Liberal Mag: Melissa Harris-Perry is America’s Foremost Public Intellectual
January 6, 2014 by Daniel Greenfield
 America’s foremost public intellectual
I don’t know how Melissa Harris-Perry managed to beat out Chris Hayes, Ed Schultz and Al Sharpton for this prominent title, but she deserves to be congratulated. It’s not every day that you can be named America’s foremost public intellectual by a guy who practically lives on your network.
Despite the traffic-baiting headline, Ta-Nehisi Coates spends a lot more time accusing Republicans of being super-racist than awarding Melissa-Harris-Perry her Nobel Prize for Amazing Achievements in MSNBClectualism.
A more honest name for the article subtitled “Why Melissa Harris-Perry is America’s foremost public intellectual” would be “Republicans are the most racist racists in Racistville.”
“We are into the sixth year of the era of a black president. In that time the conservative movement has gorged on a steady diet of watermelon jokes, waffle jokes, affirmative-action jokes, monkey jokes, barbecue jokes, terrorist machinations, secret Muslim plots, and dastardly Kenyan conspiracies.”
It might be a trifle more honest to say that in six years, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Melissa Harris-Perry and the good people at MSNBC have been gainfully employed accusing anyone who criticizes Obama of being a racist.
And Ta-Nehisi Coates proves my point by going on a bizarre rant accusing Mitt Romney of, what else, racism.
Romney’s familiarity with white supremacy was not passive and distant but direct and tangible. As a child he lived in a neighborhood which, by the employment of compacts, red-lining, and terrorism, was an exclusive white preserve.
Bill Clinton lives in that kind of neighborhood today. So does much of the liberal elite. But shh, we’re not supposed to discuss that.
From there Ta-Nehisi Coates begins accusing Mormons of racism and Melissa Harris-Perry of being a genius.
The problem was making any kind of light of a fraught subject—a black child being reared by a family whose essential beliefs were directly shaped by white supremacy, whose patriarch sought to lead a movement which derives most its energy from white supremacy. That’s a weighty subtext. But there is no one more worthy, and more capable, of holding that conversation than America’s most foremost public intellectual—Melissa Harris-Perry.
And no channel more worthy to host a laugh session about that conversation than MSNBC.
There may well be intellectuals with more insight. And there are surely public figures with a greater audience. But there is no one who communicates the work of thinking to more people with more rigor and effect than Harris-Perry.
More people? Has Ta-Nehisi Coates seen MSNBC’s ratings?
Her show brings a broad audience into a classroom without using dead academic language and tortured abstractions.
No, she does it by mocking a Republican family for having a black grandson. No dead academic language or abstractions there.
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