If Mort Divine ruled the world

The West/Coates debate is a microcosmic reflection of the larger disagreements between hardcore Marxists and identity politics.

West's work ostensibly focuses on race, but he's a Marxist at heart--a member of the old guard, along with other staunchers like Jameson and Zizek. For him, the contemporary geography of race is dependent on the history of economic disenfranchisement and class hierarchy. Whether capitalism is important or not for Coates, I won't speculate (I'm not super familiar with his longer work, only his shorter articles); but it's true that he doesn't focus on it. This is why West labels him the "neoliberal" face of black struggle.

Personally, the debate itself is more interesting than whether one side is correct.
 
At least West is an intellectual, even if I consider him to be ridiculously wrong. Coates is worthy of all the scorn West can heap on him, and only as the appetizer at that. He's not a good thinker or a good writer, and either a cynical shill shilling for shillings or a rather malevolent personality. If his act is to be believed, I wouldn't want to be locked in a room with him.
 
tbh I didn't realize mennonites existed until I moved to Virginia and thought they were just a regional thing like the amish. Thought maybe you were referring some different type of mennonite like how aryan can be used for Iranians or Nazis. Also, I'm dense but the bitches just say girth-y
 
http://quillette.com/2017/12/16/romanticizing-hunter-gatherer/

For as long as humans have been around, people the world over have faced similar struggles: getting enough to eat, navigating social relationships, dealing with parasites and disease, raising their young. It’s a nice idea to believe that somewhere deep in the past, or still today in a more remote part of the world, there existed or exists a society that has figured it all out; where everyone is healthy and happy and equal, untouched by the difficulties of modern living. But even if violence, inequality, discrimination, and other social problems are universal and part of human nature, that doesn’t mean their prevalence can’t be reduced. They can and recent trends make this abundantly clear. Denying the scope of the problem, pretending that these social issues are uniquely modern or uniquely Western, or the product of agriculture or capitalism, does not help to fix our contemporary social ills. Instead it leaves us more confused about the causes of these problems, and, consequently, less equipped to solve them.