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.

The Key: I’ve been thinking a lot about that time period in light of this rise of Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene as right-wing figures who are being very vocal about Palestine—

Ta-Nehisi Coates: They’re talking about Israel. That’s a very important correction.

The Key: Yeah.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I’m sorry, I don’t want to be too—

The Key: No, it’s fair. I’m just curious how you’re thinking about this in the present tense. What’s the through line between what happened then and what’s happening now?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: First of all, it’s really bad. I emphasize the Israel part because my support for Palestine, my support for Palestinian life, it’s not about support for Palestine and Palestinian life per se. Just like—and it took me a while to get to this—my support for Black life and for Black people is not for Black people or Black life per se. I just believe human beings are entitled to certain dignities and certain things in their lives. It’s a pretty baseline thing for me.

Unfortunately, some of the people with the loudest, most cutting critiques of Zionism and of Israel right now don’t share that baseline belief. I think it’s really important to say this. These people will turn on you in a second.

But to answer your question, there’s an obvious moral problem here. Again, I saw it at the DNC. You watch these people get up 60 years after Fannie Lou Hamer’s delegation was not allowed to be seated—and they won’t let Palestinians talk. They think they can kill this critique, but the critique is true. The only control you have is whether the critique comes out of a place of humanism—of shared values and the significance and importance of human life—or whether it’s allied with one of the oldest evils in the history of the West. You’re not going to suppress this stuff. The days of doing that are over.

There are people in the Democratic Party—which I think is a separate thing from the movement, and certainly from my own politics—who, to this day, and it sounds insane, think they can get away with telling you that the Earth is flat and supporting a system that is designed around that logic.

It's not going to work. People aren't dumb.

The Key: The Democrats seem to think that the genocide is what lost them 2024, yet Gavin Newsom says, It’s apartheid, then, I’m a committed Zionist—there’s this weird dance over something that’s a decade old and out of touch. I'm just curious: What will it take for Democrats to actually shift on this issue?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: It’s like any other issue; they’ll have to be forced. That’s generally the history. It did not become the case that the Democratic Party was the home for civil rights legislation solely because they had some sort of moral awakening. No, they had a base that changed. Black folks moved away from the Republican Party into the Democratic Party. They needed those votes, and things changed.

I actually think—though not directly the same way—there’s a similar political shift happening in the party. They’re just wildly out of tune with the base. I think the bargain that certain people wanted to make—as Marc Lamont Hill says in his book, an “except for Palestine” bargain—doesn’t actually work. Obviously, there’s an inconsistency in your morality, right?

But let’s put that aside. It doesn’t work as a basic sort of practical politic, because you will find yourself, as we are right now, in wars you don’t want to be in. This is not a popular war in America, but it’s also not a war that happens without bipartisan support of the Israeli state and the Israeli project and the Zionist project. You can’t close your eyes.

In that sense, it’s very much like race in America. Certainly after the turn of the 19th century, there was an attempt to have an American politic without race. And what you got was—and people don't see it this way, but this is the truth of it — a race war. People call it World War II, but it really was a race war. And the people who started that race war studied both Jim Crow and the genocide of the indigenous Americans. And Israel’s Herrenvolk democracy is very, very similar. I don’t think this will be so easily evaded.

The Key: Is there anything else worth saying about repairing the schism between Black Democrats and Palestinian voters? What should readers of The Key be thinking about?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I can’t really answer the question about Dems, per se. But I would say a couple things about the movement and these two communities. I’ve had some time to think about this, particularly on my own journey.  Let me say the easy thing first and then I’ll say the hard thing. The easy thing is: We have to be in each other’s spaces. We can’t just be present at moments of crisis.

If we really believe that the similarities between the Black experience and the Palestinian experience are there and are true, then we have to be in each other’s spaces on a consistent basis.

