don’t. I am the black licorice/black jellybeans eater of this household. Were you into the Beanie Baby craze? >> No. Would you ever wish to ride a dolphin? >> I don’t know, maybe. Do you ever watch the news just for the weather forecast? >> No, I have an app for that. Or I could just look it up on the internet somewhere. What was the last thing you measured with a ruler? >> I don’t have a ruler, but the last thing I measured with a tape measure was my body for clothes sizing. What textbook will you be happiest to give up when school is over? >> --- If your remote was missing, where is the most likely place you’d find it? >> The only places the remote has ever been are the coffee table and the couches. Maybe the TV stand. It doesn’t end up anywhere else. What’s the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen? >> *shrug* Would you rather have a Playstation or Xbox made console? >> We have both. Enlighten me on your legalization feelings: >> Legalisation of what? If you could go to a rummage sale RIGHT NOW, what would you look for? >> I don’t want to go to a rummage sale. I don’t want anything from one either. Honestly, have you ever had an irresponsible babysitter? >> I’ve never had a babysitter. Ever considered the thought that kangaroos technically have fanny packs? >> Heh. No, but that’s a good point. Have YOU ever worn a fanny pack? (Don’t lie.) >> Maybe when I was a child. I’m sure I’d find them uncomfortable and unwieldy now. Would you rather have chow mein or lo mein? >> Lo mein, I guess. What if you were watching COPS and saw your significant other on there? >> Well, I don’t watch COPS. But I guess that’d be pretty surreal, since Sparrow is not a lawbreaker. Have you ever tried to write to any celebrities? >> No.

When was the last time you blew bubbles? >> A couple of weeks ago. I was messing with the cat, because he’s like freaked out by them. Have you ever stumbled across a beehive? >> No. Did the last doctor’s office you were in have a crappy magazine selection? >> The last doctor’s office I was in was Sparrow’s job, and no, they don’t have what I’d consider a crappy magazine selection. I’m just not interested in most magazines, in general. Were your school’s lunch ladies scary? >> --- Are some of them really scary in America or is that all just in the movies? >> I... don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie with a scary lunch lady? I didn’t know that was a trope. What food(s) make you cringe? >> I don’t think I have that specific reaction at any food. Have you ever played an automated 20 Questions game and beat it? >> No. Have you been to a restaurant where they cook the food in front of you? >> Once, when I was eighteen. If you had a robot, what would you make it do for you? >> I wouldn’t make a robot do anything for me. Persona 5 reminded me of the origins of the word “robot” recently and boy do I hate that. The last ball you threw was a…(baseball, basketball, etc.) >> I haven’t thrown a ball in a very long time. Do you think Twitter will outdo MySpace & Facebook, or is it just a fad? >> Oof. Do you feel that presidential campaigns make people too competitive? >> Er. Have you seen how much candidates are willing to spend for their campaign? >> I’ve caught wind of it. It’s pretty unfathomable. Have you ever caught a friend snooping in your room? >> No. Do you find Family Guy hilarious or offensive? >> I just don’t find it funny. Like, that’s not my sense of humour. Which is more exciting: an underwater city or a colony in space? >> For me, a space colony. Quick! Name the longest word starting with the letter ‘J’ you can think of: Jurisdiction. <-- Do you still write letters to people, even though there’s e-mail now? >> No. Have you ever had an accident involving a microwave? >> Nope.

#surveys #survey #random survey

[dnpsuck]

Do not legalise “”””cat boys”””” pls I’m TIRED of dan being a hoe

legalize cat boys and bring back pinof :/

#lola.ask #Anonymous

[thevividgreenmoss]

