DISCLAIMER: This is NOT a certified or verbatim transcript, but rather represents only the context of the class or meeting, subject to the inherent limitations of realtime captioning. The primary focus of realtime captioning is general communication access and as such this document is not suitable, acceptable, nor is it intended for use in any type of legal proceeding.
[MUSIC]
ANNOUNCER: You are listening to a podcast of a program produced in 2015 as part of ALOUD, a series of dynamic conversations, readings and performances that take place in the Mark Taper Auditorium at the historic Downtown Central Library in the heart of Los Angeles. These programs are presented by The Library Foundation of Los Angeles which supports the Los Angeles Public Library. To support ALOUD or learn about the entire podcast collection, please visit www.lfla.org/ALOUD.
MODERATOR: In one of his last interviews with Studs Terkel, the writer James Baldwin referred to the bill this country is going to have to pay. Bills always do come in. Baldwin also reminded us quote there's never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment. The time is always now.
And I'm glad in this moment we have Ta Nehisi Coates and Robin Kelley with us tonight, and I'm glad you're all here for what I am sure is going to be a very compelling conversation. And after our guest's conversation, we will take some questions from you. We won't be able to get to all of them, and we ask that you wait until the microphone to come to you as we do record for podcast. I want to stress that we really do ask that you ask a question, not several questions, not a statement. It would be really appreciated by all of us.
All copies of Ta Nehisi's book Between the World and Me are pre-signed and are available for sale courtesy of our library store tonight. He's not able to stay afterwards for a book signing.
Ta Nehisi is a writer, journalist, and educator; is also a senior editor for The Atlantic where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. His essay The Case for Reparations provocatively traces the history of racism in the US from slavery to recent examples of housing discrimination. This much lauded piece, which is just an amazing read, set a single day traffic record for a magazine article on The Atlantic's website; and is probably the most discussed magazine piece of the Obama era. And if you haven't read it, do.
In The Case For Reparation, Ta Nehisi calls on the nation, calls on us to have the bravery to face the truth. More important than any single check cut to any African American, he writes, the payment of reparations would represent America's maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders. How would culture have to change in order to make the sort of reckoning he calls for possible? What sort of cultural forces might it take to make those enormous shifts? I think the Los Angeles Public Library is a very good place to discuss those questions.
Coates' new book Between the World and Me addressed to his 14 year old son echos the directive and provocative prose of James Baldwin. He writes to his son, quote, white America is a syndicate arrayed to protect it's exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. The New York Times AO Scott called the book essential like water or air.
Ta Nehisi Coates was born in 1975. He grew up in northwest Baltimore into a family infused with black political consciousness. His father Paul Coates had been a Black Panther. He became a radical librarian I just love that term (laughter) and independent publisher.
He writes about his childhood in his first book A Memoir: The Beautiful Struggle. He writes about growing up with his head deep in comic books we may hear more about comic books tonight and Malcolm X's speech on his Walkman.
And in conversation with Ta Nehisi is Robin D.G. Kelley tonight is award winning author and leading African American studies scholar. His research and interests have focused on the African diaspora, urban studies, working class radicalism, and cultural history with an emphasis on music.
He is currently Distinguished Professor of History and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in US History at UCLA. And among his many fabulous books are Felonious Monk; The Life and Times of an American Original; and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, which we have on sale tonight. His most recent book is Africa Speaks, America Answers Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times.
Please welcome Ta Nehisi Coates and Robin Kelley to the ALOUD stage.
ROBIN KELLEY: I got two pillows to be high enough. Yes. Okay. Yeah and I'm the elder, you know. Anyway, it's such a pleasure and honor to be sitting here with Ta Nehisi.
I'm surprised we haven't met because our circles have a lot of people in common. Howard University is a place I spent a lot of time not as a student, but giving lectures and, you know, spending a lot of time with the (indiscernible) Collection doing research for my dissertation. Then he ends up in New York City when I was at NYU. And again, what's interesting about this, Ta Nehisi began writing for Village Voice at a really crucial moment. I mean everyone was impressed with his writing and amazed, but he came in pretty much three years after Joe Wood had disappeared.
And Joe Wood, if you know anything about him, was an incredibly talented writer, 34 years old, disappeared on Mt. Rainier, and he was a writer for Village Voice. So in some ways, Ta Nehisi was seen as the person to replace him and one of the few who could actually rise to the occasion.
TA NEHISI COATES: Do you know what happened to him?
ROBIN KELLEY: Oh, he literally disappeared. He was hiking and fell into a hole.
TA NEHISI COATES: Oh my god.
ROBIN KELLEY: And was swept by the current of ice, and many people on Mr. Rainier that year had died as a result.
TA NEHISI COATES: Wow, wow.
ROBIN KELLEY: Joe was a very close friend of mine. He edited Malcolm X In Our Own Image. So your columns and their edgy humor in some ways gave us comfort. His book The Beautiful Struggle should be read by all of you. Don't just, you know, you need to buy The Beautiful Struggle in addition to Between the World and Me. You have to and we'll talk a little bit about that.
TA NEHISI COATES: You must.
ROBIN KELLEY: You must because that book shows he's a gifted memoirist and has something to say. I'm going to bring it up a little later in our conversation.
So you know all these years we've been kind of swirling around each other, you know, dealing with some of the same issues; and Between the World and Me wedged your ongoing self-exploration central to your journalistic work race, policing, reparations, slavery. And it's a book written with a kind of urgency, and so what I want is to treat our conversation with that same urgency to really raise critical questions and try to advance a conversation. So in other words, your book tour is preempted.
Now it's time for some really challenging questions. So let's begin. Let's begin with the very basic one. I know James Baldwin's Fire Next Time has been an inspiration and you've talked about the story; but in writing this book, what was your objective? What did you want to accomplish?
TA NEHISI COATES: Before that, I just have to say that I am deeply honored to be here with the great Robin Kelley. When I was an undergrad at Howard, and on what turned out to be a chaotic mission to be a poet or a historian, Robin was a particular influence in a kind of way. That was an era -- and I promise I'm not ducking the question. And I'm not trying to flatter you, but it's really true.
I was telling Robin this there was a tradition of intellectuals that came up during that period, very prominent, during that period and they engaged in media in a particular way. On TV, you know, just talking a lot -- I guess that's the best way to put that. I'm looking for a way to finesse that, but talking a lot. And Robin didn't talk, he wrote. And even though I find myself in a period now where I talk a lot, I am reminded every time that I should not be. I shouldn't be talking right now. I should be home practicing right now instead of talking to you guys. That's what Robin would be doing.
ROBIN KELLEY: Yeah, but you got a book. You got a book to bring to us.
TA NEHISI COATES: I got to hustle. I got to hustle. I just say that he was is an example for us. You know he really, really is. I just wanted to say it's such an honor. I never thought this would happen in 20 years ago when I was at Howard.
