5th Hour: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘Visceral’ Take on Being Black in America by Jennifer Schuessler Lyrics
BALTIMORE — “Between the World and Me,” Ta-Nehisi Coates’s meditation on being a black man in America, has had an almost frictionless glide straight to the heart of the national conversation. A blurb from Toni Morrison declared the book, whose publication was moved up from September after the shootings of nine black churchgoers last month in Charleston, S.C., “essential reading,” and its author the heir to James Baldwin. Mostly glowing reviews followed, and this week Mr. Coates clocked appearances on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” PBS’s “Charlie Rose” and the cover of New York Magazine, not to mention the No. 3 spot on Amazon’s best-seller list, right behind Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Go Set a Watchman.”
Mr. Coates has lived in New York City for the past 14 years with his wife and teenage son, but he was born here. At the book’s official release event on Wednesday, which drew several hundred people to the historic Union Baptist Church in the Upton neighborhood, the atmosphere combined the joy of a homecoming party with a serious statement of purpose. “It was very, very important, as far as I was concerned, that the book be launched in an African-American space,” Mr. Coates, 39, said in an interview the morning after the event. “I wanted to be very clear about who the book was written for, how it was written, what it came out of.”
The audience on Wednesday — which included the former Baltimore mayor Sheila Dixon — greeted Mr. Coates’s words as all-too-familiar home truths. A murmur of recognition passed through the crowd when Mr. Coates read a passage from the book about Prince Jones, a friend from his days at Howard University, who was shot to death by an undercover police officer in Virginia in 2000, a killing he linked to the more recent deaths of Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and other unarmed black men during encounters with the police. Only the cameras, he said, were new.
And there was a thunderous ovation when he spoke of the bodily fear that lies at the heart of the daily lived experience of racism, and “the mind-trick” people play by saying that the racism isn’t real. “He’s a truth teller,” said Karen Pearson, a middle-aged African-American woman waiting in a long line to have Mr. Coates sign her book, not far behind Ms. Dixon.
“I hope it provokes a really honest conversation,” she said, noting the sizable number of white people in the crowd. “I think people might finally be ready for it.” The runaway success of the book has propelled Mr. Coates, a national correspondent at The Atlantic, to a new level of prominence. But he expressed reluctance to be drafted as white America’s designated racial explainer or the activist whom some at the church on Wednesday seemed to want. “I’m a writer, and for me, writing is a very internal process that’s all about trying to learn something and then show it to people,” he said in the interview.
In a brief talk to a group of students from a local school before the reading, he had put it more bluntly. Understanding how an unjust situation came about “is deeply therapeutic,” he told them. “It will keep you from going crazy,” he continued. Mr. Coates’s own trajectory, as he tells it in his 2008 memoir, “The Beautiful Struggle,” is one of relentless self-education. Growing up in Northwest Baltimore in a sprawling family of seven siblings, the son of a schoolteacher mother and a librarian father, he was a voracious reader but indifferent student.
“He was a disgrace to the entire family,” his father, Paul Coates, a onetime Black Panther who now runs an independent publishing company dedicated to out-of-print African-American books, recalled on Wednesday with a laugh. He studied history at Howard but dropped out to pursue journalism, taking a job at Washington City Paper. He moved to New York in 2001, eking out a living as a freelancer between jobs at publications including The Village Voice and Time. He started writing for The Atlantic in 2008 and soon after became one of the magazine’s bloggers, attracting a notably argumentative community of commenters he affectionately calls “the horde.”
