Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975- ) is an American writer who just won a MacArthur Genius Grant ($625,000 over five years). He is best known for “The Case for Reparations” (2014) in the Atlantic magazine, for which he works, and his book “Between the World and Me” (2015).
Toni Morrison:
“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 male life is as profound as it is revelatory.”
Cornel West:
“Baldwin was a great writer of profound courage who spoke truth to power. Coates is a clever wordsmith with journalistic talent who avoids any critique of the Black president in power.”
Like Baldwin in the early 1960s, Coates does seem to be playing the same part in the middle 2010s: a “spokesman” for Black people that White American liberals will read.
Also like Baldwin, Coates sees the same roadblock to ending racism in the US: the need for Whites to preserve a (false) sense of innocence. But where Baldwin advised his nephew to help Whites, Coates tells his son not to waste his time.
Reparations is what Coates says will end racism. Not only will it help to end the huge difference in wealth between Blacks and Whites, but it will also require Whites to give up their false innocence, the main thing keeping racism in place. Deep down most Whites know they should give reparations, but they are far from admitting that to themselves.
That does not mean Black people should give up. Even if it takes a hundred years, Blacks should keep pushing for reparations.
When he was a boy, his father took him to prisons. His father was a Black Panther, working to get other Black Panthers out of prison. One of them was Eddie Conway. To Coates it seemed kind of pointless, but his father did not give up. In 2014, after 44 years, Conway walked free.
His father worked at Howard University at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. It was a library that gathered books from all over the world that were written by or about Black people. Growing up, Coates’s home was filled with such books. He became a huge reader.
His mother taught him to write and to always question. He was not much good at school and it took him 15 years after he dropped out of Howard University before he could make a living at it, but he never stopped questioning and never stopped writing.
His parents also passed onto him their fear. It was limiting but it helped to keep him safe – he grew up in West Baltimore at the height of the Crack Era, the time and place that “The Wire” is based on.
A turning point came when Prince Jones, a friend from Howard University, was gunned down by police. His fear turned to rage.
– Abagond, 2015.
Update (May 25th 2016): Coates’s “Black Panther” has become the top-selling comic book in the US so far this year (as of May 17th) – despite the common (White) belief that there is no market for Black superheroes.
Update (July 20th 2018): Coates is leaving The Atlantic magazine after ten years. Coates: “I became the public face of the magazine in many ways and I don’t really want to be that. I want to be a writer.”
See also:
- posts on books and articles by him:
- Between the World and Me
- The Case for Reparations
- Nina Simone’s Face
- The First White President – on Trump and his supporters
- Coates on Kanye
- Posts featuring Coates:
- James Baldwin
- Toni Morrison
- The Wire
- White innocence
Abagond 
Hey Abagond, I found a rare typo!
“keepng racism” needs an “i.”
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@ King
Thanks!
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“But where Baldwin advised his nephew to help Whites, Coates tells his son not to waste his time.”
Good advise.
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I am intrigued. How would you make reparations work? Who would get them, who would pay and how much? Don’t you think it is more likely increase racism if people end up believing they are unjustly blamed for something they had no part in themselves?
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Writing is hard to do. The larger and more nuanced and multifaceted your subject, the harder it is. Logarithmically. It’s because of the need for organization. Coates has been organizing his thoughts for quite a long time and is now beginning to present them in a linear fashion. He is only just beginning.
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“I am intrigued. How would you make reparations work? Who would get them, who would pay and how much? Don’t you think it is more likely increase racism if people end up believing they are unjustly blamed for something they had no part in themselves?”
I am intrigued by those who ask typical non financial experts how reparations would work. Would you ask a typical American on the street how to turn a $1k investment into a multi-million dollar windfall. No. You would seek the opinion of a successful investment/financial expert.
There are those that are skilled in matters of finance, organization, thought, and equitable fairness. Why not direct your reparation questions to specialized experts?
Increase racism?
The fact that racism still persists all these years after Blacks were kidnapped from Africa is in part both cause and justification for reparations. Increasing the cause for reparations should bolster the case for even more reparations.
Did the descendants of WWII era Germans who had no part in the mistreatment and oppression of Jews increase their marginalization of Jews?
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Whenever people hears about reparation for African-American, they quite spontaneously jump to the exciting “paycheck” part , already worried about who-deserves-what and so and so.
