A Conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Key: Let’s start with your latest book, The Message. You knew when you were researching it that you were getting into something big. This is a book about how writing and stories relate to the world and help create it—in ways that are both politically and ethically productive or destructive. What was the most surprising thing about the reception?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Probably the most surprising thing was how significant the private meetings turned out to be. Those were really important—and PalFest [the Palestine Festival of Literature] made those possible, so I want to thank you for that.

I didn’t want this book to come out and then not talk to the people whose stories are responsible for at least half of the book and really inform the other half. I’ve struggled with that, actually, in my earlier books in terms of my own community. Because you write this book that’s rooted in the Black community, and then tickets go up for sale to see you, and you look out in the audience, and that’s not what the audience is.

And so, fortunately, One World, my publisher, tried something different for The Water Dancer. We did small private meetings for local Black book clubs wherever we went. And with your guys’ help, we were able to replicate some of that, and those turned out to be complicated and extremely emotional in certain cases. I think about being in Chicago, at the meeting which Eve Ewing—who was there [in Palestine on] my year with PalFest—hosted. And it was emotional because Chicago is where I started “The Case for Reparations.”

That’s where it was rooted. So to finish The Message and then come back for the event and be there with two of the women and one of the daughters of the women who were at the end of that chapter, was so important. It was incredible.

This is October 2024, so we are a year out from the genocide commencing and there’s a woman, actually the woman who talked the longest, Deanna Othman. She talked quite a while just about her family and everything that was happening in Gaza. And we we were all transfixed. Then the next day, Eve’s husband said to her, “I see why they don’t let them talk.” 

And what he meant was if Palestinians ever got any sort of equal time in this conversation, then it would be a huge problem. Because the thing is, the Palestinian case is pretty straightforward. It’s not complicated. I’ve always said that. On one level, when the media tour for The Message was being put together I was like, oh my god I’m gonna have to fight a lotta people. But on another level it was like, I have the advantage because I just have to say, I went here, this is what I saw, please tell me why this is OK. 

The truth of it is: Almost no human being who does not have some sort of stake in the state project, would think this was OK. It’s not OK. It just offends every level of everything.

It is just so obvious, and it so obviously violates the standards of, just, basic humanism. There's no need for a Palestinian exception here, you know. You just have to be a humanist.

The Key: The tour took you to all of these places where you saw the divide between Black and Palestinian communities in the US up close in the run-up to and after the [2024] election. Can you talk about some of the other conversations you were part of regarding that?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Wow. How long do you have? It's not as bad as I think people think it is.

I think those of us who care about the future of the human race—and want equality of human life and want people to be able to live in a just manner and take care of their families—we want it for all people. I think any movement that takes that as a goal cannot organize itself through social media.

I don’t think this would have been as divisive or as nasty as it became if a lot of us weren’t trying to talk on the cheap. What I mean by “talk on the cheap” is when I pull out my phone and say a few things to the world. It’s easy, it’s cheap, right?

But the cheapness of the communication should tell you something. It's significantly more expensive—mostly in time—to cook dinner for somebody, to travel to a city to see somebody, to organize a group of people to see each other—that’s really hard, but you get what you pay for. Not to be too capitalist about it, but you get what you pay for.

I saw this immediately because I went out to the DNC for Vanity Fair. I had a close friend who was really worried—a close Palestinian friend. She said, “Listen, man, some of the stuff I’m hearing about Black folks out there and their resentment of Palestinians and Palestinian activists who are not happy, obviously, about this genocide—some of this stuff is getting really ugly.” And she wasn’t lying. It’s not like she was making that up.

So I went out there, girded for the worst. But the first night I was out there, I managed to be invited to a meeting of some very mainline Black activists. I’m talking about really traditional civil rights folks and some Palestinian activists. My good friend Rami Nashashibi was in the room. He's one of the people who organized it. It was a lot of Uncommitted folks [the movement to protest Joe Biden’s position on Gaza from within the membership of the Democratic Party] who were there, who helped organize it, and people did not agree. To be clear: It wasn’t like “Kumbaya.” It wasn’t like everybody came together and said, Now this is solved, but there was a basic understanding. Look, you’re not my enemy; we might be at an impasse here, we might have to part ways here, but I understand that for me to come to you and say you have to support the administration that is murdering your family right now—that might be a bridge too far. I get that.

And by the same token, to come to you and say, Given what race is in this country, given what it has been for 250 years, given the peculiar status of Black women in this country, to ask you not to oppose this black woman, that might be too far. These are just two irreconcilable things. That happens in movements. You can debate each position. We have to acknowledge that we’re going to part ways sometimes. I’m speaking about the most constructive aspects of both of those camps. I think the most responsible, wisest, and most forward-thinking portions of that camp in the long term want the same thing. It was kind of sad that volume—who could be the loudest, who could be the angriest, who could get the most attention—prevailed in that conversation. I don’t know that we’ve truly healed from it.

I think Trump has reminded folks of certain things, but I don’t know that we’ve truly healed from it.