The Idolization of Turpentine Paulson

Turpentine Paulson has become an idol in America’s story of race [1]. He resists titles such as “leading black intellectual” or “genius,” tweeting earlier today, “Lotta smart dumb mfs out in these streets.” [2] While insisting “intellect” is “overrated af [as fuck]” [3], Paulson considers reading and reporting not to be. So one must ask if Paulson imagines himself as simply a reader, a writer, and a reporter.

For so-called liberal elites, Turpentine Paulson has become the BOF (Black Oracular Figure) of the Twitter Era. Though he recently said on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert that his job was not to dispense hope for the prospect of better “race relations” or “politics” in America [4], it has become customary for liberal America to consult Paulson regarding their conscience on race:

“Did you read the latest Ta-Nehisi Coates piece?” is

shorthand for “Have you absorbed and shared the

latest and best and correct thinking on racism, white
privilege, institutional violence and structural inequality?”

If you don’t have the time or inclination or experience

to figure it out yourself, you outsource it to Ta-Nehisi

Coates. [5]

Considering this radically chic trend, Paulson is like an app for all things racial. Whether he likes it or not, he is the digital-age “race man” for progressive whites and their counterparts of color. Paulson’s tribe eagerly seeks him out online and elsewhere, mouths agape, waiting to receive his incisive and lyrical breath. 

On the one hand, I do not give a flying fig about Paulson being touted as “one of the most influential black public intellectuals” [6] or as “one of the greatest living writers” [7] in America. After all, my passion and interests lie in mineralogy and Mesozoic fauna.

On the other hand, this mineralogist is admittedly insulted by such an incredulous narrative: a struggling writer who dropped out of Howard University, loses three jobs, and finds himself on unemployment before fortuitously landing at The Atlantic magazine, first as a contributor, then as an editor, and now as a national correspondent. Winning a MacArthur Fellowship and garnering not only the Pen/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, but also the National Book Award for nonfiction, all within a period of eight years, Paulson is the Jay-Z of nonfiction prose.

The writer whose “prose style and literary prowess” has been described as “hip-hop sharpened” [8] is a perfect icon for the intersection of hip-hop, social media, millennial activism, “wokeness,” and cultural criticism.

Institutions from the New York Times to The Guardian, from Harvard's Kennedy School to the Aspen Institute showcase, construct, and celebrate such tales of rags to riches, often to the exclusion of more nuanced, complex stories that may never result in even a modicum of fortune or fame. 

These institutions, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the National Book Foundation, fail to share the editorial, committee, and trustee conversations and decisions that set the stage for the popularity of figures like Turpentine Paulson. My cousin Night Train, who just stopped by “to see what I am up to,” would like to know the ins and outs of how a guy, who was broke ten years ago, got tapped by a secret committee to receive $625,000 over a five-year period.

“Sounds fishy,” Night Train insists.

To follow Train’s suspicion, the media factory would have us believe that Paulson as well as his clique of predecessors--and eventual successors--make it on their own through their sheer talent and genius. Such is the appeal of that genre of storytelling in which a hip intellect attracts a job at The Atlantic and book contracts from Random House. An early book galley casually finds its way into the hands of a Nobel Laureate in Literature who pens an easy, but authoritative endorsement. A retired Ivy League professor of American history proclaims you “a rock star,” before adding that you are asking questions “other historians have not been asking.” [9]

“Is that professor kidding?” asks Night Train, who is still listening to this piece as I write and recite it. Train is not interested in rock stars or celebrity though. His preoccupation is with food, shelter, clothing, health insurance, and the fact that he can never earn enough travel points to fly anywhere he really wants to go. 

Even so, Train has touched on something important. For instance, what questions are Paulson asking that haven’t already been asked by historians, especially black historians? Is Paulson asking questions that Benjamin Quarles (1904-1996) or John Hope Franklin (1915-2009) never asked? Franklin himself knew that in any given generation “there is an urgent need to reexamine our past in terms of our present outlook.” [10] So what is exceptional about Paulson asking questions about the historical context of black incarceration rates, reparations, or redlining in Chicago? 

Even as a mineralogist, I pose a library of questions every day about black men being surveilled, harassed, and brutalized by the police; about being privately educated in some of America’s best schools, yet still being vulnerable to professional discrimination; about the perceived value of black life by people in America and across the globe; about the role of schools and universities in validating and perpetuating various forms of physiognomic and vindication discourses beneath the guise of diversity, inclusion, community, and equity; about the possibility of blacks “hacking” life itself to invent a new order of self-determination, justice, and wealth; about what will happen to all of us if America cannot heal her deep-boned divisions. 

Professor Painter’s statement that Paulson’s upbringing and reading “has given him a really solid intellectual basis for what he’s talking about” [11] is silly and/or elementary. There is nothing remarkable about a literate person reading books--tens, hundreds, or thousands of them--and then synthesizing the ideas and information in those books into critical questions and conclusions. 