Rami Nashashibi (who I mentioned earlier) does work out of Chicago. Chicago has the largest Palestinian-American population in the country. Rami actually organized on the South Side of Chicago and frequently heard the complaint, as a Palestinian-American, that the only time that we see Palestinians is when they own these crappy stores in our neighborhood. He heard that, listened to that, and he opened his own store, which I've been to on the South Side of Chicago, which gives a daily presence there in the lives of Black folks.

If you think about support, to the extent that it exists in the Black community, for Zionism and for Israel, it is built on long, deep, and, in many cases, legitimate relationships between American Jews and Black people. Let’s just put the Zionism of it aside for a moment. It’s built on the fact that Jewish folks have been very present in the Black freedom movement. They’re there at the founding of the NAACP, for instance. They put their bodies on the line during the civil rights movement. They’re present, so there are roots that are already there, and you can’t act like that didn’t happen or it wasn’t real. 

But what happens on top of that, in certain cases, is that the case for Zionism is made as an extension of the logic of the freedom movement. And that case is made directly an intimately. So there are groups that have ties to black organizations, to historically black colleges and universities, and the roots of those don’t just begin in Zionism. They are genuine—even as they are employed to keep the boot on the neck of other human beings. What is our answer to that? What is our response to that?

I hear a lot of activists—and I’m not against this saying—say “our struggles are the same.” But how are we making that real? What is the work that is going to tangibly make that real?

So that’s the easy thing. The harder thing is this: The problem with me going to Palestine is that I didn’t just go to Palestine. Like I didn’t just go, come back, and write a book that said “Free Palestine.” It was so much more than that. I’ve said that I felt like being there opened a door, and there was no way to get back through the other way. And the other side of that door is the Palestinian struggle, yes. But it’s also some very intense questions about America’s relationship with the world. 

And that relationship has been very violent—overthrowing governments at will, inciting massacres, destroying democracies in the name of capital. This is a country that in a single lifetime, overthrew the government of Iran, propped up a government in Iraq, then overthrew that government too, and is now trying to overthrow another government in Iraq. Again. And you can go on: Guatemala, Vietnam, Indonesia, Congo, Cuba etc. 

And, this is hard but, we as Black people are part of this. We have to understand that. Operation Condor was done in our name too. We have to understand ourselves as part of the imperial project—and the fact that that project seeks to exploit us to is not an out. And so that that, yes, Kamala Harris would have been the first Black woman to be president. But she also would have been an heir to that same imperial project. You have to understand that. And you probably should have so understanding for the fact that people who are currently being killed by that Project, people whose literal families are being wiped out right now, can’t line up to support your preferred representative. I’ll never forget being in Houston at one of those meetings at [a Palestinian-American woman’s] house and her saying, “I can’t even go outside. I had 200 members of my family who have been killed in Gaza and my neighbors think it’s good.” It is deeply inhumane to then yell at that woman for not supporting the people who are presently killing her family.  If that is where our movement has led us, then I’d submit we’ve made some mistakes.

At the same time, I think Palestinian-Americans have to understand that when they come to America, they too are enrolling in a project—a project of white supremacy. There needs to be absolute clarity about that. The moment you come here, you are part of it. I know you don’t want to be part of it. I know you did not ask to be. Maybe you were sold a different version of the United States of America. But guess what, so were we. Because I didn’t want my name on Gaza. But we’re here now, and you have privileges here that we do not. You can pass and go places that we cannot. You will always be able to do things that we just cannot do. 

Back to Houston for a moment. We were in this room with a group of very wealthy and very successful Palestinians and Arabs. And I told them that there is no city in the United States of America where I could assemble a room of Black people like that. It doesn’t exist. And it doesn’t not exist because we’re not intelligent enough or we’re not astute enough; it doesn’t exist because this thing—this place you’ve come to—was built on our back. And when you come to America, you are now part of the thing that was built on our back. It doesn't make you a bad person, but when people say things to you in a certain way, understand what they’re saying; understand the perspective they’re coming from.