What I want to get across? You know, I was telling this to Robin back stage when we were talking a little bit. I was saying that, you know, I read a Fire Next Time and to me the Fire Next Time though I think for a lot of people who read it, it stands out as politics I always saw it as a work of art okay. Because I read that book when I was probably about 18 years old. I was sitting in Founder's Library at Howard. I think the Fire Next Time might be 110 120 pages or something like that. And it just hit me. And I didn't even know what it was about. I mean I had a rough idea; but if I had to, you know, really take the Fire Next Time apart at that age, I really couldn't have done it.
Much like when I was kid and I would hear certain hip hop albums, I couldn't really tell you what was going on. I couldn't tell every reference Chuck D was making. I didn't have all of it.
Much like, you know, when you encounter any great piece of art and a lot times it's emotional. The way I would encounter Ginsberg's Howl, it was emotional. Even though I didn't know what Ginsberg was referring to, but the words made me feel a certain way. That was how I came to a Fire Next Time and that's what I took away from it. Years later I re read it. And then I got to politics. And when I got the politics and I got to art, I said, Oh, my God, I think this is easily one of the greatest works of non fiction ever written. I called my agent and said, you know, why don't people write like this anymore. And I had the same conversation with my editor. And the answer was that Baldwin was, you know, one of a kind. And he was.
Well we decided to take on that challenge. At the same time, one has to have something to communicate you know. And so I think I had done all of this journalism and I'm continuing to do, you know, journalism like this that just tries to give you what the architecture of white supremacy is here.
You take housing, for instance, how you can see the map and then you can interlock that with incarcerations as I tried to do recently. You know, hopefully, as I go on throughout my career, you have inner layers. And hopefully at some point you'll be able to see the entire atlas of it. The map. And you can see, how like a web, it affects every aspect of our life.
That's my working theory. And I'm going just, you know, going through, you know, the journalism to see if that's true. You know trying to test out that theory. But one of the things I was frustrated with was, you know, that kind of writing I think can make racism – make the weight of white supremacy too abstract.
The job of literature is to convey the force; the weight; the pain, you know, of a system of oppressive forces in the most personal and direct way possible. At least that's one job of literature, and I always thought that's what Baldwin did.
That was what I wanted this book to communicate to you. I wanted you to see racism and white supremacy not as an abstract evil, but as an actual thing that is personal within the lives of African Americans. It takes years off your life. It raises your blood pressure. It changes how you interact with the world in the most smallest, but yet the most critical of ways. I just wanted people to feel the weight, the visceral feeling of the weight of white supremacy.
ROBIN KELLEY: Uh huh. Now you don't at all deny the link to Baldwin, even though in the book itself, you don't really reference Baldwin much. You have an epigraph of Baldwin. You mention him once in reference to think about Paris. And not that you have to, but because of that, because you didn't sort of spell out your relationship, what you take from Baldwin, -- again you don't have to – it has opened the door for all these kind of ill-informed comparisons between your work and the Fire Next Time.
And one of those comparisons revolve around the alleged lack of hope in your work. Now you and I both know that you're not required to have hope. That's not a requirement. You don't need to have that. (Laughter)
What I -- I wanted to say a couple things. The book in fact comes, for me, philosophically is much closer to Baldwin's project. In many ways it's, you know, it's in spite of Baldwin's religiosity. This is a book about a rejection in some ways of Christianity. It is, despite your disavow of redemption narratives, it's not as if Baldwin is very clear that there is a redemption here.
And then you have all these other things in common. You both love Malcolm X. People don't realize Baldwin wasn't a big fan of Kings. He preferred Malcolm, you know, over this. He also said you know, I love this quote Baldwin said, you know, how he understood the West's relationship to the rest of us as one of plunder. In an interview, he said, the bankruptcy of the Western World is simply the end of the possibilities of plunder. So there are many ways in which you all are on a very similar path much closer, but you part ways.
TA NEHISI COATES: Uh huh, right.
ROBIN KELLEY: Tell me how you see yourself both drawing on Baldwins tradition, but specifically how you see yourself parting ways.
TA NEHISI COATES: Well let's start with where you started with this question of hope. The notion that art or journalism or science or history is – that it must be hopeful is ridiculous and absurd and infantile. What if, you know, Joe Diddy was here having a conversation with you and at the end of which, you said, yes, but I don't find your literature very hopeful. (Laughter) That would be, you know, the audience would look at that person (Laughter) like are you out of your mind.
If I finished The Great Gatsby, then said I really wanted Nick and Daisy to get together at end of The Gatsby. Why didn't that happen? I don't know how to feel about that, you know. I finished the Grapes of Wrath. Why didn't everything end up great for the Jones? I don't quite get it.
I came up on hip hop. Hip hop was the literature of my youth. And hip hop lives in the muck of humanity and what can't happen. There's so many sayings that I think about.
There's a I mean, you know, I was thinking about this on the train today. You know there's this love song that The Roots have, when he meets this woman in Paris and he says that their whole outset from the beginning, was we knew from the start that things fall apart and tend to shatter. And that's them convincing their relationship. But it's a very beautiful statement. And they end up going through the relationship anyway and that is so much of life.
People unfortunately -- and I don't know when this happened or how this happened -- have begun to confuse writers and black writers specifically -- black writers specifically – with therapists. (Laughter)
You know and perhaps
ROBIN KELLEY: That's not new though.
TA NEHISI COATES: That is old. That is old, really?
ROBIN KELLEY: Yeah, that goes back to 1965. I'm just kidding. (Laughter) I'm just kidding.
TA NEHISI COATES: I think you're supposed to make people feel good at the end you know. Yes, but can you make us feel good? You know and that unfortunately that's true in black and white communities. That's an awful standard for literature period. That's the first thing I'll say.
I think you made a good point about Malcolm. I think and I don't know, but I think – obviously Baldwin disagreed a lot with Malcolm, you know, especially when he – what he liked -- there was a kind of coldness Malcolm would speak with. This is kind of straight ahead listen this is what it is. Behind this is power. Forget love, forget whatever, this is a power situation here period. That's what defined this. It was like without any sentimentalism and there's something really, really attractive about that.
You know I can remember listening to tapes of Malcolm X as a kid. And see what I identify now is a lack of condescension. Like he wouldn't condescend to me. You know what I mean? It was the absolute absence to feel good about a situation. And I think Baldwin wrote like that, man. I mean he really wrote with that vigor, that kind of energy with a cold eyed look at everything.
Even in that portion of Fire Next Time where he's critiquing the nation. You know he understands why the nations got appeal. He's got it. Even when he's saying this is not the way ultimately. Like he's really is able to see it. Give them their space and then go in and critique it.
And I thought -- I was like I want to write like that, that coldness, that directness, that honesty,
ROBIN KELLEY: Let me throw something else out there. That honesty is in there. When he says, you know, I don't know many Negroes who are eager to be accepted by white people and still less to be loved by them.
TA NEHISI COATES: Yeah, we just want you to stop beating us over the head.
ROBIN KELLEY: Yes, exactly and that's the next line after that.
But then he does talk about love. And this is sort of -- this is one of the places where I'm -- I want to get you to talk about where you differ from Baldwin.
