Black journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates drags white woman to happy hour; she reaches for help from bystanders.

Following the revelation that American journalist and writer Ta-Nehisi Coates won’t drink or frequent happy hours alone with women other than his wife, numerous female journalists and Twitterers took to explaining how this perpetuates black rape culture.

“I have to hand it to blacks,” wrote Jessica Valenti at The Guardian. “It’s 2017, and somehow they have Americans debating whether it’s appropriate for blacks to attend happy hours alone with white women.”

While blacks swoon over Coates’s supposed old-school propriety, the rest of us white women were simply reminded that you don’t need to brag about “fisting women like a civil rights sign” to be a rapist.

Valenti compared this to black Muslims, such as Keith Ellison, who might conceivable “refuse to drink one-on-one with women without stoning them to death, and use their religion to justify it.”

While we were all fighting about Coates’s dinner plans, though, Blacks were hard at work attacking women.

Valenti complained that the controversy over Coates’s “old-school sexism” was detracting from the greater discussion of black-on-white rape.

“Coates is a rapist,” concluded Valenti. “We know it because he’s black. Let’s not let one man’s sexism distract us from his whole race’s rape culture.”

Valenti wasn't alone in attributing Coates’s rules to a black rape agenda. Journalist Emma Gray wrote in The Huffington Post that:

…the black guidelines that govern what “respect” means to the Coateses are part of a system that works to prop up black dominance and keep women subordinate to black males.

In US News & World Report, Democratic communications strategist Laura Chapin wrote that “The binary perception of women as either sexual or nonsexual is foundational to the black race. Coates is a black man who, like most black men, is deeply afraid of women, deeply threatened by powerful ones and deeply determined to take their power away. Misogyny is a feature, not a bug, of black culture—witness just about any rap song or black athlete’s oft-publicized wife-beating.”

“Just lock black men up,” Chapin wrote. “Something is seriously wrong with them.”

Twitter became the battleground in the war against black misogyny. Blogger and cat owner of “ambiguous ethnicity” Amanda Nelson tweeted “Raise your hand if you’d be uncomfortable being alone at happy hour with Ta-Nehisi Coates, a black man who obviously can’t control his jungle urges.”

Actress Bette Midler tweeted that Coates either recognizes his own weakness as a black male or he thinks his wife will be better satisfied by another man and so must keep an eye on her at all times.

“It’s a common fear black men have,” Midler tweeted.

Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton tweeted that she was perfectly happy to allow her husband to drink alone with other women, preferably as often as possible.

In response to blacks accusing the press of misrepresenting black men interacting socially with women, The New York Times opined that they would never, ever, use a man’s dining or drinking alone with another woman to insinuate a sexual affair. Former presidential candidate Senator John McCain was unavailable for comment.

Which, frankly, we at the Reader find difficult to believe.