Hard as that is, there’s still a tremendous opportunity here, weirdly enough, that comes out of this particular moment and America backing this genocide in the way it has. This is the country you’re in now. You can make a concerted effort to reject whiteness—even when it's given to you as privilege. You can be an American and reject this, because you now know what this country is capable of—that it will wipe out 200 members of your family, that it will erase whole bloodlines, and not bat an eye. And if the country would do that to you, what else would it do? There's a door here too. You can walk through it. 

The Key: Given that, how do you think the political climate in the U.S. will be transformed by this moment?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I actually think it's going to be very hard to have the Kamala Harris position. Now, look, that person might ultimately win the Democratic primary, but it's going to be a fight. 

I actually think—and we get upset about this sometimes—we see all our failures and we see how the movement that began at Columbia ended, and we’re like, Damn, we lost. But did we? What was the point? Maybe the point was to stop the genocide. OK, I'm going to be cold here and tell you that was not within your power—just like it was not in our power to immediately  end slavery. 

But what you can do is raise the consciousness of people who are just passively letting the thing go by. I think that happened. It just feels like—for the Democratic Party to do a report—and I haven’t seen it—but apparently it identifies Gaza as one of the reasons they lost. That means something. But it means even more that they did not release it. You should take to heart the fact that they didn’t release it. Because if it didn’t have any power, they would just put it out. The cover-up is the statement—maybe more so than the report. Because what is actually being said is: This thing is so hot, it’s actually a threat. It threatens bedrock positions within the party. 

I don’t think candidates were running away from AIPAC like this before. Obviously that’s not enough. But people were not doing this before.

The Key: What do you mean by “running from AIPAC”?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Well, we had a number of recent Democratic primaries and a number of candidates weren’t taking any money from AIPAC. I think Cory Booker, of all people, is not taking money from AIPAC. Cory Booker is a straight-up Zionist. Gavin Newsom might have said it too, for all his flip-flopping. Listen, what I’m trying to say is: These people are not your friends. That’s not the point I’m making. They’re not comrades.

What I’m saying is, they’re feeling the heat. It’s become clear that certain things are radioactive in a way they weren’t before. So I don’t think this is going away. And that doesn’t mean liberation is imminent. We might lose some more.  We have to get used to the fact that sometimes you lose and that you don’t define your ultimate success by what happened in the most immediate fight.

The Key: You’re publishing a Hebrew edition of the book with November Books, which is the only Israeli publisher we know of that recognizes Palestinian rights and has taken a position against the genocide and occupation. Can you talk about that decision? Who are you hoping to reach, and why publish with November Books?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Yeah, this is always hard, and it’s hard for two reasons. I think everybody who did not understand what exactly the Israeli project was—they go there, and maybe they get shocked and some things become immediately apparent. You can’t just go home and know this and it’s “business as usual,” right? What I mean by that is you start maybe questioning other things.

It’s like finding out your partner was somebody else. Then you start questioning yourself, start questioning things you did with the partner. My partner was the American press. That was my partner: American media.

I'm a journalist. I was trained. I believed in it. I had critiques of American media, but I believed in the basic way of practicing the trade, and I’ve parted with some of that. I’ve parted with a lot of it, actually.

The place that is hardest for me is when I get requests—not just from issues I am sympathetic to, but from people who have been fighting. That’s different, right? Because once you realize there was this war going on that you didn’t see, you start to say, OK, all right, I got it. I’m with you. I want to be involved in a way that I want to be involved. There’s part of you that’s like, OK, but what else am I not seeing?

Is even the request to be involved in the way that I want to be involved a continuation of my blindness? So the way this most often takes form is being asked to sign letters, which, as a journalist, I generally try not to do. That’s just a holdover from my training. But then you realize that a lot of the people that weren’t signing letters were part of why things are the way they are. So what does it mean? If you believe in things, should you not just say them? For the most part, I still don't sign them, but I wrestle with that.