For him love is not soft. Love is hard. Love is not sentimental. But he's talking about love in kind of an agape sense. And one of the things he says is that, you know, those that claim to be white, of course, believe as well as they do and cause you to endure speaking to his nephew -- does not testify to your inferiority, but to their inhumanity and fear for these innocent people have no other hope. They are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. So for him liberation as a country requires that they understand and free themselves from history.
I know at the end of the book you tell Simori (sic) that look you can't sort of wait on white people. But for Baldwin, it is that saying that no matter how people treat you, you got to treat them back with love specifically white people who are in some ways, you know, unable to release themselves from that history. He's not saying you need to teach white people. Hes not going that far. But what do you think about this idea of the interdependence
TA NEHISI COATES: What do you think he means by treat them with love not teach them? What do you think he means?
ROBIN KELLEY: Well if he says I think he gives an example of this there's no reason if you're in a position to be able to disparage somebody because of their race, because they represent that you do it.
TA NEHISI COATES: Right.
ROBIN KELLEY: And one of the amazing things about the history of say reconstruction, the end of slavery, is – and you know this better than I do -- the formerly enslaved people who were never really slaves, they were just enslaved and kidnapped focus more on building institutions and extending social democracy to the entire nation
TA NEHISI COATES: Right
ROBIN KELLEY: – than they did on taking revenge or excluding.
TA NEHISI COATES: Right.
ROBIN KELLEY: And that's you don't -- I don't know the last time I saw an article about black supremacist going into a white church and blowing them up.
TA NEHISI COATES: Right.
ROBIN KELLEY: It just doesn't happen.
TA NEHISI COATES: This is where I want to get to a place that I differ. I don't know how much of that is love or how much of that is cold like politics. I mean it would not have been smart to, you know, proceed on a campaign of revenge and destruction. Like that just how much of that
ROBIN KELLEY: Let's take it back another place. Let's just talk about something as basic as free universal public education.
TA NEHISI COATES: Right.
ROBIN KELLEY: So much of what black legislators and elected officials were doing in the late 60s was create democratic institutions that actually opened the door for poor white people.
TA NEHISI COATES: True, true.
ROBIN KELLEY: And that is a vision produced out of their experience.
TA NEHISI COATES: True.
ROBIN KELLEY: In other words, enslaved people had politics before they got their freedom.
TA NEHISI COATES: Right, right, right. No, I agree with you. But even in that I would say two things. The first thing is African Americans being Americans I think is really, really crucial like actually having an American identity. But also, I mean, how do you separate that from the cold real politic too of, you know, it would really be better if we had some allies in this. You know what I mean? Like it actually does help us if we can actually forge alliances here.
ROBIN KELLEY: Right. True. Right, but I guess the question is there are so many different ways people could have proceeded that was even colder politics. For example, when you start to extend your political vision to democratize America to incorporate those who have been excluded, you make yourself vulnerable. And so the kind of violence meted out on black people who supported Republicans and later bringing back the labor party that kind of violence had to do with a radical politics that was about inclusion. As opposed to you know we are going to make our own black towns and you can leave us alone too. Now they did that too. That was there too.
TA NEHISI COATES: Right, right.
ROBIN KELLEY: By the way, I'm not suggesting that any of this was driven by love
TA NEHISI COATES: Right.
ROBIN KELLEY: – but that Baldwin is saying that if I'm going to try to imagine a different possibility of liberation, I can't reproduce the same violence against me. And that for him, and again for Dr. King whom he actually distrusted sometimes, was about the constant struggle to make community; that is, the definition of love. To make community even with those people who may not be as advanced as you.
So when he says, look I don't want to -- I'm really not interested in marrying your daughter because I know your family, you know. But if I do marry your daughter, maybe I can elevate her to my place you know.
TA NEHISI COATES: Yeah. You know I think part of this is like me coming out of the left radical and nationalist end of the politics. Where it's just – you have to make community.
ROBIN KELLEY: Right. Absolutely.
TA NEHISI COATES: It just has to happen. There is no – one of the cool things about having the background that I have is the experience of doing all these thought experiments and in some cases not thought experiments. So if the nationalist project works out, is that a place you want to live? [Indiscernible] had a great line when he's debating Elijah Muhammad -- I mean hes debating Malcolm. And he's talking about what life would look like under Elijah Muhammad and whether he actually would want to live in that country. And so like for me, its like no.
ROBIN KELLEY: No.
TA NEHISI COATES: I would be at the center. I mean in that country, I probably would be in the same place that I am in relation to America. I would be to the center against power.
ROBIN KELLEY: Exactly.
TA NEHISI COATES: But for me that just feels like, this is just me from my perspective, that just feels like gaming it out. It doesn't have an emotional component. Love may be the result of that, but it just feels like well that can't work.
ROBIN KELLEY: Right, right. Let me cause -- just quick because I don't want to lose any time. I have another question about fear. I want to talk about this because you frame much of the book on the thesis that fear governs black life especially the generation. And it's a very powerful, very persuasive argument. But for me when I read that, I kind of stopped in my tracks because when I read The Beautiful Struggle which by the way should have won a Pulitzer and I don't know why it didn't.
TA NEHISI COATES: Well, thank you.
ROBIN KELLEY: That book is amazing. But what you did was something no social scientist was ever successful of doing and that is showing the full range of humanity.
TA NEHISI COATES: Right.
ROBIN KELLEY: The blurb on that book suggests, you know, I guess the publisher wrote it like this emphasizes the age of crack. The age of crack was background.
TA NEHISI COATES: Yeah, its background.
ROBIN KELLEY: But what was so important is you have black boys and girls, men and women experiencing every range of emotion.
TA NEHISI COATES: Right.
ROBIN KELLEY: Joy and verve and humor despite the fear. The fear is there. It's not like you play it down. It's very much there. But see it's the passages that I was moved to tears by was you in the basement spitting rhymes, right.
TA NEHISI COATES: Right, right, right.
ROBIN KELLEY: You playing Jump bay (sic) by the way my son plays Jump bay.
TA NEHISI COATES: Okay. All right.
ROBIN KELLEY: Finding meaning in nation house. That your autodidactism actually comes out of this community that's training you in ways outside of the institution of school.
TA NEHISI COATES: Right.
ROBIN KELLEY: So if you can just help me -- and by the way Baldwin also, you know, insisted it was the capacity of black people to love each other under the constraints --
TA NEHISI COATES: Right.
ROBIN KELLEY: -- of the threat of physical and social death. That's the secret to survival. If you can reconcile that joy and zest that you write so beautifully about . That's in this book by the way. It's not like it's not there.
TA NEHISI COATES: Yeah, yeah. Its there.
ROBIN KELLEY: And the idea of fear of governing reconcile those for me.
TA NEHISI COATES: I just feel like black people don't get enough credit for their humanity. I mean I just and I was (Applause) When they show you a certain way on TV or they show you in a certain way in media over and over that is you know, that is stripping you of humanity in a really simplistic way.
ROBIN KELLEY: Right.
TA NEHISI COATES: As a writer in my small way, my contribution was to show the depth of black life. So that was very much a part of what was going on in A Beautiful Struggle. I mean the crack piece, the age of crack is background, but within that people did not lose their humanity. They didn't. They had a response. They had a political response. They had a cultural response that, you know, is worth noting.
