This summer's endless search for outrage

Suzanne Fields writes in the Washington Post,

The strange summer of ‘15 fades with murder accelerating in the big cities. Most of the dead are black, slain by blacks. Many white liberals are in a fashionable rage of blaming themselves for it. What could we expect from this summer’s endless search for outrage? The literati and the left is buzzing with praise, appreciation and approval for a new book, “Between the World and Me,” by one Ta-Nehisi Coates, written as a letter warning his son that American white people — past, present and future — are out to get him.

David Brooks of The New York Times was inspired to write a public letter to the author telling him how his book “is a great and searing contribution to … public education” about the manifold sins of white folks. “It is a mind-altering account of the black male experience,” he writes. “Every conscientious American should read it.”

As blogs and social media explode with fury and rage at the thesis, much of the new radical white chic elite has taken the book as talisman, eager to cultivate perceptions of an angry African American man as personal expiation. His book, which grew from an essay in Atlantic magazine, is the perfect vehicle to soothe the troubled white liberal elite conscience without entertaining other voices, other views. “If racism is America’s oldest sin,” writes Carlos Lozada in The Washington Post. “reading Coates has become its newest absolution.”

...This black man is not beautiful, but choking on bitterness and resentment. The liberal elite is eating it up. But it’s ineffably sad.

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