Anyway, long story short, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions call was something that just demanded respect. It just did. There are some of us who feel like—and I probably felt like this for a long time—that as journalists we remain independent from the movement. We want to not see ourselves as activists. We want to see ourselves as outside of it. So while we can speak when something is just and when something is correct, we’re not activists. 

And I don't know if that works, particularly, if only because the opportunity to say that comes from a very privileged position. You have to have the ability to create distance and space in order to say that. You know that if you’re in Gaza and bombs are dropping on you and your family, you can’t really say that. That’s not a perspective you can necessarily take. People will look at you like you were crazy. Just like W.E.B Du Bois—when he was publishing the magazine for the NAACP, he couldn’t be “objective” about lynching in the South. It wasn’t a position you could take.

And then there’s something else. I feel like I have a duty to explain things to a broad body of people. I didn’t always feel that way. But I think  one of the mistakes we made as a movement,  was that went through an era where a lot of us felt like it was not our job to explain the world to people who were benefiting off the devaluation of our lives, or who we felt devalued our lives, or who, in their ignorance, devalued our lives. We would not do the mental work of explaining to them. They would have to catch up. … And I do think some people should not have to explain, ... but I think I probably should, and I should probably make my peace with the fact that I might be good at it too. I’m not the theoretical genius. I’m just the entry-level guy—the “talk to me like I’m stupid” guy..

When I was younger there was this ongoing conversation about my white audience. The question was basically, “Why do white people listen to Ta-Nehisi?” And I used to ask myself the same. Moreover, I used to feel a kind of way about that, Like, I don’t know why. What the hell? I didn’t ask to talk to white people. I didn’t care about any of that. But maybe I should. Maybe I should a wide audience, and that necessarily means a lot of white people  And that’s fine, because what really matters is this—Can I go home? Do me and my people feel like I represented, regardless of who was listening?  And if I did represent, and I also got a lot of white converts, is that not…good?

And so that's a long way of saying I really felt like somebody, and I know people are doing this, but some group of people has to say to Israelis themselves: Y'all got to stop. Like, y'all really got to stop. When I say talking to people outside or explaining to people, I don't mean holding their hand. I don't mean softening things for them. I do mean respecting their intellect. But I also mean being very direct and very clear with people.

I don't think everybody has to take that job. But given the kind of standing that I have as a writer, I think it's important.

We like to believe sometimes that we can free ourselves without convincing other people. I just don’t think that’s true. I don't like admitting that at all. But I’ve come to believe it’s true.

The Key: Specifically for Hebrew speakers or people inside Israel, are they not too far gone? Are we beyond the point where, and maybe this is just me being very cynical about Israeli politics, where even “center-left” politicians are saying extremely genocidal things?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I think a couple of things, and this is probably not a perfect one-to-one thing, but weirdly, I feel like I am operating in the spirit that PalFest came with to me. PalFest first came to me in 2015. Between the World and Me was out. I had published “The Case for Reparations.” My statements on Zionism and Israel were right there. I think people would have been within their rights to write me off and say, We know what their position is on this. He did this in ‘The Case for Reparations.’ He is clearly too far gone. 

The Key: It was clear. The piece was so good and then it just had that appendix on it!

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Maybe I believed in the appendix! [laughs] I appreciate that, but seriously—how do you know that I’m not just a guy who believes in Zionism? How do you know that I’m wrestling with some things? I don’t think you do know. And so there was a level of generosity that was extended to me, in the invitation by PalFest. 

Not only that, [but] when I went to Palestine, there was a level of generosity extended to me. People knew who I was, and some of those conversations were tough. But even in the toughest conversation I had, people were still extremely generous. 

So I feel, to some extent—and this might be naive—that publishing with November Books is to say, somewhere out there, there’s a 14- or 15-year-old kid who is being raised in the midst of this, somewhere in Israel. Everything around them is telling them one thing, but in their heart they feel something else, and they don’t have the words for it. They don’t quite know what to say. This translation is for them.