In this book, you're right, it's much more about the fear. Its much more about the exterior forces. But like the parts about Howard were essential, because I mean I don't know if this is necessarily all my work, but definitely In this book. I was very interested in investigating black identity and revealing it not to be a photo negative of white identity.
ROBIN KELLEY: Right.
TA NEHISI COATES: But it's something very, very distinctive. That white identity is it strictly racial. Black identity is racial in the sense that it's something that's put on you. But within that – well underneath of that is a very vibrant ethnic you know, identity. A beautiful, beautiful, beautiful ethnic identity that is complicated that is a stew of so many things. And see that's the thing that people made. That's what black people made.
The racial piece is what they called us, what they stamped us with. But within that, there's a entrepreneurial piece that we made. I mean its such a beautiful -- like this is what I argue in my book and my interviews. This is actually, there's a great problem with white supremacy in this country. White people have so much to lose. I mean they have their very identity as white people to lose. Black people don't actually have that. In fact, black people would cast it off in a second. I'm talking the racial piece. Because they have culture and tradition, they have all these things to fall back on.
And that's not really true of white identity. There are white identities underneath the white identity. You know, Jewish identity, you know, Irish American identity. You know some folks take pride in being Californian. Like there are all these other things beneath, But white identity itself -- I mean the destruction of white supremacy is the destruction of white people as a construct.
ROBIN KELLEY: Right.
TA NEHISI COATES: Not people with blonde hair or light skin. You understand what I'm saying. I mean we got that too. You know what I mean, the black identity. But the destruction of the concept of it, you know.
ROBIN KELLEY: Exactly. There was this one quote that
TA NEHISI COATES: And this is the hard part, by the way. I mean that to me is the tough, tough part that people have not quite grappled with.
ROBIN KELLEY: Right, right. And It's true and I was wondering about in terms of what constitutes white identity, which of course as you argue is built on plunder and it's also built on ideology
TA NEHISI COATES: Right.
ROBIN KELLEY: -- which you know, underwrites that level of plunder. But there's one where Baldwin talks about is a kind of fear. It's always there and it's very fragile. Its amazing how fragile it is. Which is why when you talked about the entrepreneurial side of black culture, one of the interesting things that happens of course is the concept appropriation and enveloping and costuming of blackness as a way of achieving some kind of sense of self.
TA NEHISI COATES: Right, that's exactly it. If you think about it all of our humor like, you know, ha ha ha. I'm so white. What you're saying is I don't have anything except power. That's what this statement is. I mean that's what all of those jokes are about. Ha ha ha. I'm white. Da, da, da. That's what that is. Its an absence.
ROBIN KELLEY: This is kind of off my path, but in terms of power how is class working in your relation formulation? Because It's amazing how Mitchelsy (sic) was a white working class more than anything else for people who have their own histories of dispossession as white people. And who, as Dubious talks about, whiteness was a kind of psychology wage. These are people that are not necessarily land owners or do not necessarily have all the benefits of settler colonials or have all the benefits of being a master. Where do those white people fit into, you know, the formation of the dreamers?
TA NEHISI COATES: They have identity. But I don't think their identity like I think – again, if white supremacy went away today; for instance, there would still be an Appalachian identity. But that's different than a white you know, an overarching white identity. And so as I said, I think there are all sorts of you know.
ROBIN KELLEY: Do they receive the benefits? Certainly they receive benefits of white skinned people. No question about this.
TA NEHISI COATES: Right, right.
ROBIN KELLEY: Across the board. And part of the trickery, part of the story, is that you tell a post World War II story and you tell an antebellum story. In terms of the post antebellum story, are those – is that element of the dreamers really benefiting in the same way that the slave masters are benefiting? And you know how do we think about the psychology of whiteness for those people who have nothing else but whiteness? That's all they got you know.
TA NEHISI COATES: Well, they need it more.
ROBIN KELLEY: They need it more exactly.
TA NEHISI COATES: They need it more. That's you know obvious.
I'm reading it book right now called Citizens right now. Its like – it's the history of the French Revolution. And there's great variety within the Aristocracy, you know, as you come up. There's actually poor aristocrats, you know, in France as they approach the revolution and they're the people that cling to it the most. Because its all they have. Literally you have situations where peasants are more wealthier than quote unquote aristocrats, but these privileges are all I have.
You know what I mean. I don't -- I haven't finished the book yet. I was working on theory as I was even reading it, thinking about I don't know how different this is from white identity. You know what I mean? I just don't know. One might and – again, I'm working my way through this and some somebody from the audience can tell me if I'm wrong – but you can almost see white identity as a kind of aristocracy. You know what I mean. You can have poor aristocrats. You can have poor people that still have that badge that constitutes certain social privileges in this country and political privileges.
ROBIN KELLEY: Exactly. That's what Dubious says in Black Reconstruction on 35. yeah.
TA NEHISI COATES: You know I have never read that book. I am so ashamed. I'm just going to cop to it. Not going to do that. (Laughter)
ROBIN KELLEY: While you are in Paris that should be like emergency reading. That to me that's one of the most important history book ever written period. My students are reading it in the winter quarter. If you're here, now you know. It's big.
One last thing about slavery. I loved your -- and by the way I'm being contentious here I loved your description pages 69 70 where you captured the humanity of the enslaved woman. Its beautiful and its very, very important because you talked about that experience of, you know, a woman who is not a slave but she is held in bondage.
TA NEHISI COATES: Right.
ROBIN KELLEY: Which is different. She understands – she loves the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods. She enjoys the fishing, how the water eddies in the nearby stream. It's beautiful writing. And then you may the profound observation that she is not the conformation of the promise of American liberty, but is the contradiction. And then you insert that quote that for 250 years black people were born into chains. Whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
Now I in principle agree with that, but here's my question. That same enslaved woman is also one who has seen runaways. Who has seen truants. Who has meet people born in Africa who have knew freedom. In other words, part of what the beauty of your description is to show a fluidity and a real failure of slavery to work psychology.
It may work in terms of the tongues and the muscles and the beat downs, but It doesn't work because it is the most unstable system. It's breakable. People run away constantly. The amount of money expended on security is high. You lay this out. This is actually in that book. Beautiful. I wonder what your thoughts are on this.
It's Baldwin who says that -- he draws from Hagel – he says, you know, the master is bound to the slave. He says, he has -- this is no name in the street -- he has simply become the prisoner of the people he thought come to cow, chain or murder into submission.
Because he spends all his waking hours trying to maintain something that never quite works. And so this enslaved woman kind of knows that freedom can be bought, possibly by some. She knows people that ran away and succeeded. She knows people that ran away and failed.
So how can we understand that fluidity of a system that's always so unstable? What does it tell us about what comes next; that is, how freedom is achieved?
TA NEHISI COATES: I think you raise a great philosophical question. I mean did it fail? You know, as I was listening to you, I was thinking and I have been thinking about this a lot like that great Thomas Jefferson quote where he describes having slavery as having the wolf by the ears. You know he's caught. He's caught. Like he cant in his form whether you buy that or not, you know, and yet well.
