The New York Public Library



Ta-Nehisi Coates | Khalil Gibran Muhammad

October 13, 2015

LIVE from the New York Public Library

live

Celeste Bartos Forum

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Good evening! Good evening. My name is Paul Holdengräber. I’m the Director of Public Programs here at the New York Public Library. As all of you know, my goal here at the Library is to make the lions roar, to make a heavy institution dance, and when successful to make it levitate.

It is wonderful to have Ta-Nehisi Coates be part of this fall LIVE from the New York Public Library season. Our tenth anniversary year, which started with Shaquille O’Neal and Patti Smith last week and continues this Friday with Elvis Costello, Orhan Pamuk and Mona Eltahawy next Wednesday, and so on and so forth. Check us out online for the full schedule at live.

When Julie Grau of Spiegel & Grau calls I know it will be good news and I know it will be serious. It’s always been a pleasure to work with her. Last it was to Bryan Stevenson, founder of Equal Justice Initiative and author of one of the most important books I have ever had the honor of presenting LIVE from the New York Public Library, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. I had an idea for Julie then, let’s bring Bryan Stevenson together with Sister Helen Prejean, the author of Dead Man Walking. It was one of the most remarkable evenings I’ve ever had here on the LIVE stage.

The first time Julie and I spoke I surprised her perhaps by insisting we launch Decoded LIVE from the New York Public Library, Jay Z’s extraordinary life story through three dozen songs. I was joined onstage that evening by Cornel West. I will never forget speaking that night with Jay Z and hope he comes back. I also did it because I have two sons who are fairly young, now ten and thirteen, and one way of keeping street—I said “street credentials” once to my son (laughter) and he said, “No, no, no, it’s street cred.” The one way I had of keeping street cred was by inviting Jay Z. I was pleased that Mr. Carter sent out this tweet on August 5: “America, please read Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates,” and I’m happy to say that America has been doing just that. Every day I see people in the subway reading Between the World and Me. Friends abroad are asking me to comment on its importance. Presigned copies of the book will be on sale after this conversation. Thanks again to our independent bookseller, 192 Books.

I am delighted tonight that Ta-Nehisi Coates is joined by my friend and colleague Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the excellent director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and a visiting professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. I am also pleased that fifteen of his students were obliged—no, are here tonight (laughter) from the Graduate Center.

I would like to say a big thank-you to the Ford Foundation and particularly the president of the foundation, Darren Walker, for their and his fantastic support of LIVE from the New York Public Library’s tenth anniversary. To celebrate ten years, the Ford Foundation will match your contribution to LIVE dollar for dollar. When you give you’ll make sure we can continue to engage New Yorkers in conversations that contribute to and enrich cultural discourse. So please consider giving with the pledge cards placed on your seats. Please drop them off filled out with your generous pledges by the door as you leave tonight or thereafter.

Additionally I want to thank the continuing generosity of Celeste Bartos and Mahnaz and Adam Bartos.

I’m delighted, as I said, to be welcoming to this stage tonight Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Of Between the World and Me Toni Morrison writes, “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates’s journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive, and its examination of the hazards and hopes of black life make life as profound as it is revelatory. This is required reading.”

Before I bring them onstage, many of you know that for the last seven or so years I’ve been asking my guests to give me a biography of themselves in seven words, seven words that will define them, perhaps, a haiku of sorts or if you’re very modern, a tweet. (laughter) Khalil Gibran Muhammad submitted these seven words to me: “Lover of the past, married to future.” Ta-Nehisi Coates submitted these seven words: “Atlantic writer, father, husband, reader, eater, drinker.” (laughter)

Please welcome to the LIVE from the New York Public Library stage Khalil Gibran Muhammad and the most recent recipient of the MacArthur so known the “Genius Award,” Ta-Nehisi Coates.

(applause)

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: With that opening I was feeling like it was either an Ali or Frazier fight about to jump off with this amazing crowd and this stage. I think it goes without saying how pleased we are to have you here at the New York Public Library and as a representative of the Library, I first just want to acknowledge how special it is to have a writer who is speaking to the urgency of now and who’s using his voice in the best of literary traditions to speak to conditions which we must confront. Now, whether we can fix them, that’s what we’re here to talk about. Now, I also want to take liberties because given that you’ve just won the MacArthur genius award, and I’m sure there are other awards in the making I’m thinking that on eBay this book might be worth something.

(laughter)

TA-NEHISI COATES: I gotta do this right now?

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Yeah, yeah, because only this book will be the one that was signed at LIVE at NYPL at this moment and you can all certify to it. Didn’t Scarlett Johansson spit in a napkin on Jay Leno or something and sell it for ninety thousand dollars? I’m thinking your signature is worth at least that much.

All jokes aside, so Ta-Nehisi, this might be the lightest—

TA-NEHISI COATES: You’re going to ask me questions while I do this?

(laughter)

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I just needed a signature. You know the book’s worth less now that you’re actually writing something.

TA-NEHISI COATES: I know, I’m sorry, man.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: I need another book.

TA-NEHISI COATES: I’m ready.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: So this might be the lightest moment that we have tonight, and in some ways I think that is the challenge that this book poses to us. This is heavy reading. It’s one of the literally lightest heaviest books that’s ever been written. You’ve written it to your son. We’ve talked a lot about Baldwin and we’ll talk some more about his role as Toni Morrison has claimed. But let’s just start with the motivation. What was the circumstance, either literary or in the world, that motivated you to put these words together?

TA-NEHISI COATES: I think with any book there’s a story. And because I’m here I’m going to take the opportunity to not give the press release story and to, you know, give like if I can the biography of the book. Howard University plays a strong role in this book. It is the light of this book. I was there as a nineteen-year-old young man trying to live up to the great ancestry, the great history, the great heritage of Howard University. So many great writers have come through there. I was aware of that. I spent quite a bit of time in the library at Howard University and one of the most important books I read while I was there was The Fire Next Time. And I sat up in Founders Library, the graduate library I found this, and I basically went through The Fire Next Time in one day, just in one sitting, just sat down and read it and it’s not that long of a book.

I finished it and this was true with a lot of the things I read at that time. I didn’t quite understand what I had read, but I knew I was powerfully affected by it and I was sort of amazed that somebody could like just produce something like that because to me it just looked like. I mean, I didn’t know anything about writing and to me it just looked like he had just sat down and a book had just spun out of nowhere. That stayed with me for many years.

The second thing that happened was a friend of mine at Howard University, shortly after I left, shortly after my son was born, was mistaken for a criminal. My friend was in Prince George’s County, Maryland, which at that period and perhaps even now but definitely at that period had I would argue probably the most brutal police department in the country. My friend was followed by a police officer from Prince George’s County in the suburbs of Maryland through Washington, D.C., into Virginia and was murdered, as far as I am concerned, mere yards from his fiancée’s home.

My friend was the child of a prominent radiologist who had worked her way up out of poverty from Louisiana. He is everything, or was everything that you could imagine when black folks say the word twice as good. That was his family, they were the poster child for it. He was murdered. Nothing was done about it, no charges were pressed, the police officer was put right back out on the street.

That made me so angry.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: How old were you at the time?

TA-NEHISI COATES: Let’s see, Samori was born—so I was born—twenty-four, twenty-four.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: And this is late nineties.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Late nineties, yeah, late nineties. 2000, he was murdered in 2000 and just, the fire for that burned in me so strong, and I could not believe that the world would not even really acknowledge his death, that life could just keep going. At that time you didn’t have iPhones, people weren’t recording things, it just wasn’t, you know, the same, and it’s just like, he’s dead, move on.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: And it was also a year when “racial profiling” entered the American lexicon because of the federal investigation on the New Jersey Turnpike. We had no shorthand for the kinds of everyday practices.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Right. Right. I carried that, it was my ambition to someday do something with that and then about I guess about two and a half years ago I went back and read The Fire Next Time, I can’t even remember why, but I just went back and reread the whole thing. Unlike the last time, I got everything, and I called my agent Gloria, who’s here somewhere, oh hi Gloria. And I said to Gloria, I said, “why don’t people write like this anymore?” I couldn’t believe somebody could be that and then getting it—I mean, getting, you talk about the heaviest lightest book you’ve ever, I mean that one right there, and I was so profoundly moved and so on fire, now I could not understand why literally in the book market, you didn’t have little books, single essay, I’m just going to go right at you and tell you what the deal is and I’m going to talk very very directly to you. And I said to Gloria, “Why don’t people do this anymore?” And Gloria said, as Gloria, I’m going to do a small Gloria imitation, (laughter) she said, “Well, Jimmy, I mean, Jimmy was one of a kind.” Gloria knew Jimmy, so she said, “Jimmy was just one of a kind, you know, Jimmy could do that.” And I said, “Do you think I could try it?” She said, “Yeah, yeah,” and I called, and I had the same conversation with my editor Chris Jackson and I just started writing. I mean, I didn’t have this, I didn’t have this in any sort of full way. I had a lot of emotion, I had my friend who was killed, and I had my ancestor, James Baldwin, you know, sitting right there.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Let’s back up the bigger context. Because you didn’t just start whole cloth you didn’t literally sit down and say to channel Jimmy and write this book. You had blogging for years.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Yeah, that’s true.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: And not just your ordinary blogger. You’ve had an obsession with history, so where did that obsession—when was the moment when you decided that your literary career, your career as a journalist would run through the past?