Alas these people often find themselves in a mental quagmire as they can’t figure how to will a paycheck out of thin air.
Not ignoring the boring parts and actually building a case for reparations is Ta Nehisi Coates’s approach, and just the legitimacy alone provided by his intellectual work proved to be a step in the right direction.
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To be honest, I’ve benefitted from the practices that Coates cites.
Besides the nightclubs much of what I control was obtained by fraudulent means.
Contract sales are rumored to be what made some of the wealth acquired by my grandparents. I’ve given the ‘good land’ back to relatives along with their water, mineral and oil rights (yearly oil lease revenue included) because my grandmother is said to have benefitted from cheating her siblings. I’ve given houses to people whose homes should have been paid off long ago. (I’ve been called naive and stupid by acquisitive and aspirational Blacks for doing so.)
I’m fighting a losing battle in the hood to make lives better because people like my grandmother were more concerned with money and status than they were with the community.
My club gives back half of our profits because we rely on the community so we are also responsible for it.
The deontological teachings of my Native-American grandmother have had more of an impact on my idiolgy than have the self centered teachings of a lifetime of pastors (the whole, “You DESERVE the best/Name it and claim it” pandering of the preacher-pimps) and my bourgeoisie relatives.
I’ve labored for others for seven years and then seven more (to walk a mile in their shoes and then being compelled to go the extra mile) for others who had/ have little in an effort to redeem my soul, and to a lesser degree my possessions.
To this day, everyone who has been around me in this town has benefitted by doing so.
Reparations are not for those being recompensed (most will squander their newfound wealth and resources anyway – but that’s a different topic) – reparations benefit the hearts and souls of those finally getting around to being just, honest and true.
(Sorry about the long post Abagond.)
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“I am intrigued by those who ask typical non financial experts how reparations would work. Would you ask a typical American on the street how to turn a $1k investment into a multi-million dollar windfall. No. You would seek the opinion of a successful investment/financial expert.
There are those that are skilled in matters of finance, organization, thought, and equitable fairness. Why not direct your reparation questions to specialized experts?
Increase racism?
The fact that racism still persists all these years after Blacks were kidnapped from Africa is in part both cause and justification for reparations. Increasing the cause for reparations should bolster the case for even more reparations.” @ Fan…Omg, what you said was just sO full of Right I don’t know what else to say except that yah took these (awesomely-on-point) words right outta my mouth!!! 😀
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“(Sorry about the long post Abagond.)”
BlackJohn,
I wish every long post was as worthwhile to read, ENCOURAGE, relevant and full of things we can all (sometimes sadly..) relate to – as your post! It seems to me that you are on the RIGHT side of fixing what you can, or trying to, some of what ails us as a people.
Colonization has not just disturbed our thinking. It has drastically affected how we treat each other. Please remain a good role model (AND benefactor) so that others can see how it is done and that IT CAN BE done – regardless of all the crookedness and nonsense that surrounds us in our community or even in our families!
Thanks for sharing your experiences here! … exception to the rule!
@MzNikita
Lol It’s funny because those intrigued questioners about reparations are almost always, on some level, against reparations. But we’re not supposed to recognize that they’re opponents/naysayers… because of their intrigued and whatnot, questions. lol
h/t to Mr. Coates for communing to many on so many different levels!
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@Fan…Truth!
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If I write book after book about how Blacks scare me, whites deserve reparations for all the bad things Blacks have done to us, and so on, would I get thousands of dollars or just reviled as a “racist”!
Coates is the High Priest of the Double Standard!
Of the 57 occurrences of the word “reparations” in the Coates piece, numbers 38 through 53 (which is 16 occurrences, or 28 percent) refer to reparations paid to European Jews and their descendants by the post-WW2 German governments …
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Ta-nehisiCoates
So far as I can tell from scanning his columns, all he writes about is blackness. Does even he find it that interesting? Obviously, yes.
There’s a narrowness, a poverty of imagination there. I count myself fairly limited in my interests—I know nothing about sport, or art, or TV, or celebrities—but in the past three months I’ve found something to say about consciousness, biohistory, literature, General Relativity, opera, science, Ireland, China, humanitarianism, eugenics, child-raising, Asian-Americans, psychology, poetry, Puerto Rico, Global Warming, genomics, robotics, and even Intelligent Design. Meanwhile Coates has been droning on about blackety-blackety-blackness.
