You’ve probably heard that Coates’ Between the World and Me is already a NYTimes Best Seller and one of Amazon’s Best of the Month, even though its official publication date is tomorrow. Benjamin Wallace-Wells, at New York Magazine, snagged a sit-down interview:
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.”…
When Obama began his first campaign for the presidency, Coates was all but anonymous, a journalist in his early 30s who had worked mostly at alt-weeklies and mostly for short stints. But in 2008, he was hired by The Atlantic — to write longer pieces, then to blog — and eventually his commentary formed a counterpoint to the White House line. Against the optimism of the Obama ascendancy, Coates offered a bleaker view: that no postracial era was imminent, that white supremacy has been a condition of the United States since its inception and that it might always be. “ ‘White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies,” Coates writes to his son. While the president talked about the velocity of our escape from history, Coates insisted that the country was still stuck in its vise. Last year, he wrote an Atlantic cover story titled “The Case for Reparations,” probably the most discussed magazine piece of the Obama era, which detailed the persistence of structural racism — racism by government policy — into the present day. When Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, and then Tamir Rice in Cleveland and Walter Scott in South Carolina, it was Coates who seemed to most adeptly digest the central paradox of the time: how, within an increasingly progressive era, a country led by a black president could still act with such racial brutality…
Coates is not a Christian. The heavy force in Between the World and Me — what makes it both unique and bleak — is his atheism. It gives Coates’s writing urgency. To consider the African-American experience without the language of souls and destiny is to strip it of euphemism, and to make the security of African-American bodies even more crucial. It also isolates him from the main black political tradition. “There’s a kind of optimism specifically within Christianity about the world — about whose side God is on,” he said. “Well, I didn’t have any of that in my background. I had physicality and chaos.”…
The interview also talks about Coates’ meetings with President Obama, his internet commenting community, and his immediate plans. Read the whole thing, you won’t regret it.
John
It is quite a thing to watch the birth of a philosopher.
Germy Shoemangler
I see Mr. deBoer is mentioned briefly in the article.
I made the mistake of wandering down into the comments sections. Lots of trolling going on.
sharl
Just heard him today with Terry Gross on Fresh Air. It was a good interview (no surprise there).
BGinCHI
I can’t wait to read the book. The guy can think and write and he has courage. The real kind, not the fake right-wing kind of bullshit.
Baud
There are a lot of people I don’t read enough of and Coates is one of them. FWIW, it sounds like his book will be successful (without the need for think tanks to engage in bulk purchases), and that’s a good thing.
schrodinger's cat
I find his writing illuminating, especially when he writes about the Civil War. At times, though I find his relentless negativity hard to take.
SiubhanDuinne
I’m very eager to read his book. Did not pre-order, but I assume there is an e-book version, which I can order while I’m on the road and read in chilly hotel rooms.
Baud
@schrodinger’s cat:
If I did read him more, I’d probably have the same reaction. I am not easily disposed to “things will never change” viewpoints, although sometimes it feels like never because it can take a really long time.
Another Holocene Human
Maybe the article circles back around to this, but it talks about his Atlantic blog being Obama’s counterpoint, and sure, he criticized Obama, but I remember it being basically non stop civil war minutiae, with a bit of a flashpoint when he took on the Black soldiers for the Confederacy myth. He also spent a ton of time engaging and policing comments. He had some very conservative and also some frankly quite racist regulars who were tolerated as long as they didn’t use salty language. It was really exhausting to read the comments. I kind of felt like … don’t you all burn me at the stake all at once for saying this … that Coates had his nose up these ass of these horrible commenters who were not worth it way more than Obama ever kissed Republican ass.
And then one day TNC seemed to have a mental break and started telling the truth to everybody and it was like an earthquake on the intertubes. And yeah, that reparations thing went viral and I bet it was persuasive and everything (I got the summary and fwiw I agree) but I was so over TNC for so many other things he had said during his madness that I couldn’t and still can’t bring myself to read it. Oh well.
