On the “race writer”...trend?

So lately I’ve been reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book, We Were Eight Years in Power, and it’s a great, critical reflection on the Obama years as told with post-Trump hindsight. (For a daily dose of TNC wisdom, I highly recommend his diamond-clear response from a book tour Q&A about the n-word and context).

But the book is also fascinating in how Coates uses the more memoir-y chapters to trace the arc of his career as it rose with — and somewhat because of — the Obama campaign. That is, he posits, until Obama came along, the kind of writing Coates has been doing on race for decades didn’t really have a “market” or urgent sense of relevancy in the national conversation. And then suddenly, it did.

It’s a jarring point that those of us who academically came of age reading Lemonade thinkpieces and talking casually about white privilege just don’t really have, and it reminded me of this great CJR profile of Jay Caspian Kang, another now-prominent “race” writer/journalist who also recognized the role that this ~race writing wave~ played in many writers-of-colors’ careers — and the danger it might pose now:

Writes Karen K. Ho:

“In “An Open Letter to Fellow Minority Journalists,” Kang lays out how many journalists and writers of color were hired “as part of a cynical push to turn ‘race writing,’ especially race writing about pop culture, into a click factory” and why the results of the 2016 election would likely lead to situations where “editors and publishers will start hiring alt-Tucker Carlsons so they can hear both sides.”

Obviously, scholarship and mainstream writings on race relations isn’t just gonna like, vanish, but it’s a bit discouraging/disheartening to consider. Was is it really all just a trend? And if so, what happens next?

Like Deez Links? Forward to comedy queen Tiffany Haddish.