TA-NEHISI COATES: Well, you know, I grew up in a household that was obsessed with history. And I was always extremely, extremely frustrated—I can remember being at Howard and reading the Africa coverage in the Washington Post and being just pissed off about how ahistorical it was, and one of my great frustrations even today is how our conversations around racism, and conversations around our color line, and conversations around white supremacy for whatever reason tend to begin roughly around the time of the Moynihan Report. It is as if everything before, nothing before 1965 really, really matters and if you want to understand the black community, begin somewhere around the War on Poverty and then proceed forward, which is lunacy to me. I mean, it’s just absolutely, absolutely crazy to me and so I thought as a journalist that was what I could bring, some sense of the deep past. That was the other thing that led to this book I had written this article “The Case for Reparations,” and I was somewhat displeased with the article.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Could we give it up for “The Case for Reparations?”

(applause)

TA-NEHISI COATES: Thank you. Thank you.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Before you tell that story, that article was so influential and Ta-Nehisi was so in demand and someone asked me, they were, “We can’t get Ta-Nehisi, maybe you could explain this to a group of people?” and I said, “Sure.”

TA-NEHISI COATES: No, that’s real though. Because it wasn’t like I invented the concept. You know what I mean? You’re more than capable of explaining it. There’s no reason why, you don’t need my article to call you to do that, I mean, what, that shouldn’t have been necessary to begin with. I finished the article, and I was actually somewhat displeased with it.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Give people who haven’t read it, which is probably five people in the room, but a slight sketch.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Sure, it’s an argument for reparations and it is rooted in the housing policy of this country in the mid to mid-late twentieth century and it just takes that as a particular example. And there’s some other stuff in there, but that’s really the root of that article. I feel like you could have written that article from any number of dimensions. I’m saying you could have written it from the perspective of mass incarceration. I chose housing and I wrote it that way. Basically we made an investment in this country in building a middle class. The suburbs do not, did not appear by magic. They appeared because of government policy and the second half of that government policy was cutting black folks out.

And as I do this, because Khalil and I had a great conversation about making sure we credit historians. I have to say Ira Katznelson, who’s in the audience right here was influential to that argument and that’s not just blowing smoke, he really, really was, and I felt like a number of historians had done the work of outlining the racism implicit in New Deal policies and twentieth-century policies because the weakness with reparations is always people look at you and say, “Well, the slaves are long dead,” but there are plenty of people who are around right now, you know, who were certainly affected by New Deal policies, so I pulled that history and made that argument, but when I was done I was somewhat displeased because I felt like the article did not explain how it felt to live your daily life under a system of plunder, under a system of theft, how does it individually feel to live that way, and that was like I guess the main challenge for Between the World and Me.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: So let’s give more credit to the article because it seems that you were building a case that began—let’s talk a little bit more about those blogs, because for fans of the blog you’re taking microhistories, often wrestling with thick quotes, often primary quotes or responding to what you describe as the lunacy of thinking everything begins and ends in the 1960s which obviously is a period fraught with all sorts of racial ideologies that are deeply rooted. So the article is an attempt to do something more than just tell this narrative, this contemporary narrative of housing discrimination. You’re responding to something. I want you to talk a little bit more. You’re in the world of highbrow journalism, so you’ve got people who think they know this stuff better than most, you among them, but you all don’t just agree. Unpack that a little bit and how the blog relates to those battles over how to interpret the past.

TA-NEHISI COATES: One of the cool things, I mean this is no longer true, but it was true in the early days of the blog, is I had great teachers, and my teachers were in my comments section, a number of them were graduate students, just people who knew a lot more than me and were able to steer me towards sources and talk to me about what I should read and what I should avoid and there’s something beautiful in that. I was raised by a father who was an autodidact himself. I was raised, you know, with the notion that knowledge does not belong to schools, that’s one way you can get it, but it does not belong and you can get it yourself, and I was empowered, you know, I was empowered when I came to the Atlantic to really go out and find—I had luxury, I had space to really read and explore in a way I really hadn’t had before that and a lot of that, the readings came directly out of the blog.

And you know the interesting thing about “The Case for Reparations” and I guess at the end of the day this book is I think like circa 2010 I was not in favor of reparations. It was only through the exploration of history that you know I came to not only believe in reparations but to believe as I believe now that it is actually the key, that is not a part of a bunch of other solutions, that in fact it is the thing that cannot be taken out, that it actually is the essence of the problem right there. That was only through the exploration of history that I got that.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: So I was thinking, I was baiting him to talk about Jonathan Chait.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Oh, really, you can just ask me about him, I’ll answer any questions. You can just ask me.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Because I think that there are a number of voices that ring in my head who your work is explicitly engaged with.

TA-NEHISI COATES: You mean in opposition to, who I’m fighting with.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: So in the way that scholars obviously have footnotes, you can see sort of the arguments unfold back and forth, you are not writing with footnotes, but you are writing with voices out there. So maybe just talk about the state of play. So you talked about it historically, you talked about reparations, but this book clearly is original in one significant formulation among many but one being that you wrestle with the issue of violence within the black community in ways that are typically positioned as an either/or. Either these are explorations that are about the terrible things that black people do to themselves, or they are about the terrible things that whites do to black people but here, and probably surprising to many, you found a way to wed those two things together. And that seems to me to be an explicit response to the conversation we’ve been having about Michael Brown, for example.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Right. Well, it’s very much a response to the notion of “black on black crime,” or black people not caring about “black on black crime,” and I think people who regrettably, people I agree with quite a bit, play into this sometimes because they are afraid of talking about “neighbor on neighbor” as someone, you know, helpfully phrased it for me, “neighbor-on-neighbor” crime that happens in African American communities, and we say neighbor-on-neighbor crime because the vast majority of crime that happens in any community is done by other community members. That was always true, that did not become true in 1965, it has always been true in black communities and in other people’s communities, it’s just true. People don’t tend to, you know, take the subway to the other side of town, you know, to commit a crime, they tend to rob people who are right around them and in that sense the black community is just another human community and the fact that the black community suffers more crime is part of the oppression, it’s not separate from the oppression. It’s not something that you know mutate over.

It is part of what happens when you have a group of people who over the course of generations have been isolated, segregated, plundered, have had things taken from them. The expectation that the amount of crime that happens in their neighborhoods will somehow be the same as what happens in other neighborhoods is absurd, it’s just absurd. I don’t find it hard to explain, nor am I afraid of any sort of conversation about the kind of neighbor-on-neighbor violence that happens in African American communities. What the hell do you expect to happen? It just makes sense.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: You actually take the argument a step further, both in the book as well as in a recent Atlantic cover story called “The Black Family and Mass Incarceration.” The argument goes a step further by saying that we ought to read the violence within the African American community or neighbor-on-neighbor violence as symptomatic of oppression and this is the addition that pushing back against the fact that it’s been used as an excuse to justify further oppression. So because of what black people do to themselves, we can’t help them, we have to withdraw from the equation until they fix this.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Or even worse we jail you at higher rates, I mean, we actually do other things to you, we use a different arm, because you commit so much crime around each other, we don’t invest benevolently, we invest malevolently, you know what I mean, with the long arm of the state. Systems of oppression have to justify themselves.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: I want to play a little bit with some of your words, because I think that’s one of the gifts you’ve given to this topic, is you’ve put flesh on the bones of what often are conversations dominated by numbers and statistics and in and of itself a dehumanizing language of a terribly tragic human drama. So plunder. My graduate students are here and we’ve played with this, and where was the inspiration for using that particular word to pull all of these threads together?