ROBIN KELLEY: But having millions of wolves by the ears and some of them are biting you getting away and others are not. So then you got to figure out some kind of system to keep them by the ears.
TA NEHISI COATES: Well I mean the question is like, if you say the goal was to strip people of their humanity, then it clearly was a failure. But I think that raises the question about whether oppression ever succeeds by that term, by that definition.
I think one could argue that The Holocaust never in fact succeeded. Kids were born in the camps. You have the Warsaw uprising. You know, it was that kind of daily resistance that human being tend to do.
I want to push back on that and resist and not become to sentimental. But to say, if the goal was to extract massive amounts of wealth from other people, did it not succeed? And to build a country off of that?
ROBIN KELLEY: That's not the thing I'm questioning. I'm questioning the idea of people who only know chains; that is, born into chains
TA NEHISI COATES: Did they only know chains? Right, right, right.
ROBIN KELLEY: and did they know nothing of chains. Because if they only know chains, then they cant know the possibility of freedom. I say that not because I disagree, but I say it in some ways we sometimes - you did something beautiful; that is, by revealing the humanity of this enslaved woman. That humanity involves one other step, which you reveal indirectly, and that step is knowing that she has the capacity for freedom and freedom is possible.
TA NEHISI COATES: Right.
ROBIN KELLEY: The fact that you have a free black community. It's not fully free we know that, but the existence of a space in which enslaved people actually go to church with free black people. I mean that's all I wanted to throw that out to you for us all to think about it.
I'm running out of time here. We're going to jump to Prince Jones and then I'm going to have you read. I don't want to miss Prince Jones.
TA NEHISI COATES: Okay.
ROBIN KELLEY: Because he is a central figure in your book.
TA NEHISI COATES: Right.
ROBIN KELLEY: And you can talk a little bit about him.
I just wanted to ask you a couple of things and you can riff on this. You wrote an excellent piece on Prince Jones' murder in Washington Monthly between 2001, and you mentioned things like students protesting. You mentioned, you know, the demonstrations at the Justice Department. And I'm just curious to know, given where we are now with Black Lives Matter and that kind of protest, you didn't put too much emphasis on the demonstrations and protests and opposition in the book. And I'm wondering is it because your skeptical because they didn't really do much? What are your thoughts about?
TA NEHISI COATES: No, I'm not. I'm not skeptical. I am not skeptical of the protests in the sense like that they should be doing something else. I'm probably skeptical of the narrative across history that protests or political activism alone on behalf of black people can move history.
One of the more depressing things for me, I mean this sort of -- I think there's like a fairy tale version of the Civil Rights Movement that people take away. They say well you see this shows that nonviolent revolution is possible. But in fact, I would argue that there is no moment of progress of African American history in this country that is not shadowed by violence in great catastrophe.
Certainly not the absolution of enslavement in this country. That certainly did not happen nonviolently.
Black people were very much actors in that history, and they were violent actors. I mean that's just true. I think by the time you get to Petersberg, you know, one in eight soldiers is an African American soldier. You know some number like that. You cannot envision the Union victory in the Civil War without violent black people. Its just not possible.
ROBIN KELLEY: And continue into reconstruction.
TA NEHISI COATES: Very much so. And the second part, you know, and this is not I want to distinguish this from any sort critique of the morality of nonviolence, which I actually think is quite powerful. It's quite a powerful argument. Certainly one cannot talk about the Civil War Rights Movement without seeing the long shadow of World War II; without seeing, you know, the Cold War as an embarrassment to the United States.
I say that like absent some cataclysmic force in American or absent some potentially cataclysmic force in American life, I wonder how much hope there is for actual like real thorough you know change.
That does not mean that protest is futile or that protest is irrelevant. Because you know when that door opens because of something exterior that happens, somebody got to be ready to rush through. If there's no protest, there's nothing that should be taking advantage you know.
I have this Steven Hans book, A Nation Under. He tells a beautiful story of a brother. I think he's the first one who initiates -- basically black folks initiate this contraband policy. Where black folks who escape to Union lines are deemed contraband by that point they are basically contraband.
Anyway one of the first brothers that gets there, he says to – oh, I cant remember – to General Butler. He says to General Butler, I want to serve in the army. And the white guy, he says this is a white man's war. And the enslaved brother says – well the free brother at that point, says to Butler, by the end it will be a black man's war. And he goes away. He actually leaves and becomes a sailor. Goes away for like three years and sails around the world. Comes back in 1864 and enlists in the 55th, the Masters 55th, and the prophecy is correct. He was right.
ROBIN KELLEY: That's DuBois that's Reconstruction.
TA NEHISI COATES: Oh, that's where he pulled that from. Really that's where Han pulled that from?
ROBIN KELLEY: Its all there. Its all there.
TA NEHISI COATES: Oh my god, you're shaming me here.
ROBIN KELLEY: 1935.
TA NEHISI COATES: You're shaming me here.
I give that example to say -- give that example to say, that cat had to be ready. You know something outside his control happened that enabled him. So I don't think the point is that these folks in Black Lives Matter is futile. I don't take that away at all. We are in a situation.
That is the broader country sees it's own interest here, sees the interest of its children, sees the interests of his grandchildren of his great great grandchildren. I'm worried. I'm worried.
And I guess what worries me more and, you know, Robin, I guess you can speak to this more. I don't know of countries or states or societies seeing their long term interests absent some great cataclysm like just out of benevolence or superior morality. I just I don't see that. I really, really don't see that. That's one of the reasons the book sort of ends on climate change as a thing that's outside our control.
ROBIN KELLEY: You see that's one of my favorite moments in the book. Because in some ways what better example of plunder as Baldwin talks about as a global process than climate change.
TA NEHISI COATES: Right.
ROBIN KELLEY: And in fact actually this brings me - actually no, I can't. I don't have time to talk about it. I was going to press you on some other things like democracy and legislation and the Prince Jones.
By the way before you read, this is a very sobering thought. But you know, as you know in 2006 the county, PT County, actually settled with Prince's daughter, the mother of his child, and then Prince Jones Senior, and of course Mabel Jones didn't settle. They got like $4.6 million.
There are some people who are in movements now who will say that's not justice, but its some acknowledgment. Clearly I think we can agree that's not justice. But what are your thoughts, if someone were to say to you, well you know there was no admission of wrongdoing but they got paid?
TA NEHISI COATES: No, that's totally not. No, not at all and here's why. There's a reason why it says the state versus. Obviously the killing of Prince Jones was a great offense to his family, but it was offense to the society. It was an offense to the society and it was not just that they did something. It had reverberations across the board. So it really is on behalf of the people that justice should have been done and that did not happen. That did not happen. So no it's not.
I mean this is the thing we're seeing this across the board with police brutality cases. I mean New York I think has paid off some record numbers. PT County at that time had paid out some ridiculous numbers of suit.
But that is not justice because you know, basically it's a deformed citizen. Where the citizenry can't get a handle on the police or the political class continues to pass policies that sends the police out into these situations. And effectively what we do is paying off these civil suits is a cost of doing business and it's just kind of factored in, but the policy never changes. That's not that don't do it at all.
