The Hard Truths of Ta-Nehisi Coates
Late this spring, the publisher Spiegel & Grau sent out advance copies of a new book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a slim volume of 176 pages called Between the World and Me. “Here is what I would like for you to know,” Coates writes in the book, addressed to his 14-year-old son. “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.”
The only endorsement he had wanted was the novelist Toni Morrison’s. Neither he nor his editor, Christopher Jackson, knew Morrison, but they managed to get the galleys into her hands. Weeks later, Morrison’s assistant sent Jackson an email with her reaction: “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died,” Morrison had written. “Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.” Baldwin died 28 years ago. Jackson forwarded the note to Coates, who sent back a one-word email: “Man.”
Morrison’s words were an anointing. They were also a weight. On the subject of black America, Baldwin had once been a compass — “Jimmy’s spirit,” the poet Amiri Baraka had said, eulogizing him, “is the only truth which keeps us sane.” On the last Friday in June, the day after Morrison’s endorsement was made public and then washed over Twitter, Coates sat down with me at a Morningside Heights bar and after some consideration ordered an IPA. At six-foot-four, he towers over nearly everyone he meets, and to close the physical distance he tends to turtle his neck down, making himself smaller: “A public persona but not a public person,” explained his father, Paul Coates. Ta-Nehisi said he thought Morrison’s praise was essentially literary, about the echo of Baldwin’s direct and exhortative prose in his own. The week before, The New Yorker’s David Remnick had called the forthcoming book “extraordinary,” and A. O. Scott of the New York Times would soon go further, calling it “essential, like water or air.” The figure of the lonely radical writer is a common one. A writer who radicalizes the Establishment is more rare. “When people who are not black are interested in what I do, frankly, I’m always surprised,” Coates said. “I don’t know if it’s my low expectations for white people or what.”
It had been nine days since the young white supremacist Dylann Roof had massacred nine black churchgoers in Charleston, and Coates, whose great theme is the intractability of racial history, had helped to orient the debate, to concentrate attention on the campaign against the Confederate flag: Even casual tweets he sent out were retweeted hundreds of times. The television behind the bar was tuned to President Obama’s eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, which was just about to start. The broadcast was muted, but Coates noticed the tableau: “There’s a sister over here to the left, she’s natural, no perm, and a very black dude, and then an African-American president.” Coates imagined how this would appear to a 4-year-old white boy: “That’s the world as he knows it,” Coates said. “So all these people saying that symbols don’t mean anything — that’s bullshit. They mean a lot.” Coates has often been a critic of the president from the left — of his instinct to submerge race in talk of class, of his moralizing to black audiences. “I’m going to make a prediction,” he said. “He’s going to say something incredible.”
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/07/ta-nehisi-coates-between-the-world-and-me.html
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