TA-NEHISI COATES: When I was writing “The Case for Reparations,” obviously reparations means that something has been taken from somebody. I started off my career as a poet and as a poet, you know, one of the things I learned was not just economy of words but within that economy of words you choose words that have certain angles that have certain edges that affect people in a certain way. So when I write an article for the Atlantic, it’s never enough for me to win the argument logically, you’ve got to feel it. You’re not just aiming at the head, you’re aiming at the heart. It’s not enough for somebody to read the article, say, “wow, that was correct,” and then forget about it. Better for the person to read the article and say, “I don’t know if that was correct,” go to bed thinking about it, wake up thinking about it, walk down the street thinking about it, turning it over and over again. You do that by being very, very choosy about your words and about how you articulate things.

“Plunder” was just a true word. It was just the truest. You know, I went through “theft,” I went through. It became clear to me that it was theft. I you know, the lead person in “The Case for Reparations,” and I guess this was like the first big inspiration. Reporting is so great because you get so much wisdom from other people. The main, you know, protagonist in “The Case for Reparations” is this gentleman by the name of Clyde Ross, and I sat down with him the first time I interviewed him and I said, “Mr. Ross, where are you from?” And he said, “Clarksdale, Mississippi.” And I said, “Oh, the home of the blues.” “Yeah.” I said, “Why did you come to Chicago?” He said, “There was no law.” I said, “What do you mean? Of course there were laws.” He said, “No, no, no, no. There were no black judges, there were no black police officers, there were no black attorneys. That was no law.” And what I understood was that he was outside of the law. The law actually didn’t exist to protect him. The law actually existed as he laid it out as he started talking to take from him.

So normally we think about the period of people taking things from black people as ending with slavery. It’s even in how we talk about segregation. We don’t think about say folks being barred from the University of Mississippi as plunder. But it is. It’s a public institution. They tax you for that, and you have to obey the law and you have to hold up your end of the social contract, but you don’t get the same protections and privileges—that’s plunder. That’s a con. I mean, that is exactly what it is and as far as I’m concerned, it is the dominant thread in explaining the relationship between African Americans and our government and society from 1619 up until today.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: So speaking of plunder, you open with the story of your son, Samori, and telling him about an experience you have with a journalist, and I think for anyone who’s read the book or started the book, you literally smack the reader in the face with the boldness of both how you paint the picture of what has happened but also what you make of it, so I just wanted to read this passage:

“Lincoln’s government of the people did not mean your mother or your grandmother and it did not mean you and me. As for now it must be said that the elevation of the belief in being white was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land.”

TA-NEHISI COATES: How could that not be true? I’m not trying to compliment myself. (laughter) Like, I’m just saying, like how could that not—how else—how did it happen? You know, I was thinking about this, I really appreciate the compliment about being bold, but and I don’t want to make this a mutual admiration society, but isn’t that what you guys—and by “you guys” I mean historians, isn’t that what you’ve been saying, that’s the read I get from—and I know that people who say other things. But when I say, okay, what’s the best book to go you know and read, let’s say something the people that you consider right down the middle on the Civil War and people say go read Battle Cry for Freedom, that’s what’s happening. I mean, I had to go back and reread it recently, that’s what’s happening in that book. This is Oxford History of America, this is not some obscure text over here. I mean, isn’t that what the history is?

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: I mean, the great thing about being a historian is you can find primary quotes of villainous people at every turn, you don’t have to dig very deeply. Which gets at a bigger problem, right, which is how can the villainy that is just a few archival boxes away, certainly here in this building and at 135th Street at the Schomburg Center be so lost to history? How can it be that the record of history which tells us how civilization both in an idea and in what we might agree are its realities, its brick and mortar. How did they come—somebody built the railroads, laid the red bricks on the road, extracted the coal from the mines.

TA-NEHISI COATES: I think throughout history all great powers seek to sanctify themselves. Charlemagne wants to be blessed by the pope to make his rule official. It is not enough to just create a social construct of whiteness, it has to be sanctified, it has to be rendered just, you know, and I’m going to jump ahead, because I knew we were supposed to talk about this, but this is where Barbara Fields’s book Racecraft, when it becomes so, so key, you know. And the basic argument of this book is we have a notion in America that as far as I’m concerned filters through all of our conversation about racism and I talk about this in the book and their whole is that there was a unique race of people called white who come from Europe who are pure and are here. There is a unique race of people who we call black who come from Africa and are here. There is a unique Asian race that comes from someplace called Asia and are here. There’s a unique race of Native Americans, and increasingly a unique race of Hispanics and Latinos who are here. And this is written in blood. This is somehow written in the DNA and inscribed in science.

But in fact what you find is that these definitions, these allegedly biological hard-and-fast definitions are not consistent across history and are certainly not consistent across geography. And when you try to understand like why we call something white today and why we call something black today you go back into the history and you cannot get away from the notion of plunder. Someone decided that they wanted to be able to strip as many people as possible of labor, the fruits of their labor. They called that group of people black. That notion isn’t consistent you know across time, and we’ve had, you know, groups come to America at various points and not necessarily be called white and slowly because there’s some sort of political interest, they get called white.

If you think about the world that way, you know, if you understand race as a done thing, not the work of God, not the work of genes, but an actual done thing, a decision that was made by a group of people, it charges you with some things, it charges you to fix some things. If you can make it mystical, if you can make it the work of genes, if you can make it the work of gods, they you can say, well, this is just natural. Then the inequality, the wealth gap, it becomes sanctified. “Not my fault, man, I didn’t choose this, this ain’t got nothing to do with me,” you know?

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Racecraft.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Racecraft. Very good book. By a great historian, Barbara Fields.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: So let’s talk a little bit more about these white people. (laughter) Because I think that on one hand a young man who grows up in Baltimore at the height of the crack epidemic can fall into an archetype that we’re all too familiar with. And in the parts of the story where you throw us curveballs, you tend to talk about the diversity of your college experience and the infinite expressions of black humanity, which is for many white people almost, you know, as crazy as the moment when the hooded Klansman in the Dave Chappelle skit turns out to be black and somebody’s head explodes. Really? So those are really interesting ways in which you subvert kind of the dominant narrative. But one way you do it is drawing on the body of work that scholars might call whiteness studies. But as within this literary context you are really challenging readers to let go of an identity that will force them to name themselves something else. You refer to white America literally as a syndicate.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Yes.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: But most white Americans not only in the way which you describe, which is I didn’t have anything to do with that, I mean, this is when you say verbs over nouns, you’re saying, “No, you are actively participating in ongoing plunder by virtue of holding on to this identity.”

TA-NEHISI COATES: Yes. Yes, and I just—I actually think one of the reasons this is hard to deal with is again the dominant language has this idea that white and black are two sides of the same coin, but they’re not. They’re not. Black identity has two really dominant things going on. It has the race portion, which is put on us. People say we have defined you as part of a black race. And then you have a cultural and an ethnic portion, a traditional portion, a historic portion that defines how we talk, defines a certain familiarity between me and Khalil for instance. That defines certain foods, certain musics, a whole folkways, and that really is what is in the Howard University chapter.

White identity is very different. I’m willing to have a fight about this but as far as I can tell, you know, white identity is essentially an identity of power. It’s just a racial identity. Now, underneath that are ethnic and cultural identity. You know what I mean, somebody might say, I’m a Californian, I really identify with that, I’m from the Bronx, that’s really, really important to me. I’m Irish, and I’ve heard people say, “My family’s traditional Irish Catholic.” There are identities within that that have been incorporated into that, but whiteness itself is just power and so the end of white supremacy in one really, really profound way is the end of whiteness in a way that it’s not actually the end of blackness. The people who believe themselves to be white, as I argue in the book, have so much more to lose.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: So let’s break this down a little bit further. Because you use the notion of a dream, a metaphor, in lieu of I would say American exceptionalism. The poet in you decided let’s not get caught up in the clunkiness of that which is bandied around in our political discourse, and generally is a good thing, as opposed to this dream, so just define the dream.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Well, the dream is that, and part of this is in what we were just talking about. The dream is that the things that I have in the world are natural and were gotten through dint of hard work and labor. The dream is that the suburbs that ring our cities sprung up because people just went out there and took their hard-earned wages and invested. Social engineering is what people pitch for black people. Social engineering is not what built the white middle class. The dream is the notion that, and this is the American exceptionalism portion, that America is distinct from all states and nations in the world. That whereas almost every state that I’ve come across has violence at its roots, America has a particular nobility at its roots that other states do not. Part of that is you know the whole Enlightenment dream of being free of the entanglements of Europe and founding this, you know, this great place that would be a representative of liberty and equality and that’s still with us, you know, it’s somehow the notion that we are better than.