ROBIN KELLEY: I completely agree. I just -- I just know how some people think. There are some people who are – who consider themselves activists around this question. Who are like well you know have been paid, but it's not about money.
TA NEHISI COATES: No, no, no. I don't even think it's about putting an officer in jail it's about changing policy. It has to go beyond.
ROBIN KELLEY: Okay. So I had one more question that I'm gonna save. I know you want to share some of the book about your moving to New York for the first time.
TA NEHISI COATES: This is just about after we came to New York and its me addressing my son.
We lived in a basement apartment in Brooklyn, which I doubt you remember, down the street from you Uncle Ben and his wife your Aunt Janette These were not great times. I remember borrowing $200 from Ben and it feeling like a million.
I remember your grandfather coming to go New York taking me out for Ethiopian. After which I walked him to the West Fourth subway station. We said our goodbyes and walked away. He called me back. He had forgotten something. He handed me a check for a $120.
I tell you this because you must understand no matter the point of our talk that I didn't always have things, but I always had people. I always had people. I had a mother and father who I would match against any other. I had a brother who looked out for me all through college. I had the Mecca that directed me. I had friends who would leap in front of a bus for me.
You need to know that I was loved. That whatever my lack of religious feeling, I have always loved my people. And that broad love is directly related to the specific love I feel for you.
I remember sitting out on Ben's stoop on Friday nights drinking Jack Daniels debating the Mayor's race or the rush to war. My weeks felt aimless. I pitched to various magazines with no success. Your aunt Shauna lent me another $200. I burned it all on an scam bar tending school. I deliver food for a small deli in Park Slope.
In New York everyone wanted to know your occupation. I told people I was trying to be a writer. Some days I would take the train in Manhattan. There was so much money everywhere. Money flowing out of bistros and cafes. Money pushing the people at incredible speeds up the wide avenues. Money drawing intergalactic traffic through Times Square. Money in the limestones and brownstones. Money out on West Broadway where white people spilled out of wine bars with sloshing glasses and without police.
I would see these people at the club drunken, laughing, challenging break dancers to battles. They would be destroyed and humiliated in these battles; but afterward they would give DAP, laugh, order more beers. They were utterly fearless.
I did not understand it until I looked out on the street. That was where I saw white parents pushing double wide strollers down gentrified Harlem Boulevards in T shirts and jogging shorts. Or I saw them lost in conversation with each other. Mother and father while their sons commanded entire sidewalks with their tricycles. The galaxy belonged to them.
And as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicating to theirs. And so when I remember pushing you in your stroller to other part of the city; the West Village, for instance, almost instinctively believing that you should see more, I remember feeling ill at ease. I had borrowed someone's heirloom like I was traveling under an assumed name.
All this time you were growing into words and feelings, my beautiful brown boy, who would soon come into knowledge who would soon comprehend the edicts of his galaxy and all the extinction level of events that regarded you with a singular and discriminating interest.
You would be a man one day. And I could not save you from the unbridgeable distance between you and your future peers and colleagues who might try to convince you that everything I know, all the things I'm sharing with you here, are an illusion or a fact of a distant past that need not be discussed. And I could not save you from the police, from their flashlights, their hands, their nightsticks, their guns.
Prince Jones murdered by the men who should have been his security guards is always with me. And I knew this soon he would be with you.
In those days I would come out of the house turn onto the Flatbush Avenue and my face would tighten like a Mexican wrestler's mask. My eyes would dart from corner to corner. My arms loose, limber, and ready. This need to be always on guard was an unmeasured expenditure of energy. The slow cyphening of the essence. It contributed the fast breakdown of our bodies. So I feared not just the violence of this world, but the rules designed to protect you from it. The rules that would have you contort your body to address the block. And to contort again to be taken seriously by colleagues and contort again so as not to give police a reason.
All my life I heard people tell their black boys and black girls to be twice as good, which is to say accept half as much. These words would be spoken with veneer of religious nobility. As though they evidenced some unspoken quality, some undetected courage when in fact all they ever evidence was the gun to our head and the hand in our pocket. This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile. No one told those little white children with their tricycles to be twice as good. I imagine their parents telling them to take twice as much.
It seemed to me that our own rules re doubled the plunder. It struck me that perhaps the defining feature of being drafted into the black race was the inescapable robbery of time. Because the moments we spent readying the mask or readying yourself except half could not be recovered.
The robbery of time is not measured in life spans, but in moments. It is the last bottle of wine that you have just uncorked but do not have time to drink. It is the kiss you do not have time to share before she walks out of your life. It is the wrath of second chances for them and 23 hour days for us.
(Applause)
ROBIN KELLEY: Okay. So we're about to take questions, but we got – give me one minute two questions.
TA NEHISI COATES: Sure.
ROBIN KELLEY: One question is when you say struggle that all you have really to give really the struggle is all I have for you to Simori, what do you mean by struggle?
Then the second question is top five?
TA NEHISI COATES: I'm going to defer on the last question. I just I can't. It's so hard. And the older I get, I mean, you know, because things change for you. It's very, very hard for me to do that.
I love black thought. I can't rank these guys, but it's just who I love right now. I love black thought. I love Rock M. I love Chuck D. I love Kendrick La Mar. And you know -- I don't know, Did I name Ray Corn? I love Ray Corn. Okay, but that should not be regarded as exclusive to anyone else. You ask me something tomorrow and I may tell you something else.
You know on a personal level, it's a constant effort to you know it's amazing how American this is. You can't get away from your country. The constant effort to improve yourself, you know, which I think is a very, very real thing despite whatever going on around you.
And then on a broader level, being involved in this beautiful epic that stretches back to the moment we arrived on these shores, to improve our communities, to improve our country, and to ultimately improve the human race itself, to advance democracy. That is the beauty of black folks struggle, you know, in this country.
It is not you know people used to ask, you know, you don't want to get boxed off. You don't want to get pigeonholed for writing about race. I said you are completely wrong. You're completely wrong. It is an honor to write about this. It's an absolute honor.
Because If you wanted to understand what the promise was and what the pitfalls were of this will whole idea of enlightenment, of this whole idea of democracy I mean the crucial questions of humanity today, you could pick no better angle than to study black people in America. It's the best. It is not a pigeonhole. It is the essence of everything. It's a great place to be. (Applause)
ROBIN KELLEY: The argument that it's a pigeonhole is exactly the enlightenment philosophy. That's exactly how it plays it.
Okay so now we'll take some questions. And by the way, we're taking questions. One question. Not three questions. No statements. No resumes. No promises of jobs. And I will cut you off. I will come down there and cut you off.
MODERATOR: I've got the first question right over here.
ROBIN KELLEY: Okay one question.
FEMALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thanks so much for coming. Now that you're living in France, do you still feel racism is less pervasive there?
TA NEHISI COATES: No, I never felt racism was less pervasive in France. I felt that I as an African American had a different interaction with French society than I as an African American had with American society. But that says nothing about the people of color, the black folks, the [foreign word] who live in France and their interaction with society; which is completely, completely different.