Obama occasionally denounced the ‘fat cats’ of Wall Street, but Wall Street contributed heavily to his campaign, and he entrusted his economic policy to it early in his tenure, bailing out banks and the insurance mega-company AIG with no quid pro quo. African-Americans had turned out in record numbers in 2008, demonstrating their love of an ostensible compatriot, but Obama ensured that he would be immune to the charge of loving blacks too much. Colour-blind to the suffering caused by mortgage foreclosures, he scolded African-Americans, using the neoliberal idiom of individual responsibility, for their moral failings as fathers, husbands and competitors in the global marketplace. Nor did he wish to be seen as soft on immigration; he deported millions of immigrants – Trump is struggling to reach Obama’s 2012 peak of 34,000 deportations a month. In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, he had eloquently sympathised with the marginalised and the powerless. In power, however, he seemed in thrall to Larry Summers and other members of the East Coast establishment, resembling not so much the permanently alienated outsider as the mixed-race child of imperialism, who, as Ashis Nandy diagnosed in The Intimate Enemy, replaces his early feeling for the weak with ‘an unending search for masculinity and status’. It isn’t surprising that this harbinger of hope and change anointed a foreign-policy hawk and Wall Street-friendly dynast as his heir apparent. His post-presidency moves – kite-surfing with Richard Branson on a private island, extravagantly remunerated speeches to Wall Street and bromance with George Clooney – have confirmed Obama as a case of mistaken identity. As David Remnick, his disappointed biographer, said recently, ‘I don’t think Obama was immune to lures of the new class of wealth. I think he’s very interested in Silicon Valley, stars and showbusiness, and sports, and the rest.’

Embodying neoliberal chic at its most seductive, Obama managed to restore the self-image of American elites in politics, business and the media that had been much battered during the last years of the Bush presidency. In the updated narrative of American exceptionalism, a black president was instructing the world in the ways of economic and social justice. Journalists in turn helped boost the fantastical promises and unexamined assumptions of universal improvement; some saw Coates himself as an icon of hope and change. A 2015 profile in New York magazine describes him at the Aspen Ideas Festival, along with Bill Kristol, Jeffrey Goldberg, assorted plutocrats and their private jets, during the ‘late Obama era’, when ‘progress was in the air’ and the ‘great question’ after the legalisation of gay marriage was: ‘would the half-century-long era of increasing prosperity and expanding human freedom prove to be an aberration or a new, permanent state?’ Coates is awkward among Aspen’s panjandrums. But he thinks it is too easy for him to say he’d be happier in Harlem. ‘Truthfully,’ he confesses, ‘I’m very happy to be here. It’s very nice.’ According to the profile-writer, ‘there is a radical chic crowd assembling around Coates’ – but then he is ‘a writer who radicalises the Establishment’.

For a self-aware and independent-minded writer like Coates, the danger is not so much seduction by power as a distortion of perspective caused by proximity to it. In his account of a party for African-American celebrities at the White House in the late Obama era, his usually majestic syntax withers into Vanity Fair puffs: ‘Women shivered in their cocktail dresses. Gentlemen chivalrously handed over their suit coats. Naomi Campbell strolled past the security pen in a sleeveless number.’ Since Clinton, the reflexive distrust of high office once shared by writers as different as Robert Lowell and Dwight Macdonald has slackened into defensiveness, even adoration, among the American literati. Coates proprietorially notes the ethnic, religious and racial variety of Obama’s staff. Everyone seems overwhelmed by a ‘feeling’, that ‘this particular black family, the Obamas, represented the best of black people, the ultimate credit to the race, incomparable in elegance and bearing.’ Not so incomparable if you remember Tina Brown’s description of another power couple, the Clintons, in the New Yorker in 1998: ‘Now see your president, tall and absurdly debonair, as he dances with a radiant blonde, his wife.’ ‘The man in a dinner jacket’, Brown wrote, possessed ‘more heat than any star in the room (or, for that matter, at the multiplex)’. After his visit, Joe Eszterhas, screenwriter of Showgirls and Basic Instinct, exulted over the Clinton White House’s diverse workforce: ‘full of young people, full of women, blacks, gays, Hispanics’. ‘Good Lord,’ he concluded in American Rhapsody, ‘we had taken the White House! America was ours.’