And I believe that the black experience is the ultimate in—this is so important—this is why I say you don’t know American history if you don’t know African American history. The African American experience in this country is the most perhaps compelling evidence that America is the work of men and it is a state like any other state that has graced history.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: I thought you were going to talk about pot roast, blueberry pies, fireworks—

TA-NEHISI COATES: Those are manifestations of it.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: —ice cream sundaes, immaculate—what do you have with blueberry pies and immaculate bathrooms—

TA-NEHISI COATES: Those are awesome.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Memorial Day cookouts.

TA-NEHISI COATES: that’s great. That’s great.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: I was like, dang, (laughter) in order to be cool with Ta-Nehisi I can’t enjoy fireworks on Memorial Day. Which does raise some of the challenges, right, so remember we’re talking to your son and I know that consistently I’ve heard people readers of this work ask me, talk in online venues about does he really want me to teach this book to my fifteen-year-old son?

TA-NEHISI COATES: You can do what you want.

(laughter)

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Do we really want—

TA-NEHISI COATES: that’s up to you. You don’t have to, you know what I mean, you do what you feel.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: How do we reconcile in this sense.

TA-NEHISI COATES: This is what I teach my—this is what I have been teaching my son all his life, you know.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: The definition of the dream, I guess another way of putting it. If the dream is inclusive of pot roast and fireworks and immaculate lawns, then where does that leave black folks and their own aspirations in American society?

TA-NEHISI COATES: That’s a great question. I don’t think we can escape that. And I don’t know that you should try to escape it. I make pot roast. I don’t have anything against making pot roast, but I try to think about where the meat came from, and I try to remember where the meat came from, and I try to think about how much of the meat I’m actually consuming. But I want people to do—you see, the dream is not just the notion of everything’s great. The dream is a riff on the idea, as you know, of how brothers and sisters would talk, “Brother, are you conscious? Are you conscious?” The dream is the unconscious, you know what I mean? It’s like I can remember when I was a kid, my dad would compliment people, “That brother’s conscious, that sister’s real conscious.” You know, the dream is the opposite. It is to be without consciousness.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: The walking dead.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Yes. If you want to go there, yeah. But it is to be unaware of the world that is around you. To be unaware of the things that make your life possible. And I think all the juice in the conversation begins once we can admit that. Once we can say, “You know what, we really are in a mess here.” But it don’t make us bad people. You know, humanity. That’s the story of humanity itself. It just means we’re like everybody else who came before us, and now we have to figure out how to attempt to live morally within this and do our best, but we can’t even get there, you know what I mean, because we were divine, we were kissed by God, and we never do anything wrong.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: So I asked Ta-Nehisi to read a passage, so this is a good moment. I’m curious what he picks.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Well, this is good, because this is the other side of the dream. You know what, I’m going to start here because were talking about things to tell your son.

We live in a “goal-oriented” era. Our media vocabulary is full of hot takes, big ideas, and grand theories of everything. But some time ago I rejected magic in all its forms. The rejection was a gift from your grandparents, who never tried to console me with ideas of an afterlife and were skeptical of preordained American glory. In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live—specifically, how do I live free in this black body? It is a profound question because American understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men. I have asked the question through my reading and writings, through the music of my youth, through arguments with your grandfather, with your mother, your aunt Janai, your uncle Ben. I have searched for answers in nationalist myths, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment.

And I am afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever you leave me. But I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. I had seen this fear all my young life, though I had not always recognized it as such.

It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against their world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak and Liberty or Cold Spring and Park Heights, or outside Mondawmin Mall, with their hands dipped in Russell sweats. I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear, and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered ’round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away. The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T-shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.

I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys who stood out on Garrison and Liberty up on Park Heights loved this music because it told them, against all evidence and odds, that they were the masters of their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with their words for the sin of playing too much. “Keep my name out of your mouth,” they would say. I would watch them after school, how they squared off like boxers, vaselined up, earrings off, Reeboks on, and leapt at each other.

(applause)

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: I think one of the most striking uses of the concept of fear is that it completely inverts what our media and popular discourse make of young black people in our poorest communities.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Rage.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Which is rage, which is fearlessness, which is an untrammelled danger and threat to all. You talk about your own journey with fear in Baltimore. Was that a particular insight in framing this concept? Because frankly no writer that I know of uses fear in this way. You could partly say that the boast of blackness has always been its ability to dissemble one’s fears for the purposes of survival, and I think that’s partly what you’re describing. So was it your own experience that inspired you to think of it this way?

TA-NEHISI COATES: Yeah, I think as a young man in Baltimore I was afraid of everybody else. And then when I left I realized that they were afraid too. That even the things I thought of as power were fear. The violence, you know, which I think about all the time, which I just have a much greater capacity to understand now as logical, as sensible. Everybody was scared about what was going to happen to somebody on their block and the best way to protect your block— and this is going to sound crazy, I mean, this is going to sound crazy—the best way to protect your block was to go out and do violence to somebody else and then establish a reputation for your block so that nobody messed with you.

The best way to protect yourself was to project this untrammelled notion that you just talked about. This almost superhumanity. The best way to gird yourself against the violence of all young boys around me was to pretend that at a moment’s notice that you would take somebody out. And what is scary about this—and I was thinking about this while I was doing the mass incarceration. Because I was in Detroit talking to this brother and he was talking about the rules, and I got that the rules that he was outlining for living in prison were just the rules of the block, like, intensified. That in fact, it was just the neighborhood but just times a hundred. When he was talking it did not sound crazy to me, it did not sound unfamiliar to me and you know he was making a point about how they prime you in the neighborhood with those laws and by the time you get to prison, you know, it’s like graduation, you know. But it’s still school, it’s still the basic rules of school.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: You talk also about fear in the way that you were raised and also in the way that other friends were raised. So talk a little bit about your father’s own relationship to this generalized fear of history catching up with you, of the neighborhood catching up with you, of police officers.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Corporal punishment is like a theme in here. We are in an era, I think, where, you know, the country has turned away from corporal punishment. I’m living in France and they have not caught up, they are not there yet. (laughter) So if you think there is anything black about putting hands on your kids, you should go to other parts of the world, there’s nothing black about it at all. We’re turning away from that, I think that’s a good thing. One of the things that happens is you know as we turn against certain practices, we tend to view other people as though they are backwards and we apply labels to them, you know, and I’ll just go out on a limb and say this, one of these labels is abuse to people. And those labels become much more important than actually trying to understand what’s actually going on.

People are afraid for their kids, and they would damn near kill their kids before they would let the forces around them kill their kids. They are just so, so, so terrified. It was only after I got distance from my father, it was only after I got distance from my mother that I could really see. There’s a passage right after that where I talk about, you know, going into my grandmother’s house who lived in Philadelphia and feeling it, you know, in her hardness, her brusqueness, and not recognizing it as fear at that time, but recognizing it as roughness, but then when I started pulling it together, I recognized that I was talking to a woman who had lost my grandfather, my grandfather had died, had been killed. Had lost two sons, they had been killed, and I thought about all of that grief, and knowing that made the hardness make so much more sense. Like if that is your reality, if that’s the frame you’re living in, you know, attempting to ask black people, or any group of people, to adopt the manners of people who do not live under the same fear, I think it’s tough, I think it’s tough, which is not to say that I would abandon the argument, but I don’t think the argument is rooted in putting labels on people, you know what I mean, and you know condescending towards people and wagging your finger people towards people.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Speaking of finger-wagging, one of your—I can’t help but make this observation, but basically the article that brought you to the attention of many readers was your own critique of Bill Cosby back in 2007. My oh my.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Right. Right. Yeah, know, I didn’t go far enough, it’s clear, (laughter) it’s clear. Never again. That’s what I learned from that story. It is a critique and I’ve written about this, so it’s nothing for me to say this here, I had a good sense that there was a lot more going on. I was new to the Atlantic, you know, and I did not have the confidence, I certainly did not have just the character as a journalist, as a writer that I have now. You know? That is a deeply shameful article for me, it really is, it’s just not hard enough.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Well, we’ll cut you some slack where you are now. The experts in the Tamir Rice case have recently weighed in. Tamir Rice was the twelve-year-old killed in Cleveland when police officers were called to the scene of someone waving a gun in the park and later even that same caller said that he thought it might be a toy gun. Police arrive on the scene, an officer disembarks from the vehicle and within two seconds shoots the diminutive, we’re not talking about a very large twelve-year-old dead. Experts say falls within the bounds of the law.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Yeah. No one should be particularly surprised by that. If you understand the history and then the policies particularly over the last thirty or forty years, it is extremely hard to convict police officers of anything, much less lethal violence. These are decisions we’ve made, you know, about how we are going to be policed and about how we are going to be “kept safe.” It pissed me off but there’s no reason to be surprised by that. That is the system that you have right now. It allows for somebody to drive up and within two seconds to execute a twelve-year-old boy. That is what the system is right now. It allowed for John Crawford, in Walmart, I don’t know how quick, but it was quick. It was quick, in an open-carry state, by the way.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: John Crawford was shopping in Walmart and holding merchandise in the aisles that happened to be a rifle, but in a store that sells rifles and ammunition this should have been normal fare.

