Black History Month at AUP: Ta-Nehisi Coates

A few minutes into Ta-Nehisi Coates’ talk on February 16, and it’s clear that those expecting a brief book chat, with a Q&A if there’s time, will have to quickly adjust. “I’ll start by allowing you guys to ask questions but do not be surprised if I throw the questions back at you…I don’t much like the mode of public intellectual, of thinker, even of writer, as it’s commonly deployed. The notion holds that writers, intellectuals, thinkers, have achieved a sort of wisdom, that they are somehow touched by God and thus can prophesy from on high and essay and talk about a diversity of subjects with some amount of wisdom and intelligence. As a reader, before I became a writer as a professional, I found that generally not to be true.”

With his latest book, Between the World and Me, as a starting point, Coates spoke on a variety of topics, including his views on being a writer and a journalist, as it applies to himself and to those authors whose work he appreciates. From a very young age, observing the aforementioned public intellectuals and pundits, he vowed to himself that whatever status he attained, he would always see himself as perpetually in the process of learning. “The best part of being a writer is not what you say to other people, it’s what other people say to you. It is a license to learn things, people pay you to go and learn things, to answer your own questions. It’s an incredible thing—it should be illegal! And so, one of the things that I’ve tried to do with the success of Between the World and Me and with whatever prominence I’ve had as a result of my time at The Atlantic is to not allow people to rob me of my right to be a student.”

For Coates, the idea of questioning is more than a rhetorical pivot: he has spent much of his life grappling with a multitude of troubling inconsistencies, which seemed to lead to one massive challenge: how was he to reconcile the America that he saw in sitcoms and advertisements with the America that he, his family, and other black people he knew lived in? This was not a simple problem, there was no single moment of epiphany, and yet when the answers started to emerge, when he was able to begin the process of comprehension, never mind articulation, it was significant. “I’ve always felt that the ability to understand is an act of liberation in and of itself. There is the racism of America, the fact of racism in America, but there’s also the effort to conceal that racism, the effort to make black folks lie to themselves, to make black folks believe that they are, in fact, crazy. And to achieve a level where you understand that the things that are happening to you are actually happening to you, that you are not, in fact, crazy: this too is a kind of liberation.”

Coates describes the relationship between the United States and its black citizens as characterized by recurrent instances of plunder, starting with 250 years of slave labor, and swiftly followed by 100 years of largely state-sanctioned subjugation and exploitation. “Once I understood that, I understood everything, or I felt like I understood everything. In America, we have this dialogue around race, as if it’s hard to understand why black people are at the bottom of every single socioeconomic category in the country. And we have these great back-and-forths: is it economics? Is it culture? Is it racism? And it’s a show, it’s a game; it’s an absolute game. If an alien from Mars came to America, and looked at its history of policy for 350 years towards black people, and then measured that against 30 or 40 or 50 years of kind of, sort of trying to do the right thing, the alien would not be stunned to find black people at the bottom of every socio-economic category. If plunder is the main activity during that period of time, who are we to be shocked and surprised by anything?”

In the shift from reporting to literature, driven by the need to show his discoveries, and having already written about the historical and social facts, Coates was searching for a new medium with which to illustrate the more intangible sense of the situation. “The task is to take something like numbers, statistics, and history, and try to make it emote, try to make it sing, try to make it feel. It’s important to have the science, the facts, but you have to understand that there are actual individuals, actual people, who you know, who you see every day, who are living under a condition that is way more violent and fearful than anything any other population in America could imagine."

While answering questions, Coates addressed why hope doesn’t figure prominently in his work: “I think people who are struggling and in difficult situations grasp for hope all the time, if only as a means for survival, I don’t think that’s wrong. But I don’t think our artists, writers, and thinkers are required to necessarily do the same thing. It’s not a matter of being for or against hope. The requirement I ask, from literature, from art, is that you look out at the world and you speak to it as truthfully as you possibly can.” He also discussed reparations for African-Americans and that for him, there was simply no other way for America to move forward. “If I spend 350 years taking things from you, I don’t know how to make things equal without somehow giving some of that back. Or at least attempting to give it back, at least acting within the spirit of giving back.” The reverberations of those 350 years of plunder, he argued, can be seen in almost every facet of American life, particularly in the 20-to-1 wealth gap between black and white people, as well as the staggering incarceration rate, among whose ranks African-American men figure prominently: “The incarceration rate for black men is somewhere around 4000 per 100,000. It corrupts our very justice system. Unless something specifically is done about that, and that will mean resources, and I tend to think those resources will somehow have to be justified by history, I don’t see another way forward. I just don’t.”

After sharing his views on Barack Obama’s presidency and the lead contamination of Flint, Michigan’s water supply, he also talked about his reasons for coming to Paris—he’ll be staying for a year—and the difference between being a black man here as opposed to being a black man in the United States. In the latter, he and other black people are signposts of the lie that the country tells itself regarding its national identity, while in the former, he doesn’t automatically represent the “historical sin”.

His time in France is meant to be a way for him to broaden how he looks at and thinks about America, as well as study French culture, its national myths, and the people who might trouble those. Throughout the evening and seemingly throughout his career, Ta-Nehisi Coates has remained on a path of constant reflection and interrogation (be it of the world or himself). This does not, however, translate into uncertainty about what he does or why. “I have to write as myself. I have to be me. For me, the premier value in here is not hope, but struggle. That you get up every day and you do what your heart calls you to do, you do what your morality calls you to do. And what happens in the rest of the world is not so much up to you. But every day, you try to resolve yourself, to your morality. Other people have to take other values, you know, but I can only write like I write.”