A political culture where progress in the air was measured by the president’s elegant bearing and penchant for diversity was ripe for demagoguery. The rising disaffection with a narcissistic and callous ruling class was signalled in different ways by the Tea Party, Occupy, Black Lives Matter and Bernie Sanders’s insurgent candidacy. The final blow to the Washington (and New York) consensus was delivered by Trump, who correctly read the growing resentment of elites – black or white, meritocratic or dynastic – who presumed to think the White House was theirs. Writing in Wiredmagazine a month before Trump’s election, Obama hailed the ‘quintessentially American compulsion to race for new frontiers and push the boundaries of what’s possible’. Over lunch at the White House, he assured Coates that Trump’s victory was impossible. Coates felt ‘the same’. He now says that ‘adherents and beneficiaries’ of white supremacy loathed and feared the black man in the White House – enough to make Trump ‘president, and thus put him in position to injure the world’. ‘Every white Trump voter is most certainly not a white supremacist,’ Coates writes in a bitter epilogue to We Were Eight Years in Power. ‘But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.’ This, again, is true in a banal way, but inadequate as an explanation: Trump also benefited from the disappointment of white voters who had voted, often twice, for Obama, and of black voters who failed to turn out for Hillary Clinton. Moreover, to blame a racist ‘whitelash’ for Trump is to exculpate the political, business and media luminaries Coates has lately found himself with, especially the journalists disgraced, if not dislodged, by their collaboration in a calamitous racist-imperialist venture to make America great again.

As early as 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois identified fear and loathing of minorities as a ‘public and psychological wage’ for many whites in American society. More brazenly than his predecessors, Trump linked the misfortunes of the ‘white working class’ to Chinese cheats, Mexican rapists and treacherous blacks. But racism, Du Bois knew, was not just an ugly or deep-rooted prejudice periodically mobilised by opportunistic politicians and defused by social liberalism: it was a widely legitimated way of ordering social and economic life, with skin colour only one way of creating degrading hierarchies. Convinced that the presumption of inequality and discrimination underpinned the making of the modern world, Du Bois placed his American experience of racial subjection in a broad international context. Remarkably, all the major black writers and activists of the Atlantic West, from C.L.R. James to Stuart Hall, followed him in this move from the local to the global. Transcending the parochial idioms of their national cultures, they analysed the way in which the processes of capital accumulation and racial domination had become inseparable early in the history of the modern world; the way race emerged as an ideologically flexible category for defining the dangerously lawless civilisational other – black Africans yesterday, Muslims and Hispanics today. The realisation that economic conditions and religion were as much markers of difference as skin colour made Nina Simone, Mohammed Ali and Malcolm X, among others, connect their own aspirations to decolonisation movements in India, Liberia, Ghana, Vietnam, South Africa and Palestine. Martin Luther King absorbed from Gandhi not only the tactic of non-violent protest but also a comprehensive critique of modern imperialism. ‘The Black revolution,’ he argued, much to the dismay of his white liberal supporters, ‘is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes.’

Compared to these internationalist thinkers, partisans of the second black president, who happen to be the most influential writers and journalists in the US, have provincialised their aspiration for a just society. They have neatly separated it from opposition to an imperial dispensation that incarcerates and deports millions of people each year – disproportionately people of colour – and routinely exercises its right to assault and despoil other countries and murder and torture their citizens. Perceptive about the structural violence of the new Jim Crow, Coates has little to say about its manifestation in the new world order. For all his searing corroboration of racial stigma in America, he has yet to make a connection as vital and powerful as the one that MLK detected in his disillusioned last days between the American devastation of Vietnam and ‘the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society’. He has so far considered only one of what King identified as ‘the giant American triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism’ – the ‘inter-related flaws’ that turned American society into a ‘burning house’ for the blacks trying to integrate into it. And in Coates’s worldview even race, despite his formidable authority of personal witness, rarely transcends a rancorously polarised American politics of racial division, in which the world’s most powerful man appears to have been hounded for eight years by unreconstructed American racists. ‘My President Was Black’, a 17,000-word profile in the Atlantic, is remarkable for its missing interrogations of the black president for his killings by drones, despoilation of Libya, Yemen and Somalia, mass deportations, and cravenness before the titans of finance who ruined millions of black as well as white lives. Coates has been accused of mystifying race and of ‘essentialising’ whiteness. Nowhere, however, does his view of racial identity seem as static as in his critical tenderness for a black member of the 1 per cent.

#this review still slaps #essays #*