TA-NEHISI COATES: And they just ran in and shot him. He was literally holding the merchandise in an open-carry state, and they shot him and there was no prosecution or—that is the truth of your country and I think any sort of reform or any hope of reform begins after accepting that and then moving forward, because this process that we go through over and over again, where we have to be reminded that the courts are you know a certain way, that this policy is a certain way and we actually hope for some sort of justice, I don’t know what that can be logically attached to.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: I think you actually—so you talk to Samori early on about Tamir Rice, which is why we’re talking about it and you talk about the sadness that he expresses in the cases of Michael Brown’s killing, of Tamir Rice’s killing, and you name Eric Garner as well. But your solution seems not to turn on any police reforms or trainings or culture of competency. It seems like what you’re saying to your son goes a lot deeper, and maybe to all of us.

TA-NEHISI COATES: I mean, all of that’s cool, all of that I think should happen. Prince Jones was killed by an African American police officer who was employed by a municipality.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Your friend Prince Jones.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Yes, forgive me, my friend from Howard. He was killed by an African American police officer who was employed by a municipality that had an African American executive, that had plenty of African Americans on the county council, that was at that time I believe the wealthiest African American municipality in the country. It was the only municipality in the country that had become wealthier as it had become blacker, and he was still killed. I mean, what sort of cultural training and diversity was going to help that, you know? So there was something deeper there. What was deeper there was our laws around policing number one, our perspective on who black people are number two, allowing for the fact that, you know, a gentleman who was much, much shorter, who did not look anything like Prince Jones, that they could be conflated with the two.

When they ran my friend’s tags, the tags didn’t come up as his own, they come up from Mabel Jones, who was his mother, who was living in Philadelphia. It is very, very hard for me to believe that if he was not African American, they would not have immediately, you know, went to, okay, it might have been stolen. That would have been a red flag in anyone else’s mind. They went right to criminality with this guy. He didn’t look anything like the suspect. It’s not enough to diversify, it’s not enough to culture—because you see you don’t deal with the fact that the reason the police are acting this way are because of laws and policies that went through the democratic process.

You let the people off the hook when you focus too much on the police. I really, really believe that. I mean, I’m sorry it looks like that gentleman in the case of Tamir Rice is not going to face justice, I am sorry and I just believe this. I am sorry that in my head I really have the assumption that, you know, that those officers who are being held responsible for Freddy Gray’s murder will not be convicted. But the bigger notion is that Freddy Gray looked at an officer and ran and that was enough to arrest him. That is not enough to arrest somebody on the Upper East Side. That is a policy decision. That is a policy decision that we made about a “high drug area.” It’s not a, you know, guns decision, it’s not a high murder decision, it’s a decision we made in terms of the drugs so to focus then on what the cops did. Why are the cops there? Who gave, and I’m not you know calling for the complete abandonment of policing in our communities. Who said that was okay? Who said it was okay to look at somebody and the person runs and they can be detained, their freedom can be taken away? When did that become okay? And that’s on us. That’s on Americans. That can’t be you know just put on like if we train the police officers, everything will be okay. That is not enough, I think that lets us off the hook.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: So to get deeper to that point, I think that what you’re saying is that we can’t get to a solution without a full reconciliation with our history.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Yes. And that is the power of or half the power of reparations as far as I’m concerned. Khalil, I mean, you know this. Khalil wrote a very, very powerful book, The Condemnation of Blackness. (applause) Yes, please clap. Please clap, and buy it—buy the book and give it to your fifteen-year-old if this doesn’t work. If this don’t work, no give both of them to your fifteen-year-old. Khalil’s book is much more hopeful. (laughter) That’s the thing that always gets me. You’re not full of hope. Do you read any historians, man? Do you think they’re full of hope? Jesus.

So one of Khalil’s—one of the phenomenal things Khalil does in that book is he historicizes this notion of people believing in the criminality of black people and using that in fact as far as I’m concerned, you know, as an answer against policy. You know somebody argues for something, they say if they don’t stop. Today it’s black-on-black crime. You say I want to reform the police and they say, well, why don’t you get rid of black-on-black crime? And what you start to get is how that old that actually is. You know? And that’s in Khalil’s book and see if you can’t reconcile yourself to that fact you will not realize how bone deep the thing is that you’re dealing with. You know, you’ll think that we can just reform a couple cops and it will be okay, we’ll have some diversity training. Because you see you think it started in 1965, you don’t understand it’s at the roots of your country. You know, you’re underestimating what you’re up against.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: You say to Samori, “And you know now if you did not know before that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly, they will receive pensions.” Damn.

TA-NEHISI COATES: I mean, I said, that is you know, thank you but I feel like it’s just sort of naming the obvious. I mean, that is what happened with Prince Jones. That is what happened with Amadou Diallo. That is what’s going to happen with Eric Garner. That is probably what’s going to happen with Tamir Rice. I was looking at the Walter Scott case, which people think is a slam-dunk, and I hope you all are right.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Walter Scott in Charleston, shot in the back.

TA-NEHISI COATES: And his lawyer’s defense is no, no the tape doesn’t actually reveal the whole thing, they were in a struggle, this guy had just committed three or four felonies by assaulting a police officer and he pivoted and he shot him because he was afraid. He had no way of knowing what he was going to do when he pivoted.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Eighteen feet away.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Eighteen feet away. He might have had a gun. Sure, that’s the argument. He might have had a gun. How did I know he didn’t have a gun? You know? I hope the right thing happens in that trial. No one should be entirely confident that it will.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: I want to come back to Baldwin, because there’s a passage in Baldwin, and I’m going to let you read it, it’s highlighted here, it starts with “after Baldwin,” and then we’ll talk about it, just that paragraph.

TA-NEHISI COATES: “I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know which is much worse and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be, indeed, one must strive to become tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. But remember most of mankind is not all of mankind. But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”

That was a huge part in this book, it is the innocence which constitutes—you don’t have the right to not know. Perhaps you can’t make America into the land of milk and honey perhaps there’s you know some amount of violence that is always essential to society. Perhaps there is some amount of injustice that is essential to any sort of working state. Maybe that is ultimately true, but for you to turn around and look at me like you don’t know, like you’re innocent, like you’re clean, like you are not you know down here in the mud. That is the crime. The crime is not being human, the crime is not making mistakes, the crime is not and the crime is not even founding the country on white supremacy. I suspect that if you go deep enough into the history of any state you will find some great injustice perpetrated on some other group of people. The crime is to look at me and be like, “It wasn’t me.” You know, “It wasn’t me.” That’s the crime. That really is the crime.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: So the Baldwin comparison does though break down. So first of all that was from The Fire Next Time and a quote that is also inspired my own thinking and work, but the Baldwin comparison does break down in this one way. I want you to talk about it. He was a man who grew up in the church. So unlike yourself who grew up in an atheist household, at least as I would interpret it.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Agnostic.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Agnostic.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Agnostic they would say, and my dad I would not say that.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: He’s got a little insurance policy just in case, to make sure.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Yeah, yes sir.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: “I’m good.” So the religiosity that frames all of Baldwin’s work is absent and obviously that makes some readers uncomfortable, but you really are taking on in this way, my students and I have been wrestling with this. This particular approach to history essentially rejects the most dominant frame of African American historicity. There really is no metanarrative of the black past that doesn’t run through the black church or doesn’t run through suffering or doesn’t run through an exodus story. So where does that leave us?

TA-NEHISI COATES: I don’t know, but I have always felt alienated from that, and I can only write out of my heart. I’m black, I’m African American, and there is so much about being African American and African American politics that I don’t understand, primarily because in my household Malcolm X was Jesus, so your orientation, and again, that’s at the root of this book, you know, like, the stress on the body, you know, Malcolm’s belief, his anger, his rage at seeing, you know, black people beat in the street and dogs sicced on black people said to me, “the black body, your body is precious, your life is as precious as anyone’s and you should not give up your life and you should not give up your body for rights that are already written in the Constitution. It’s wrong.”