He won a National Magazine Award for his 2012 article “Fear of a Black President.” But “The Case for Reparations,” a 15,000-word opus that became one of the most widely viewed articles in the magazine’s history, really put him on the map. His argument was rooted not just in slavery and in Jim Crow, but also in more recent housing discrimination, including the federal government’s redlining of black neighborhoods in the New Deal — a fact, he said, that had been lost to “historical amnesia.” “I got a lot of critiques for that article,” he said. “But what I did not get was, ‘This history is erroneous.’ ”
“Between the World and Me,” written as an open letter to his son, Samori, grew partly out of the feeling that the reparations article, for all its length and detail, “had left something unsaid.” “It was very empirical rather than emotional,” he said. “It was almost like a math problem. But I thought there was also a work of literature in it.” While working on a draft, he picked up Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,” which he hadn’t read since he was a teenager. He called his editor, Chris Jackson at Spiegel & Grau, and asked why no one wrote that way anymore. Many had tried and failed, Mr. Jackson told him. But maybe he could do it? That conversation, Mr. Coates noted, came not long after he attended an off-the-record meeting between President Obama and liberal opinion journalists.
“Probably being in the White House helped improve my sense that maybe I could do it,” he said, and paused. “God, I hate saying that, but you have to be honest.” In the book, Mr. Coates describes racism in terms of assaults on the free movement of the black body, whether by the officers who shoot unarmed men or in more everyday incidents, like the casual shoving of Samori when he was 4 by a white woman on an Upper West Side escalator. “I wanted to make racism tactile, visceral,” he said. “Because it is.” Against that daily lived reality, he sketches the illusions of “those Americans who believe that they are white” and “the Dreamers,” metaphorical shorthand for people who remain ignorant of the historical realities behind their privilege.
He summed up their outlook: “It is the right for me to walk through my life as though everything I have was justly garnered, to think that I am the descendant of noble ancestries, that I am always a force for good in the world, and that even at the times when I was a force for bad, I was really trying to do the right thing.” “Between the World and Me” gives no quarter to those who seek uplift, or who hold an interpretation of American history that doesn’t take domination of black bodies as a central truth. But the book, Mr. Coates said, is “an act of anti-sentimentalism,” not cynicism. “I don’t write from a default negative position,” he said. “You just have to call things as you see them.”
Next month Mr. Coates is moving to Paris with his family for a year to report for The Atlantic. He’s also working with David Simon, Taylor Branch and James McBride on an HBO series based on Mr. Branch’s civil rights trilogy, “America in the King Years.” Mr. Coates said his own ideal of integration was close to that of Baldwin, who wrote that if the word meant anything, it was “that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are,” outside any sheltering fantasy of whiteness. “It’s not, as King said, little black girls beside little white girls,” Mr. Coates said. “It’s looking at little black girls and little white girls and not seeing any difference.
Mr. Coates has lived in New York City for the past 14 years with his wife and teenage son, but he was born here. At the book’s official release event on Wednesday, which drew several hundred people to the historic Union Baptist Church in the Upton neighborhood, the atmosphere combined the joy of a homecoming party with a serious statement of purpose. “It was very, very important, as far as I was concerned, that the book be launched in an African-American space,” Mr. Coates, 39, said in an interview the morning after the event. “I wanted to be very clear about who the book was written for, how it was written, what it came out of.”
The audience on Wednesday — which included the former Baltimore mayor Sheila Dixon — greeted Mr. Coates’s words as all-too-familiar home truths. A murmur of recognition passed through the crowd when Mr. Coates read a passage from the book about Prince Jones, a friend from his days at Howard University, who was shot to death by an undercover police officer in Virginia in 2000, a killing he linked to the more recent deaths of Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and other unarmed black men during encounters with the police. Only the cameras, he said, were new.
And there was a thunderous ovation when he spoke of the bodily fear that lies at the heart of the daily lived experience of racism, and “the mind-trick” people play by saying that the racism isn’t real. “He’s a truth teller,” said Karen Pearson, a middle-aged African-American woman waiting in a long line to have Mr. Coates sign her book, not far behind Ms. Dixon.
“I hope it provokes a really honest conversation,” she said, noting the sizable number of white people in the crowd. “I think people might finally be ready for it.” The runaway success of the book has propelled Mr. Coates, a national correspondent at The Atlantic, to a new level of prominence. But he expressed reluctance to be drafted as white America’s designated racial explainer or the activist whom some at the church on Wednesday seemed to want. “I’m a writer, and for me, writing is a very internal process that’s all about trying to learn something and then show it to people,” he said in the interview.