“That’s what you're supposed to do!” Night Train exclaims.

Of course, Train is right, and I keep asking myself what is behind the idolization of a forty-two-year-old, autodidactic journalist from West Baltimore who cribbed James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963). What is so award-wining and ingenious about such a literal remix of another author’s work? And what state of mind was Toni Morrison undergoing to suggest that Paulson was the next Baldwin [12] after he simply recast the latter’s “My Dungeon Shook--Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation”?

The logic here couldn’t be that Paulson is the new Baldwin because he, like Baldwin, wrote a book in the epistolary format, addressing race, family, history, and racism in America. Baldwin penned the first part of The Fire Next Time to his nephew; Paulson pens Between the World and Me (2015) to his teenage son. Ergo, Paulson is the new Baldwin?

Again, what is the ulterior motive behind numerous media, universities, and think tanks elevating Paulson to the perch of BOF (Black Oracular Figure)? Why is he allowed to “secret rich people meetings”? [13] What does Paulson represent to the liberal ilk and more furtively to certain rich folks? What is the precise nature of the manufactured consent that certain wizards would like for us to embrace about Paulson?

Paulson’s transformation into a public intellectual at the hands of the Trismegistic machine reminds me of one of those eighteenth-century narratives about some homo ferus or wild man being discovered and brought to a European royal court. In Antient [sic] Metaphysics (1784), James Burnett (aka Lord Monboddo) recounts the story of one Peter of Hanover, who, after being discovered in 1742 (at the age of thirteen) in the woods near Hanover, Germany, was brought to England. There, he was presented to King George I, and became something of a celebrity, even having his portrait painted. From even earlier, we have the triumphal tale of Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, who graduated from Harvard in 1665 as its first Native American graduate during the colonial period. [14]

Although Paulson is a self-taught man who apparently learned better outside of the classroom, the promotion and publicity bestowed on him should give offense to anyone who is herself--or knows someone who is--a well-read teacher or scholar of race, American history, public policy, political science, American Studies, sociology, literary criticism, or African-American Studies. The idea or pronouncement that Turpentine Paulson possesses some preternatural understanding of American history, especially regarding race, is absurd. By what means has a detached pessimist or a skeptic with no alternative plan for America been given such a prominent platform to tell us what he thinks about the history that any literate and interested person can read and contemplate for herself? His case for reparations is mere Gedankenexperiment (thought experiment). We won’t find him anywhere fighting for such a program of repair.

Something about Paulson reflects and feeds into the easy extremes that have come to define our nation. He peddles “intellectual fast food” to one side of the Great Divide, and basks in a growing consensus of praise as a result. 

At times, since Paulson’s rise onto the Olympus of Pop-Intelligentsia, I have asked myself whether the media thinks that Paulson is the only so-called Negro who can read history, political science, and literature with an eye toward drawing inferences, deductions, and conclusions. 

Today, what is the criteria for being lauded as a black intellectual by the white media anyway? What does it even mean to be a black intellectual anymore?

“Who must one be? What narrative arc must one’s life follow to be given the far-flung pulpit being extended to Paulson right now?” I asked Night Train.

“I don’t know,” he said, “but it sounds fishy to me.”

Notes

[1] Turpentine Paulson is a satirical pseudonym for Ta-Nehisi Coates. 

[2] Ta-Nehisi Coates, Twitter post, October 3, 2017, 7:31am, https://twitter.com/tanehisicoates.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Constance Grady, “Colbert asked Ta-Nehisi Coates if he has hope for America. Coates said no,” Vox, October 3, 2017, https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/10/3/16409194/ta-nehisi-coates-stephen-colbert.

[5] Carlos Lozada, "The radical chic of Ta-Nehisi Coates," Washington Post, July 16, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2015/07/16/the-radical-chic-of-ta-nehisi-coates/?utm_term=.11edc8d9cb20.

[6] Concepción De León, “Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Making of a Public Intellectual,” New York Times, September 29, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/books/ta-nehisi-coates-we-were-eight-years-in-power.html.

[7] Micahel Harriot, “We Were Eight Years in Power Moves Ta-Nehisi Coates to Top of Black America’s Draft Board,” The Root, October 2, 2017, https://www.theroot.com/we-were-8-years-in-power-moves-ta-nehisi-coates-to-top-1819055572.

[8] Walton Muyumba, “Ta-Nehisi Coates blazes a singular intellectual path in ‘We Were Eight Years in Power,’ September 29, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-ta-nehisi-coates-power-20170929-story.html.

[9] De León, “Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Making of a Public Intellectual.” 

[10] “John Hope Franklin,” Biography, accessed October 1, 2017, https://www.biography.com/people/john-hope-franklin-9301314.

[11] De León, “Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Making of a Public Intellectual.” 

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013), 58, iBooks.