It may be as a matter of real politics that that’s actually what had to happen. But I have never parted with the sense that it was wrong. I’ve been talking about this like—I can’t watch the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma campaign in the same way as other people. I can’t even watch the movie Selma in the same way as other people. I can’t—I mean, I love King’s speech, how long how long, I love that speech. I can’t feel happy, I can’t share in the sense of triumph and hope that comes out of it, because when I see those cops rush those folks for wanting to walk across a bridge, I just think it never should have came to that. It just—how did it even come to that? Like, it was wrong. Bloody Sunday was wrong. You know?

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: And the redemptive story.

TA-NEHISI COATES: And I can’t be redeemed you know by John Lewis’s sterling career afterwards. You know, those four little girls were killed, and there’s no afterlife to make that—I’m not going to see them, my belief system, I’m not going to see them somewhere else, their bodies were destroyed by somebody and no law that came afterwards, no march that came afterwards can make me okay with that. I can’t draw anything out of my friend Prince Jones’s death. Except frankly, you know, a great deal of anger. Perhaps some understanding about the world that I live in. But I can’t be—this book does not redeem him. This is not redemption. Prince Jones did not die for this book. Prince Jones was killed mere feet away from his fiancée’s house. His young daughter was rendered fatherless. And I don’t want people to forget that. I don’t want that to be obscured, forgive me if I offend anybody here, by spirituals, by gospels, by some sense that, you know, the arc of history ultimately will reward us. If your life ends, that’s where your arc ends, and that is a tremendous tragedy. When I see the forgiveness around the Dylann Roof.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: The Charleston Nine.

TA-NEHISI COATES: I understand that from the perspective of not living your life filled with hate and not letting your hate consume you. I have that. When I see people in power, you know them praising that. You know, you’ve got nothing to say about that Nikki Haley, don’t even talk, don’t even talk, (applause) because as long as that Confederate flag was up there and anybody in that state, anybody in America who ever flew that Confderate—you are complicit in that death, you are part of it, and you know so I can’t access that. You know what I mean? I’m sorry I can’t access that, I’m not bragging because I think there’s some profound truths about African American life that I actually don’t understand that would probably enrich my work, but, you know, all I really have and the only place I can really write from is my individual experience, and I don’t feel redeemed by it. I don’t like—Martin Luther King was shot in the head. That shouldn’t have happened. It’s horrible that that happened.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Well, it makes sense, Ta-Nehisi, when your framework is a history of plunder. So if people die in the interest of conquest or self-referential justifications in the name of Christianity or Islam or some other ideology that justifies dehumanizing a group of people, then it really is about the set of beliefs that come second to the act itself, which is I think your point. That we control the things that we do. We then layer on ideas that justify the things that we do.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Right, right, right.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: I think that there’s an amazing, one of the most moving passages in the book, and it’s been written about by reviewers, and I was surprised because I read it first in a review, later in the book, and I was surprised by just how short it was, but it was the story of the enslaved woman that you humanize and you talk about a spot on the ground in the woods that was her favorite spot as she went to gather things for the household that she served. But you also say something about the life that she gave up and I just want you to talk about that in the way which you describe that she didn’t—I want to finish the thought—she didn’t sign up for this.

TA-NEHISI COATES: No, no, no, and again I think this comes out of this sort of shorthand and footnotes and I guess like part of my work is to try to pull this apart, to make people, you know, live in the moment for a second. But the shorthand that we’ve developed about black suffering in this country. Again, that somehow it’s okay. You know, it’s okay because it makes America a better, more human place. But black people don’t sign up to be martyrs. The example I use—these are not people who signed up to be a part of your grand narrative, no, you have to focus in on that individual who liked and loved certain things, who was annoyed and hated certain things.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Who had a favorite sibling.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Who had a favorite sibling, you know, exactly, who understand that the person who she worked for, or who she was enslaved by, was actually not as intelligent as she was, and just had to live with that and that was just the facts of her life. That’s what’s stripped away. It is your individual personhood. It is your individual desires, your dreams, you know, all the things that you want out of your life stripped away, you know, for the interest of plunder, for the interests of somebody else, to benefit somebody else. I think we skip over this stuff. Slavery’s 250 years, man, that’s generation and generation. That’s person, person, person, person, person. And I think it helps every now and then to focus in and let’s just think about one of them for a second, you know, as opposed to the number.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: We read Leon Litwack’s Been in the Storm So Long recently and this is one of the first. It’s a Pulitzer-Prize-winning work of history that masterfully uses the WPA slave narratives to give voice to the experience of enslaved people in the years that the Civil War are unfolding, and we read that the week after we read your book, and we really appreciated how you captured the essence of what Litwack attempted to do, which was to give humanity, to give flesh to the bones of the people who we know by the millions lost their lives over the course of 250 years of this institution that we now look in shame at as if it wasn’t the engine that made America what she is in the world today.

TA-NEHISI COATES: You’re exactly right.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: You use this vessel metaphor with Samori in reference to Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin as young men not too much older than your own son as kind of a final way for him to think about the preciousness of life, if you could share it with us.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Sure. I tell him that children are vessels that parents put things in, you know, under the best circumstances they put a great deal of positive things into them. We invest in our children. We invest, you know in them to have to have music lessons, we shuttle around their friends to soccer practice and soccer games, we take them for play dates, we try to get them into schools where we think their education will be benefited. We hire them tutors, we take them on vacation, and we do this to cultivate our children. You know, I hope this doesn’t come across as crass, but when somebody kills your child, they have taken your most precious investment and they have just shattered it on the ground and in the case of all these people as far as I was concerned, what American policy had done was shattered these lives on the ground and then looked at the parents like, “What? What?” You know, it’s just a tremendous tragedy.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: And to put those pieces back together with naming the tragedies of Martin and Davis I think you’re also telling us that the tragedy of when a young man in Baltimore takes the life of another young men.

TA-NEHISI COATES: It’s the same. It’s no different and it can’t be separated and the attempt to separate out the violence committed by the agents of the state from a hyper level of violence that is the result of the policies of the state is a huge huge mistake. It’s just you know, the agent pulling the trigger is not important to me, you have to look back past that. I think police violence is significant in the fact that you pay your taxes to be protected by police and when they don’t do that, it hits us in a significant way but at the same time I think it’s much more important to see the policy behind it. We should not be afraid to talk about the violence that happens in African American communities. It is symptomatic of the oppressions.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: So by any literary standards, the MacArthur genius means you have reached the pinnacle of success as a writer and a journalist. You’re a genius now, right?

TA-NEHISI COATES: Not even close. (laughter) I hope not. I hope this ain’t the pinnacle. I hope not.

(applause)

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: And I guess before we open it up to a few questions I wanted to know what you make of this moment of arrival, of this acceptance of your voice in a time when it’s not entirely clear that people are fully prepared to sign off on what you’ve written. What do you make of this moment?

TA-NEHISI COATES: You know, what I make of this moment is I’ve got to get back to work. (laughter/applause) I don’t know. You know, Khalil, I would be in conversation with you anytime, but if somebody said, “You know what, this whole tour thing is done, you can go write,” I would take that, I would take that in a minute. And it’s not just, you know, out of selflessness for what I think the writing does. You know, I believe in writing. Like I believe in that as a life, as a commitment. I deeply, deeply enjoy it. I find it tremendously pleasurable. You know, I’m just happy that somebody recognized that, somebody was wiling to invest in it to allow me to do more of it.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Does it make you hopeful, though? That to me is the real question.

TA-NEHISI COATES: For what?

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Well, there’s the question.

(laughter)

TA-NEHISI COATES: I am happy that I am being personally recognized. That has very little to do with the issues I’m talking about. I am talking about broad systemic issues. We live in an era right now in which if there was, you know, any one change between today and Jim Crow it is that it is certainly possible for African Americans to achieve the pinnacle, individual African Americans, to achieve the pinnacle of success in this society. You know, that is a huge, huge difference, right? You couldn’t have a Barack Obama fifty years ago.

