If the racial politics of the 2010s has a definitive chronicler, it's Ta-Nehisi Coates. He spoke with zakcheneyrice
Photo: Sebastian Kim/AUGUST As the decade began, there were reasons to be optimistic: America had elected its first black president, and the world hadn’t cascaded into total financial collapse. Obamacare, for all its flaws, was passed, and then came the Iran deal and the Paris climate accords. Sure, there were danger signs: the anger of the tea party, the slow hollowing out of legacy news media, a troubling sense that somehow the bankers got away with it.
Birtherism strikes me as one of the few things Trump has done that Republicans haven’t been explicitly willing to defend, even as they do stuff like rationalize his defense of white supremacists in Charlottesville. But there’s also been no broader reckoning with its effect or with how successful it was in getting a number of current Republican representatives into office, either.
You’ve said that Obama’s presidency made your work possible in that it created this interest and audience for the type of analysis that you were uniquely well positioned to provide. If that’s the case, why do you think people gravitated toward your fairly downbeat analysis of Obama, this figure who inspired a lot of hope and warm feelings?
Because I’ll tell you one thing, if Obama, let’s say, had been Bill Clinton, right? Like if Obama had been credited to all these rumors of him womanizing or fraternizing with all these white women, and if he had been found to have, God forbid, actual rape allegations on top of that, and if he had been found to, I don’t know, carry on an affair with some 22-year-old white intern, the effect would have been devastating. Negroes would have been hanging their heads like, I cannot believe.
Probably not for most, but for some critical mass of white people who probably were already somewhat susceptible to it, yes.Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones, which I just finished a couple of weeks ago and I’m still recovering from. Kendrick Lamar —I got to say Good Kid, M.A.A.D City. I felt like he was talking about my childhood, 20 years before. I think about “The Art of Peer Pressure,” and that just sounded like being a kid in the late ’80s, early ’90s. Creed is incredible.
I think when he’s no longer dangerous, when he’s no longer trying to get a job, when he’s 40, when he’s 50, a lot of people will be standing up to honor him. This is like how when everybody looks back at the civil-rights movement, they think everybody was like, “Yeah, that’s a great idea.” Clearly, we recognize Bull Connor as the enemy, and this is the good guy. That’s not really how it goes, man. This is exactly like it’s happening with Kaepernick right now.
They’re unrelated in terms of who they think their base is. Nike, at least part of its legitimacy, it feels, comes from the streets, and who it sells to is young people. But I take your point. It’s very different than Muhammad Ali, right? There was no place for Muhammad Ali to go to in that same sort of way. And I think part of that is the real progress that has happened in terms of how black people are seen in the wider society.
First of all, you can’t be the first again. That’ll never happen. So the sheer amount of energy that was generated at that particular moment in time following a president who had just basically run the country into the gutter, failed wars. Two failed wars, economy on the brink, all of everything feeling like it’s breaking.
They also aren’t apples to apples or oranges to oranges. Hillary Clinton is not running for the same office as Stacey Abrams was. What I am countering is the very fact that this is significant enough for us to talk about, I think, attests to the kind of, again, normalization that you get when you have power. There are much more significant factors than those two or three points in why Trump is in office. Why does he have power in the first place? I would argue that those two or three points are nowhere near as important as the fact that Trump basically got a majority of every single white demographic you could think of.
But I wonder if, do you feel any responsibility to the people? I think it’s fair to say a lot of people turn to you to help them make sense of this cultural moment in a way that was positive, people who made sense of the world through the lens of your analysis. Do you feel any kind of residual responsibility toward those people? But seriously, just one example: Conversations about racism are easier with a lot of white people I know. I can attribute that largely to your work.
So when you were called to testify in front of Congress, nobody sat down with you? They were just like, “Come talk,” basically? Some of the criticism your work has faced on the left is that you overstate racism’s intrinsic nature in a way that casts it as this elemental force that will be with us forever. It’s baked into the soil we walk on, the air we breathe. Is this a fair assessment of your belief?
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
https://ew.comEntertainment Weekly has all the latest news about TV shows, movies, and music, as well as exclusive behind the scenes content from the entertainment industry.
Read more »
Australia probes 'deeply disturbing' allegations of Chinese political interferenceAustralia's domestic spy agency is investigating whether China tried to ins...
Read more »
After four decades, a Vietnamese woman reunites with the daughter airlifted to AmericaIn 1975, Nguyen thi Dep feared Vietnamese Communist forces would kill her 3-year-old daughter because the father was an American soldier, so she put her on a plane to the United States. They were reunited this month turnerscope reports
Read more »