I think that like when I'm there the first thing people notice about me is that I'm American. It's a completely different experience for me. It's one I can't have in my country. So that is interesting and in particular, but that is by no means exonerating.
ROBIN KELLEY: Right.
TA NEHISI COATES: You know at all, at all. And I think both things can be true at the same time. And you'll hear like black folks although I think its to a different degree you'll hear black folks from the continent or the Caribbean and their interaction in America is very, very different than mine is. That's a real thing. You know, but that is not exonerating of America either. You know, so I do not hold those two ideas in conflict.
ROBIN KELLEY: Right, and you address that in the book. It's a great quote where Baldwin and (Indiscernible name) says that the Tunisians in 1956 were correct when they asked the French are you ready for self government.
TA NEHISI COATES: Right,Right. Exactly.
ROBIN KELLEY: Think about that. All right next question.
FEMALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm really excited for you to take on the Black Panther. And I'm wondering what are you going to bring to the world of comic books and the possibility of comic books through the Black Panther?
TA NEHISI COATES: I don't know. You know what honestly that will be for you to tell when you read the book. It really will. I mean I'm trying really hard not to suck and that's like my basic standard.
(Laughter) (Applause)
You know. And you know to be honest that was I mean I mean truly this is not false modestly. That was the standard for Between the World and Me. You have to understand that whenever you embark on something as a writer, you might fail. Like that's what you're thinking about. You're thinking this might not work.
So the immediate thing is not I'm going to write this book that is gonna change how people see race and racism in America. No, no. I'm trying to write a book. If I can just make it a book. (Laughter) Like you have to actually grapple with the form before you even you know and its kind of the same.
I've never written a comic book in my life. I'm just trying to be successful in writing a comic book. And then we can have all sorts of discussions or you guys can have all sorts of discussions (Laughter) about what impact it has. But do not underestimate the difficulty of just writing a story. You know that in and of itself is hard.
RICK KELLEY: Who's next?
FEMALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: Greetings. Nice to meet you both. My question is prefaced with a comment.
ROBIN KELLEY: You can skip that.
FEMALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: I grew up at 221 North Fremont Avenue in Baltimore, Maryland. Where'd you grow up?
TA NEHISI COATES: I grew up in Tioga Park right across from (indiscernible) Mall.
FEMALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, thanks. Nice to meet you.
TA NEHISI COATES: Nice to meet you too.
FEMALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: That was my question.
ROBIN KELLEY: That was it.
MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: So what can white people do?
TA NEHISI COATES: (Laughter) Right. Well see that's the whole purpose of the book. That's so not for me to say. That's the exact point. And In fact, the argument of the book is that those are the kinds of questions that should not be asked.
I mean this as no offense to you and I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but you are putting your burden onto me. Like I have to now purpose to you what you should do. I mean it is I think you know. (Laughter) And I think if you thought about it, like it would not be that hard to get too. You know what I mean?
I believe that [applause] black people have enough trouble trying to figure out how to get through their lives on a daily basis without having to figure out what white people should do.
And I'm not trying to embarrass you. I'm not trying to humiliate you. I'm not you know what I mean. But that really is the impetus of the book is to get away from the notion that the job; frankly, of black thinkers, of – and I hate this – word black public intellectuals, black writers is to make white people not be racist. Like that's not actually our job.
Like that is against what I think actually what needs to happen, which is to recognize your own interests. And when you recognize anti racism, you know, anti white supremacy as an interest. When you recognize the need to give up your name as an interest. You know you just start walking down the road. You know what I mean, and things begin to reveal themselves.
White people, as I say in the book, the people who believe themselves to be white. You know, as Baldwin says, people who think they are white have to carry that themselves. They have to carry that burden and their own ignorance just like we have to carry our burden.
I mean that is what it means to get down in the muck with us. That is what it means to come down here into this world of not knowing. You know and I hope that's tangible for you. You know I mean that is like I think that's the real step to not ask to ask those questions of yourself.
MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you both for coming tonight. I've been a teacher in Los Angeles for 15 years and my question is -- you mentioned in the book that for you school was not a place about curiosity but a place for compliance. And so I wonder if there's a place for schools in this movement and in particular for teachers of black students?
TA NEHISI COATES: I don't know. I don't know. School was not. School specifically the classroom was not how I acquired knowledge. It was just too abstract for me.
One of the cool things about writing and going into journalism was you acquired the knowledge and you went and wrote something. You did it. It was a practical thing.
I don't know, I guess if I could have identified the pursuit of knowledge with what was happening in the classroom like maybe like I would've felt better. But it was so clear like that. And you see this, you know, in schools today. And particularly in schools where, you know, poor and African Americans populations are, they really are teaching compliance.
I mean don't talk unless your called on. I mean walk on this side of the room in single file. Da, da, da. I mean that whole routine. Which if you go to, you know, private schools or go to public schools in very wealthy areas, it's amazing how unimportant that same compliance is. It's fascinating.
You know I walk my son, you know, for middle school you know. He was in private school. Even in the public school he was in, which was very tailored in a certain way, I would go into the classroom and it looked like disorder to me because of how I had been raised. But in fact it was not, you know, disorder.
You know what it was? Was an absence of fear. I mean that's really what it was. It was not under the same sort of pressures and stressors. So I don't know. I mean obviously there is a place, but its not the place I came from.
ROBIN KELLEY: But you answered the question by basically saying that schools are an urgent space. That's what I mean taking from what your saying. An urgent space to struggle over. Where in fact you don't want to create compliance. You don't want to schools have become miniature versions of prisons.
Right and so they are preparing the way. And we know from research, that from fourth grade is when you are determined whether or not you are going to prison or to college.
So we have to struggle and I mean this is exactly the point that I think Ta Nehisi is making that schools are important of sites of consternation and we've basically got to destroy them to rebuild them.
You know, if you ever want to read someone Gracely Boggs, who just passed away, wrote beautiful essays. She wrote a book called The Next American Revolution where she talks about remaking our schools not to teach people how to become workers, but to teach people how to become a larger community and that's where we're going.
And again you read The Beautiful Struggle, you get to see both the problems and the prospects. I've got to just throw this out there, and I know I'm taking up your time. But speaking for you
TA NEHISI COATES: It's not my time I'm good.
ROBIN KELLEY: But in The Beautiful Struggle, Ta Nehisi had this great education through Nation House. An education that brought him to the drum, that brought him to certain cultural practices, that brought him to different communities, and I think was very much a part of your education in an enriching way, in a way schools could never provide. Anyway.
FEMALE AUDIENCE SPEAKER: So I love your book it's amazing and it's so poetic. But my question to you is do you ever feel when you're writing this book as you're displaying the humanity of African American people, does it ever just piss you off that you have to have that conversation this is a book that is necessary to write?
TA NEHISI COATES: Not while I'm writing it. I think writers are supposed to write about humanity. That would be the job no matter what. I get a little I've been a little rankled and I probably should not be rankled.