But I don’t write on behalf of individuals. You know, I’m not thinking about just individuals who can achieve certain things. Because the fact of the matter is even as that’s true, your child can be killed. Your child can be taken from you, you know, in a way that is just not true for other folks. So, I’m happy to be recognized, but that just charges me to go out and really frankly to do something greater than this book, that really is how I see it. The great Gwen Ifill sent me a nice tweet. She said, “Congratulations. Now get back to work.” (applause) That’s true. That’s true.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: So I have one final thought about this. He uses this blanket metaphor about covering oneself in a blanket to hide from the truth of this history and so I thought at the beginning of this story maybe that it was a Snuggie. (laughter) And now that you’ve won the MacArthur, I’m convinced that it’s a Williams Sonoma blanket.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Maybe so.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: It’s a better blanket that you can hide under now and then. All right, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

(applause)

TA-NEHISI COATES: Thank you guys, thank you.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: When I had the thought that we might not do questions because I knew that you would have two hours to talk to each other, both Khalil and Ta-Nehisi said, “No, please questions, but let them be brilliant.” So they didn’t say anything of that sort, but I’d like to invite people who have questions to come up to the microphone and really ask questions, which in my experience can be asked in about fifty seconds.

Q: So thanks, thanks, Mr. Optimistic, for sharing. Three things and you can ignore them or take just one of them or address all of them. One, it’s interesting your absence of religious background and the notion that the redemptive story within the African American community is somehow a natural response to oppression when in fact that there is no such redemptive religious tory among the Aztecs and the Peruvians who were slaughtered in the Spanish Conquest, so there’s certainly some precedent for that. But I wonder if you could critique your sense of skepticism about the redemptive religious construct within the African American community and the sense of exceptionalism in the American political discourse. Are they equal myths that need to be broken down? Are they separate myths and fundamentally different? Secondly, you mention corporal punishment. Do you have a comment on the Adrian Peterson case and the way that the media handled it, not the way the justice system handled it per se? And do you think it’s possible for America to jettison its sense of exceptionalism in its political discourse as we enter into the 2016 candidacy or the 2016 cycle and we’re going to hear in all of the rhetoric that we are the greatest country on the planet? Okay? Thank you.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: I got your notes if you need them.

TA-NEHISI COATES: So the first question is easy, no. (laughter) I don’t think it’s possible to jettison that exceptionalism. The second question about Adrian Peterson; I think the case was covered by a lot of people who are just unfamiliar with the world. That doesn’t mean that what Adrian Peterson did was okay, by the way, it was not. But I think there were a lot of people who were comment who just don’t understand that world where he was coming from. I think in terms of the first question, no, I don’t think those are equal myths. I think one is the myth of people who are trying to survive with the boot on the neck and I think the other is the myth of a group of people or a society that’s trying to justify the boot being on their neck. I think they’re totally different.

Q: New York City is the second most segregated, residentially segregated city in the country and one of the ways the city bakes that in today is that half of all the affordable housing that gets built is reserved for people who already live in a neighborhood. So what would you say to people who come back and their response is, “Wait a minute. That neighborhood belongs to me,” and is your response different if the person is saying that from a white neighborhood, a black neighborhood, or a Latino neighborhood? Less than fifty seconds.

TA-NEHISI COATES: I’m certainly not an expert on affordable housing in New York, I haven’t really looked at that too much, but I can answer the second half. Of course it’s different. Of course it’s different. Again, white people and black people are not the, you know, two equal sides of a coin. Black America is not a photo negative of white America. When black people speak about Harlem being theirs it’s much the same way that folks of Chinese immigrants might speak of Chinatown belonging to them or Little Italy belonging to the Italians. It is not the same kind of claim. In terms of the other question, I just don’t have the knowledge to really answer in any effective way.

Q: How do you get rid of the segregation if you leave a lot of it alone?

TA-NEHISI COATES: I guess you don’t, but I’m concerned about my ability to answer your question specifically about affordable housing because I’ve done no reporting on that at all.

Q: Hi, good evening. So my question is a lot more of a modern question, it goes to the roots of what you’re talking about. We’re a few blocks away from the Richard Rodgers Theater, which has Hamilton, right? And so when we talk about our roots and you’re talking about going really deep in it, we have a show that is now populated with people of color and talking about history has its eyes on you and yet it’s people of color saying that through. It’s a weird show, right? There’s a discomfort for me and I just always wonder. I read the book this year and I’m just thinking what are your thoughts on this show?

TA-NEHISI COATES: I’m such a disappointment, I haven’t seen the show.

Q: What?

(laughter)

TA-NEHISI COATES: This is like and you know what I haven’t listened to Kendrick Lamar’s second album either.

Q: What?

(laughter)

TA-NEHISI COATES: And I saw Mad Max really late, and I’m not taking this out on you but one of the problems is if anything—God, I’m going to complain. If there is anything I resent, not just about this book, but about any sort of success that I have achieved as a writer. And I blame this on people who came before me actually, and now I’m going to complain about other writers. Writers and “public intellectuals” sit up in spaces like this and they have an opinion on everything, and they pretend that it’s an informed opinion on everything. (applause)

I know a lot about what I know. It should not be a shock to you that I have not seen that. It’s just impossible for me to know everything. It’s just not possible and it’s not even, listen, and it’s not even possible to know everything about that which I care about. Obviously I care about affordable housing, obviously I care about history and I care about art. I just ain’t there yet. (laughter) And I’m a tell you. I’m a tell you. People who sit up here and answer the question, they’re not there yet, either. You know, and so I just—please don’t be surprised. You know what I mean?

Part of—the best part about writing is that I’m actually a student. You actually are a student, that’s actually what you’re doing. I mean that was like what a big part of this conversation was, it was outlining studies. I am not anybody’s leader, I am not anybody’s specialist. I am not—I would even reject the term public intellectual. I don’t like any of that. I wrote a book, it did really well, I am happy about that, I am happy it moved you, but that really is the end of it, that’s all I have. (laughter) That’s all I got.

(applause)

Q: Well, hello, my name is Akira Charles. Nice to meet you. I thought you did a great job and I guess my question just stems on—your book focused so much on the black body and before I came in the room, I was like where is the community? Where are these disadvantaged black bodies in what you’re talking about? Why aren’t they taking up the space here and listening and what you’re trying to say? And I think another thing, too, forming into a question is this whole idea of the black body just dies, and I think for me as I look at myself as a black body as a phoenix, I am constantly dying a million deaths every day, and just this whole idea of like our suffering is just a suffering as opposed to seeing black bodies die on the constant and I think for me once I read your book it was just—for me what I got out of it was just this whole idea of black liberation that is connected to a male-centered narrative.

That is popular and that’s why it’s selling, because it’s talking about a narrative that everybody wants to know. We want to hear about black male exceptionalism. We want to hear about these dominant narratives that oftentime take up space. Not saying that black men aren’t victimized by a whole bunch of isms within America but just this whole concept of how can we understand the black body but understand it in the framework of what the black body or maybe the black male body is doing within the community and also how it’s affected by other systemic issues involved with it. So I think for me it’s just clarifying whether your take on the book comes from a nationalistic perspective that is often narrow and focused on male-centered issues.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Well, I’ll answer the second part and then I’ll go to the first part. I wish that had been true for my first book which was even more male-centered than this one. As a father of two sons, nobody read that, so I don’t know how eager people are to accept that. Do you write?

Q: I do.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Beautiful. How old are you?

Q: I’m twenty.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Beautiful. Even more beautiful. (laughter) This is 150 pages.

Q: I had to read it for my Black Lives Matter class at NYU.

TA-NEHISI COATES: I’m sorry about that. (laughter) I’m sorry it was assigned to you. I really am. I’m sorry you didn’t just find it on your own. I’m sorry it was assigned to you. This is a 150-page book. It is limited by who I am. It is not a stand-in for the black experience. It is not even a stand-in for the entirety of how black people interact with the world physically through their bodies. It was never meant to be that. It should not be that. I don’t say that to duck responsibility. I say that if you are looking for one book to cover the broadness, and that’s one of the things I do talk about in the book, the broadness, the richness of the black experience, the black diasporic experience, African American experience across the board, if you’re looking for that in one book you’re going to lose every time. I understand that this book has been elevated by certain people to be that way. That is not what I wrote. I have only what I have. My hope is that there will be more books. That’s always been my hope. I don’t want to be a stand-in for black people, I don’t want to be a representative. You find this narrative to be too male-centered, that’s fine, that’s okay. That just means we need more narratives, that’s all that means. (applause)

And in terms of spaces, you know, I can’t speak for New York Public Library, but what I will tell you is not to mistake one space for all spaces. First place we went when this book came out in mid-July was this African American church in my hometown of Baltimore. Last week, I was at my mom’s high school out in Baltimore, Maryland, speaking before a predominantly African American audience of students. The very next day I was at Howard University, a historically black college, where it was the freshman read. I talked to, you know, two different groups, an hour and a half each time and then had a big sort of thing at the end of the day. So and then I’m going to be at the Schomburg, I’m going to be at the Schomburg, (applause) so don’t make the mistake of looking at one audience and thinking that is the audience.