About these reparations: what does Ta-Nehisi Coates actually want? A one-time bounty for all blacks? Monthly checks? Forty acres and a mule? What?
So far as I can tell from Ctrl-F-ing on “reparations,” Coates’ only concrete proposal is that Congress should take up Rep. John Conyers H.R. 40 Bill:
To acknowledge the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a commission to examine the institution of slavery, subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies, and for other purposes.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c101:hr3745:
What do the reparations people really want?
What they really want is for everyone else to find blackness as infinitely fascinating as they themselves find it. This is clearer in the interview Coates gave to Bill Moyers, which comes with a full transcript. From which:
I think, one of the things is that we talk about race a lot, we do. So I think it’s wrong to say we don’t have conversations. No, we actually talk about it quite a bit. I don’t think we talk about it in depth as much as we should. And I think part of the problem is when you start talking about it in depth, when you start getting to a level where you say, listen, everything we are, everything we have is built on past sins.
http://billmoyers.com/episode/facing-the-truth-the-case-for-reparations/?mc_cid=cbf1c7e859&mc_eid=835a541922
Translation: “I know you’re all going to roll your eyes if I say we need to have a conversation about race, but you know what? We really do need to have a conversation about race! In depth! We don’t talk about race enough!”
Maybe because whites are called “racist” or “deniers” if WE start talking about race and race problems, and after being called “racist” often enough, we become the cowards Holder claims we are…Nah!
The dream of the Eric Holders and Ta-Nehisi Coateses is for us all to talk about race 24-7—although of course only in a vocabulary approved by them: acknowledging collective white guilt and sympathizing with the sufferings of blacks.
Personally, I’d rather pay the reparations, if I thought it would shut them up. It wouldn’t, of course:
One potentially undesirable consequence of reparations, as with other remedial programs, is that disappointing results might fuel open-ended or escalating demands for additional compensation. If reparations fail to change blacks’ situation, that might be taken as proof that the amounts paid are insufficient.
So if they squander it all, as even Uglyblackjohn admits…It means we haven’t given them enough!
The rest of Coates’ argument, to the degree I am acquainted with it, consists of familiar charges about the dire effects of racism: the incarceration gap, the achievement gap, the wealth gap. All caused by white people!
Well, no. The incarceration gap is caused by the very high levels of black criminality; the achievement gap is caused by low average black IQ; the wealth gap is caused by a combination of the achievement gap and high black time preference…And of course, squandering wealth on ostentation instead of reinvesting and increasing it. How many whites are willing to kill for Jordan shoes?
Some of Coates’ facts are dubious:
Forced partings were common in the antebellum South. A slave in some parts of the region stood a 30 percent chance of being sold in his or her lifetime. Twenty-five percent of interstate trades destroyed a first marriage and half of them destroyed a nuclear family.
Why doesn’t anyone call him a troll or “something wrong upstairs” for lying?
http://www.amazon.com/Time-Cross-Economics-American-Slavery/dp/0393312186/vd0b-20
That the interregional slave trade resulted in the destruction of some slave marriages is beyond dispute. What is at issue is the extent of the phenomenon. Data contained in sales records in New Orleans … sharply contradict the popular view that the destruction of slave marriages was at least a frequent, if not a universal, consequence of the slave trade. These records, which cover thousands of transactions during the years from 1804 to 1862, indicate that more than 84 percent of all sales over the age of fourteen involved unmarried individuals … It is probable that about 2 percent of the marriages of slaves involved in the westward trek were destroyed by the process of migration.
TWO WHOPPING PERCENT! Maybe the Welfare State destroyed the Black family and created the fatherless “Somebody Owes Me” broods?
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3e41prVDv4)
That’s not even considered, because, I guess it’s not WORTH considering?
Coates’ chronology of real-estate issues ignores the fact that no force known to physics is great enough to prevent nonblacks fleeing a neighborhood when Blacks arrive in sufficient quantity.
Coates also seems to argue that
·Prior to the Fair Housing Act of 1968, it was too hard for blacks to get mortgages, and that was an injustice.
·Following the Community Development Acts of the 1970s and subsequent liberalizations in securities trading, it became too easy for blacks to get mortgages—and that was an injustice, too!