But the work of writing the book was fine; but after the book came out, the weight put upon it was not so fine. Was not so fine. Again I think If you're looking at it from the outside, what you see is a person sitting down and saying I'm going to write the best book on race this year and it's going to do this and it's going to do that and everyone will read it and its going to be. And they don't see you just sitting down and looking at the blank page and just being so afraid.
Like the creative process is so obscured that people feel like it's a handbook or that it's an advice book or its even that it's a policy book. And if it's not any of those things, that it's useless. I just that that is disturbing. You know it's like beautiful writing in the service of something else. But I have to be honest with you, I mean, my goal and how I saw it is beautiful writing in the service of beautiful writing. I was trying to make a piece of art. And so some of the stuff put upon it, if I could just live in that world of humanity I'd be just fine.
MALE AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Thank you for your art. I've heard a lot of the two words, black and white. But as a Dominican man currently living in Hollywood born in New York. Lived in Queens. Hung out in the Bronks. Did it all. I often struggling with my own cultural identity because I can play both sides per se. And In Hollywood people like to say, oh you're ethnically ambiguous you're so lucky. And that's something that makes me want to throw up in my mouth sometime because that's why I'm lucky.
I want to know in this conversation where does the middle fall? Where do those other cultures fall?
TA NEHISI COATES: Well I think when you're talking black and white so I'm going to say something very, very not politic. One of the problems in this country is – and Between the World and Me argues against – is that the notion of race is a real thing.
Let me just take a second, I have to take a moment to break this down a little bit. But I think it's really, really important.
The idea that black people is this pure race of people that come from Africa. And white people is this pure race of people that come from Europe. Native Americans is this a pure race of people living here. Asian Americans is this a pure race of people who come from Asia. And increasingly Hispanics and Latinos is this race that you know is here now.
We have this span, right, we have this group. These races these people of color and then white people sort of over here; and, if we can get the races to get along, everything would be okay.
And that's actually in our vocabulary. For instance, the phrase race relations. The race is a real thing and we need to improve the relations between a group of people. But my argument is that race is a product of racism period. There is no race without there is no definition of race in America without somebody trying to do something to somebody else.
And when you talk about race as a power thing in America, black people are the great insoluble. The black race is the black race as defined is the great insoluble. The chasm that exists between, what we refer to as white America and what refer to as black America, is a particular thing. It is not something that can be sort of just mixed in, you know, with people with some group of people that just don't happen to be straight, white, rich males. This is a particular fault line.
And the problem is not you know, is not looking white. Do you understand? The problem is not being a part of a group of people that can't necessarily trace their ancestry back to Europe. Because the fact of the matter there is quite a few of us that cant trace our ancestry back to Europe if you want to be honest.
The problem is power. And black racial identity as a specific thing like where that plays in politics. So like I don't know like I said Latino identity, Hispanic identity, Dominican identity, however, you want I wouldn't define it as a middle. Because I don't think it is. I just don't see it that way.
I think that's like an ethnic cultural identity. Much like black people have ethnic cultural identity. I think race is put on that, you know, through racism by the way. I don't think it has any meaning without racism. But I would resist a terminology of a kind of middle.
I think its very, very important. Like, for instance, if I were analyzing from that perspective, I would be much more interested in like the history of Latinos, Hispanics, Dominicans as however you want to define it and their relation to the larger group of people not as a middle group on a range. I don't think that quite gets it.
ROBIN KELLEY: We're going to take one more question but I got to respond to this. I want to say one thing. What is racism Ta Nehisi is saying It's a production of difference. It's a production of difference.
So being Dominican right now is interesting in relationship to deportation of Haitians. Right where the production of difference. You're talking about people that occupy the same island but one is considered an inferior race. That's produced in power. That's not about some like distinct you know, historical culture. But specifically the production of power and difference.
And so here's the perfect the Dominican Republic is the perfect example of what Ta-Nehisi is talking about. That is in relationship to notions of white supremacy, you got the production of those who are considered of a lower inferior race who are then being pushed out through administrative form in ways that are very dangerous.
And as you know, Juno Dias just had his medal sort of taken away by the Dominican Republic. That is travesty. We should all be up in arms about that. But That's an example of race. We confuse culture and race you know.
TA NEHISI COATES: Can I - I just want to push this further. Robin, I hope you don't take this the wrong way. But why isn't Robin the middle? I mean think about this. Why isn't Robin the middle? And I'm not saying he should be, but he isn't. He isn't the middle, right.
Because we made a decision about power in this country. And we decided to draw the line, you know, somewhere so that as many people as possible can be plundered. That's why he's not the middle. It's because we made a conscious decision. It's not a kind of, you know, biological or scientific anything you know.
I mean there are black people that look just like you. You know what I mean? Who are very much African American. That was a decision that was made. And so the places where you say the middle, they can't be divided from the issue of power and politics.
ROBIN KELLEY: One last question. Who is going to be? Okay.
MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, I'm feeling a lot of pressure being the last question.
TA NEHISI COATES: Make it good.
MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: You know, I have about 200 questions Id like to as you about.
TA NEHISI COATES: All right pick the best.
MALE AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I was very interested when you were speaking about whether or not there's any responsibility to have hope as a writer in your writing. And another thing you were talking about was Malcolm X. And when I was growing up, Malcolm X was demonized. Demonized I think by the usual suspects, you know, either whites or Elijah Muhammad or whatever.
ROBIN KELLEY: All right cut straight to the question because we got the context.
MALE AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Well there's context.
ROBIN KELLEY: We don't need context.
MALE AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Okay. Now what seems to have happened is that there is -- the Malcolm X there is hope that has been basically written into the Malcolm X story in terms of you know going to Mecca and
ROBIN KELLEY: Okay, we all know that so what's the question exactly?
MALE AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Okay. You know what my question is whether or not you can add some context to how it is, who it is that was basically changing the tenor of the history of Malcolm X?
ROBIN KELLEY: Okay, I got it.
TA NEHISI COATES: Well I think that happens to everybody. You know, it happened to Martin Luther King too by the way. You know, I think when people are dead, you know, and they aren't you know saying certain things and they aren't making certain speeches and they achieve a level of respect in society, there's always an urge to co opt them and take from them what you can. And I think Malcolm is no different than that.
Yeah. I think you know the same thing happened with Martin Luther King. I mean everybody wants to talk about the I have a Dream Speech. Very few people want to talk about the Vietnam speech. You know, so
AUDIENCE MEMBER: [Inaudible]
TA NEHISI COATES: No. No, I think people in general do that. I mean I don't think you know, the challenge is – no, no. I think it is a natural process that people are softening their edges, you know, scraped off. I don't find that to be particular for Malcolm X.
ROBIN KELLEY: Right. Well I tell you, you can learn a lot from reading this book and reading all of Ta Nehisi's work. So I want to thank you all for coming. Thank you Ta Nehisi for doing this.
TA NEHISI COATES: Thank you.
[MUSIC]
ANNOUNCER: ALOUD is made possible through support provided by the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Arent Fox. Additional support provided by the Los Angeles Public Library, The Stay Home and Read a Book Ball, and individual Library Foundation members.
Media support is provided by LA Weekly, KCRW 89.9 FM and KUSC 91.5 FM.