In a brief talk to a group of students from a local school before the reading, he had put it more bluntly. Understanding how an unjust situation came about “is deeply therapeutic,” he told them. “It will keep you from going crazy,” he continued. Mr. Coates’s own trajectory, as he tells it in his 2008 memoir, “The Beautiful Struggle,” is one of relentless self-education. Growing up in Northwest Baltimore in a sprawling family of seven siblings, the son of a schoolteacher mother and a librarian father, he was a voracious reader but indifferent student.
“He was a disgrace to the entire family,” his father, Paul Coates, a onetime Black Panther who now runs an independent publishing company dedicated to out-of-print African-American books, recalled on Wednesday with a laugh. He studied history at Howard but dropped out to pursue journalism, taking a job at Washington City Paper. He moved to New York in 2001, eking out a living as a freelancer between jobs at publications including The Village Voice and Time. He started writing for The Atlantic in 2008 and soon after became one of the magazine’s bloggers, attracting a notably argumentative community of commenters he affectionately calls “the horde.”
He won a National Magazine Award for his 2012 article “Fear of a Black President.” But “The Case for Reparations,” a 15,000-word opus that became one of the most widely viewed articles in the magazine’s history, really put him on the map. His argument was rooted not just in slavery and in Jim Crow, but also in more recent housing discrimination, including the federal government’s redlining of black neighborhoods in the New Deal — a fact, he said, that had been lost to “historical amnesia.” “I got a lot of critiques for that article,” he said. “But what I did not get was, ‘This history is erroneous.’ ”
“Between the World and Me,” written as an open letter to his son, Samori, grew partly out of the feeling that the reparations article, for all its length and detail, “had left something unsaid.” “It was very empirical rather than emotional,” he said. “It was almost like a math problem. But I thought there was also a work of literature in it.” While working on a draft, he picked up Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,” which he hadn’t read since he was a teenager. He called his editor, Chris Jackson at Spiegel & Grau, and asked why no one wrote that way anymore. Many had tried and failed, Mr. Jackson told him. But maybe he could do it? That conversation, Mr. Coates noted, came not long after he attended an off-the-record meeting between President Obama and liberal opinion journalists.
“Probably being in the White House helped improve my sense that maybe I could do it,” he said, and paused. “God, I hate saying that, but you have to be honest.” In the book, Mr. Coates describes racism in terms of assaults on the free movement of the black body, whether by the officers who shoot unarmed men or in more everyday incidents, like the casual shoving of Samori when he was 4 by a white woman on an Upper West Side escalator. “I wanted to make racism tactile, visceral,” he said. “Because it is.” Against that daily lived reality, he sketches the illusions of “those Americans who believe that they are white” and “the Dreamers,” metaphorical shorthand for people who remain ignorant of the historical realities behind their privilege.
He summed up their outlook: “It is the right for me to walk through my life as though everything I have was justly garnered, to think that I am the descendant of noble ancestries, that I am always a force for good in the world, and that even at the times when I was a force for bad, I was really trying to do the right thing.” “Between the World and Me” gives no quarter to those who seek uplift, or who hold an interpretation of American history that doesn’t take domination of black bodies as a central truth. But the book, Mr. Coates said, is “an act of anti-sentimentalism,” not cynicism. “I don’t write from a default negative position,” he said. “You just have to call things as you see them.”
Next month Mr. Coates is moving to Paris with his family for a year to report for The Atlantic. He’s also working with David Simon, Taylor Branch and James McBride on an HBO series based on Mr. Branch’s civil rights trilogy, “America in the King Years.” Mr. Coates said his own ideal of integration was close to that of Baldwin, who wrote that if the word meant anything, it was “that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are,” outside any sheltering fantasy of whiteness. “It’s not, as King said, little black girls beside little white girls,” Mr. Coates said. “It’s looking at little black girls and little white girls and not seeing any difference.