·300,000 Union dead. New amendments to the Constitution. Reconstruction. A decade of Civil Rights. Busing. Equal employment opportunity legislation. Disparate impact legislation. The new “religion” of Anti-Racism, which somehow only picks on WHITE racists, and ignores if not canonizes nonwhite criminals!
·Black people get reparations through record “Entitlement” spending and Government employment. Nearly 21 percent of the nation’s working Black adults hold government jobs, as compared to some 17 percent of white workers. 39% of Welfare is to Blacks, 38% to whites…Whites ARE still the majority, right? Why doesn’t our WELFARE SPENDING reflect our demographic makeup? *Crickets*
·Blocking OURSELVES from instituting a way to make sure ONLY AMERICANS VOTE, because it MIGHT inconvenience some of the lazier or dumber ones? They can get their drivers’ license renewed every few years, most can pick up a check every other week, and presenting ID when making a credit-card purchase, but proving they are American and deserve to vote in America is TOO HARD? Those, regardless of race, are the ones I consider too stupid or too lazy to be near WORD voting, much less the ACTION!
·Nope. America hasn’t done any soul searching whatsoever about the legacy of not picking their own damn cotton until Coates came along!
Won’t the reparations issue be a problem for the Democrats and threaten to crack their coalition? I can’t see Asians or Mexicans supporting a policy that gives the biggest piece of the pie to Blacks. Democrats would have to make a hard choice between being the party of MINORITIES, or the party of BLACKS! Even the Amnesty for illegals wouldn’t be enough…Or are Asians so few in number that Democrats would shrug about throwing them under the bus?
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I read Ta-Nehisi Coates will be the writer for the new Black Panther superhero comic series.
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Guys, this EPGAH guy must be a liberal! A color blind liberal allow me to add.
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Mary Burrell
Wow, that will be the most boring comic remake ever. “I’m Black, you must surrender and give reparations”. Is he going to lecture them into submission?
The original was a Prince who sold an amount of his country’s Vibranium stock to build Captain America’s shield (Among other things), and to get the money to be a lowbudget Batman and ward off an evil warlord who wanted to overthrow his country.
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villagewriter
I AM a Liberal in the Classical definition.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism)
The American definition is off by about 90º if not 180º.
Now that they’ve ruined the word “Liberal”, they want to move on to the title “Progressive” and ruin that too!
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“There’s a narrowness, a poverty of imagination there. I count myself fairly limited in my interests—I know nothing about sport, or art, or TV, or celebrities—but in the past three months I’ve found something to say about consciousness, biohistory, literature, General Relativity, opera, science, Ireland, China, humanitarianism, eugenics, child-raising, Asian-Americans, psychology, poetry, Puerto Rico, Global Warming, genomics, robotics, and even Intelligent Design. Meanwhile Coates has been droning on about blackety-blackety-blackness.
About these reparations: what does Ta-Nehisi Coates actually want? A one-time bounty for all blacks? Monthly checks? Forty acres and a mule? What?
So far as I can tell from Ctrl-F-ing on “reparations,” Coates’ only concrete proposal is that Congress should take up Rep. John Conyers H.R. 40 Bill:
To acknowledge the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a commission to examine the institution of slavery, subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies, and for other purposes.”
and more.
Plagiarized from (http://www.vdare.com/articles/john-derbyshire-on-maya-angelou-ta-nehisi-coates-the-whining-of-pampered-pets)
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Actually, that’s not plagiarism, if you go to the main page, VDare encourages–in print–people to copy their statements.
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@EPGAH
It is plagiarism if you take another persons work and pass it off as your own. You did the same on another post.
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Update: Coates’s “Black Panther” has become the top-selling comic book in the US so far this year (as of May 17th) – despite the common (White) belief that there is no market for Black superheroes.
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@Abagond: I was listening to one of my podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour two weeks ago and Ta- Nehesi was a guest. And he was talked about how he and the artist worked together to create the Black Panther character. And Black Twitter was excited about the movie with the Black Panther character portrayed by Chadwick Bosman. I am not a fan girl but i would read the comic and go see the movie because i want to support it.
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[…] Source: Ta-Nehisi Coates […]
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Update: Ta-Nehisi Coates is leaving The Atlantic magazine after ten years. Coates: “I became the public face of the magazine in many ways and I don’t really want to be that. I want to be a writer.”
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