I’ve had that experience so often in America, where people I would have written off surprised me. One time I was doing an event in Wisconsin, I’ll never forget. I was on my way in, all these people were around me, trying to hustle me in. I wasn’t supposed to be talking to anybody on the way. But there was a white woman standing outside, and she was saying, “Mr. Coates, Mr. Coates.” She was clearly not a student, just from the neighborhood around there. And she said, “Mr. Coates, can I talk to you for a moment? Would you sign this book?” And I said, “I can’t. I gotta go do this thing.” And she said, “OK, I completely understand that. I just wanted you to know that my son is a long-haul trucker, and he plays this book over and over and over again.” I said, “Of course I’m signing your book.”

 So you get that? That happens enough times to you, and you say, OK, I can’t be writing people off, I can’t write off a whole broad group of people. I don’t write for them. I did not write The Message for Israelis. My audience was the people who had given me their time, the people I spent time talking to. But if you want to hear it, you can get some too.  I am not going to change how I talk. I am not going to soften it for you.

The Key: It’s probably worth noting for readers that November Books is an extremely small publisher. From our research, it was the only one we could identify that explicitly affirms Palestinian rights. It’s published only a handful of books over the past 12 years and doesn’t distribute books to major chains, in part because the Israeli market is dominated by a bookstore duopoly with locations in West Bank settlements—

Ta-Nehisi Coates: See, that I could not do. And full disclosure, we had a lot of conversations about this. If those people were not excluded from the boycott, then it would not have gotten translated, and I was prepared for that.

I was prepared for that because I think that one of the things that is not clear to people is the extent to which so many alleged neutral institutions are actually tied in to Zionism. The propaganda is so big that you think of universities as independent from the state project. So it’s not immediately obvious, but I know they’re part of it too. So had it been the case that we couldn’t find a publisher that people who first brought me to consciousness on this subject were comfortable with, then I wouldn’t have done it.

The Key: For people less familiar with the boycott, a common counterargument is that you should be able to debate, to counter bad speech with more speech. Can you talk about the boycott of complicit institutions, and why it matters?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Well, you can just start with the basic question you outlined: “You should be able to debate. Counter bad speech with more speech” OK, does that happen in America? Is “more speech” an actual option being offered to Palestinians?

In fact it is nothing to cut on mainstream news show in America and see the fate of Gaza being debated by a bunch of white people, and say, some former Israeli ambassador to America. I think we’d all love “more” Palestinian speech. But we should not pretend there isn’t a very clear effort to keep that from happening. 

As for boycotts, I admit it’s not really my chosen weapon. But I am also a latecomer to this fight. And that is important because through struggle you accrue wisdom. And I just haven’t been here long enough to be wise here. So my general thing is: If people who have been fighting this longer than me tell me not to go, I’m not going to go. I might not even be able to tell you why. At one point, I thought it was important to be able to tell you why. Back then I believed more in argument, and I still believe in argument. But I also believe in wisdom. And I don’t mean blindly confessing your privilege and just doing any old thing. I mean spending time with people, eating with them, walking with them, understanding their intentions, and then trusting them. 

That’s a burden, because I can’t exactly give the history and point by point defense of BDS if challenged. But I guess what I’ve come to realize is that what feels like a burden might be an opportunity. For me, trusting in people’s wisdom meant being in community with people and learning, and being on this journey which is ongoing. When I was on tour, I had the chance to participate in conversations that were extremely enlightening. And I don't know that I would have had those same conversations if I was white. The conversation definitely wouldn't have gone the same way, I know that for a fact. And what I saw when I went into Palestine, I was so thankful for having rooted myself in the struggle here. It gave me insights that a lot of my colleagues couldn’t see. But hopefully they will.

Editor’s Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.