Q: I know but since you already made it, some people look at you and say—look for you as the answer for the black experience.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Right, but that’s on them, that’s on them. That’s not what I’m giving you. Have you heard me say that?

Q: No, but I’m just saying, just spaces of looking at this tokenized black male, and someone’s like, okay, he’s going to talk about all the black issues, and it’s just like there’s somewhat of a responsibility now that you have all of those people here that you need to—

TA-NEHISI COATES: Absolutely not. I’m a writer. Absolutely not. And I hope you don’t do that either, I mean you as a writer, I hope that never happens.

Q: That’s why I’m bringing the community with me, so I’m not like not speaking for them.

TA-NEHISI COATES: It will destroy your writing. And it will destroy you. You can’t represent—you just can’t, you can’t. You need a community, you need a group, you need a lineage, you need a family, you know, you can’t look for one person to do that ever, because the writing will just be mush. It will mean nothing.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Hit him up on Twitter to continue the conversation.

(applause)

TA-NEHISI COATES: And I indulge it because it’s important. It’s an important conversation. You know, but don’t mistake what other people are putting on the book for the book itself.

Q: Thank you so much.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Let’s take a few more very short questions.

TA-NEHISI COATES: That’s my fault, I’m sorry about that.

Q: This is maybe not a great question to follow that but I am giving a presentation on you which is not something I’ve ever said to anyone before, but it is specifically on you, your work, your perspective, your writing, to a group of psychologists in training in the interest of training culturally sensitive, culturally competent people who are capable of working with a broad array of training culturally sensitive, culturally competent people who are capable of working with a broad array of individuals from diverse backgrounds and so I was wondering, just you, not anyone else, just you, if there was anything in particular either from the book or your other writing or your personal experience that you might like to see people who are in helping positions emphasize or understand better.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Well, just following on the last question, I just hope it doesn’t end with me. I would—the presentation probably shouldn’t be on me, I mean, to be honest and to follow the last question, it should be much broader than that. I’ve been writing for twenty years, and right now it’s hot, you know, and one day it won’t be hot, you know. But everything in this book everything in my work was built on other people, other scholars, like my friend here Khalil. It wasn’t like magic, it wasn’t even intelligence, it’s not even intelligence, it’s not a particular wisdom that’s greater than other people. You know, I exist within a community and so I think it’s always a mistake to focus on one person like that, I’m not even just saying for me, I just think it’s a mistake.

Q: I will say that in the presentation.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Just one more thing. In the interest of time, the line is now closed. And we’re going to respect the end time, which is 9, which gives us about thirteen minutes for everyone, just so you know.

Q: Hi, good evening, in your book earlier you talked about how the streets and your school were very parallel. And I was hoping that you could mention how that has changed today and how young black kids can navigate those structures.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Repeat the question because I’m not sure everyone heard.

TA-NEHISI COATES: The question was in the book I talk about the streets and schools were parallel. I believe they’re arms of the same beast, that’s what I say. And then the question is how can young black kids navigate. I don’t have good advice on navigating, I just don’t. I don’t know that I even reached the place at the end of the book where I say hey here’s how you get out, here’s how you get through. All I can say is what worked for me. And what worked for me was taking ownership of my own education and embracing as I say in the book, you know, just this idea of struggle of life through struggle. Which does not mean you know you will do x, y, and z, and the clouds will part. You take every day at a time. That is deeply insufficient and uninspiring advice. (laughter) But this is not an advice book, it’s not a handbook, you know, and it wasn’t. You know, that’s not what I wrote.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: But to your credit what I think partly what you’re saying is this search for simple solutions and inspiration is not only underwriting the dream but is also destroying lives. That our unwillingness to confront the finality of the choices that we make in everything that we do is the challenge that is right in front of us rather than something that we might package and market as something that we can opt into when in fact we know that that opting in is really opting out.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Thank you, Khalil. Thanks.

(applause)

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: We’re a community.

Q: Good evening. In “The Case for Reparations,” you talk about redlining and redlining certainly undermined the communities here in New York and specifically southeast queens. Redlining took down that community that according to Ebony magazine in the 1950s and 1960s had the largest middle-class black community in the entire country. Then when it started to rebound after CRA in the early or in the late 1990s, the subprime mortgage debacle happened. And once again after some modest community revitalization, it started to decline. My question is that with the subprime mortgage debacle lots of foreclosures occurred, many people lost their property, many people lost value in their property. What do we do about institutional racism that’s here and now? What do we do to protect our communities and are there elected officials that are on this case with regard to housing?

TA-NEHISI COATES: Well, I don’t think you’ll be able to do anything until there’s a grand policy change. I just don’t believe it. I think actually the answer is right in your question. If this keeps happening repeatedly and you mentioned after CRA, which was supposed to make up for all the—in part the redlining that you were actually talking about. And yet it happened again. And it didn’t even happen like implicitly. It happened like Wells-Fargo literally shopping what they were calling internally “ghetto loans,” just the most base kind of discrimination, like straight out of the 1950s, that you’d ever want to see.

As long as black people occupy a certain social stratum, and as long as there’s money to be made off of exploiting people who do not have access to the same sort of possibilities that other people have access to, this will continue. It’s very hard for me to imagine a world without this happening again as long as black people have what for every dollar of wealth a white family has, a black family has a nickel, and on top of that you are segregated by policy. As long as that’s okay and as long as there’s no sort of big government—and I use that not as a dirty phrase but as an intentional phrase—big government commitment to integration, not because it’s nice to sit next to white people, although that’s nice, too, but because segregation is really the fencing off of people to exploit them. As long as that has not permeated the policy, I hate to tell you, I’m pretty sure it will happen again. There’s money to be made by doing it.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I’m so sorry to say we’re going to take two more questions.

Q: Hello. I guess I just wanted to ask you where you stand on whether or not black art, or art written by black and African American writers is political or is—

TA-NEHISI COATES: My art is political. That’s probably about the best I can do.

Q: I guess more generally then, is all—with its history I guess and with its history is all black art political?

TA-NEHISI COATES: I don’t know. That’s tough to answer, right?

Q: Exactly, exactly.

TA-NEHISI COATES: I don’t—I can only speak for what I do. What I’m attracted to. I’m attracted to art that has something to say about the world that I live in. I don’t know how that art is not political and mine is.

Q: Thank you.

TA-NEHISI COATES: thank you.

Q: So I’m going to borrow this question from Darnell Moore. I think it’s a hard question for me to answer surprisingly. Could you or how would you imagine a world in which we loved black and brown people?

TA-NEHISI COATES: I don’t know, I don’t know, because, again, you’re speaking about words that are so outside of like my experience and how I understand white supremacy. I don’t understand white supremacy as a lack of love of white people for black people or a lack of love you know in the country for black people—and brown people. That’s a valid way—of understanding it. I don’t know that white people love themselves or each other, you understand what I’m saying? I mean I’m not saying that to attack white people as a group. I’m saying that, you know, one of the dominant frames of history is people using power to exploit other people in order to get things.

America is, you know, for all of my criticisms, I don’t know that America is particularly unique in that and so for me being historically rooted, that being my philosophical frame, I don’t even mean knowing more about history, but actually that, like the first question I go to is I say how do other human beings live. I’m making my way very slowly right now through this Barbara Tuchman book called The Distant Mirror, it’s a history of the fourteenth century. And she has this chapter on serfs, and she goes through the literature of how people talk about serfs, and it’s no different to how people talk about black people. Except the substitution for the science that we use for black people, about black people being scientifically and genetically inferior is replaced by God. That’s really, really the only difference, so when you get to that, you say, “Damn, this is something about the human condition.” And I’ve gotta say in many ways like that’s the power of the African American experience when you begin to understand it’s actually a statement about the human condition, it’s tough for me to answer that question. What love is there? It’d be like me looking at the fourteenth century and saying, well, what would the world look like, what would the fourteenth century have looked like if the nobles loved the serfs? It’s like tough. I’m not mocking you, I’m saying it’s like a tough way for me to actually see things, so I feel very ill-equipped to answer that question.

(applause)

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Khalil, Ta-Nehisi, thank you very much.

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