I think people do tell you about themselves by who they associate with. Obama associates with Michelle Obama. TNC spent quality time chatting with racist, sexist, homophobic white dudes, careful never to step on their toes, while bitching that Obama wasn’t as hopey changey as he wanted. You know what, change yourself, don’t expect the President to change you for you, or anybody else on this earth.
Another Holocene Human
@Germy Shoemangler: But there’s trolling of Mr. DeBoer. So worth a visit.
eta: he’s fucking in the comments, auto-trolling and making it all. about. Freddie.
The Moar You Know
Not the man’s biggest fan but that made me lol hard. Long overdue.
Corner Stone
Who is this this crazy ass, second rate Sarah Palin that is speaking before Scott Walker’s announcement?
Loviatar
@schrodinger’s cat:
You see, what you consider negativity, some of us consider reality.
.
Truth
MomSense
@SiubhanDuinne:
I hope there will be an e-book version, too. I’m finding it easier to read on a tablet.
the Conster
@Corner Stone:
From what I gather from Twitter she’s a Real Housewife. Yeah, let that sink in.
dedc79
@Germy Shoemangler: Well, since you brought up Deboer:
SiubhanDuinne
@MomSense:
The older I get, the more I appreciate being able to adjust the print size.
Baud
@dedc79: So no tingle up the leg for Freddie?
kc
Why “black bodies” and not “black people?”
Baud
@SiubhanDuinne: This!
Loviatar
Truth
Schlemazel
@Loviatar:
You beat me to it. I have been accused here more than once of being too negative so maybe thats why I don’t see his writing as negative as much as realistic.
I fear things will never get better but I keep plugging away hoping I will be proven wrong. Doesn’t happen often but once in a while.
trollhattan
@the Conster:
Way to connect with the Little People, there.
Schlemazel
@dedc79:
If Freddy ever said that about me I would use the quote on the dust jacket. That is a strong endorsement from that asshole.
EDIT: should have included “useless” before asshole in order to more accurately describe The Bore.
dedc79
@Baud: But it’s not TNC’s fault, see, because Freddie doesn’t get tingles from any essays. Except maybe his own? and maybe Baldwin’s?
Loviatar
Truth
BGinCHI
@dedc79: You can’t get to the left of Freddie. Go ahead and try. See, it doesn’t work.
Schlemazel
@the Conster:
So The Situation or one of the other bimbos from “Jersey Shore” was not available?
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@the Conster:
I didn’t realize there was a Real Housewives — Madison Edition. Or would it be Janesville?
MomSense
@SiubhanDuinne:
Yes. My eyes are changing. It feels pretty dramatic the last few months. I am going next week for an exam.
schrodinger's cat
@efgoldman: I used to find the comment section of his blog at the Atlantic too goody goody. I prefer the jackals and hyenas of Balloon Juice to the enforced civility.
schrodinger's cat
@efgoldman: Some of those are really funny, thanks for sharing.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
I can’t let it go — would “Real Housewives of Wisconsin” have a A Very Special Episode where one of the housewives totals her Mercedes by hitting a deer?
dedc79
@Schlemazel: I didn’t even include the worst part: “At his best, Coates has helped rehabilitate a kind of meditative essay writing that went out of fashion in the more immediate culture of online writing.”
Where do I even begin?
Corner Stone
No thread for Gov Dimwit Walker? God he is bad. Just an awful speaker. Who the fuck keeps voting for this numbnuts?
Corner Stone
It looks like the GOP has their very own lifesized bobble head doll in Gov Walker.
Baud
@Corner Stone:
Not watching. How many times has he invoked Reagan?
Corner Stone
Nowhere <—-Occupancy one Wisconsin Gov
geg6
@dedc79:
Jeebus. I always knew the stupid was strong in that one, but I had no idea quite how strong.
Corner Stone
@Baud: It’s so bad. He’s sweating worse than Nixon. He’s so shiny.
Baud
@Corner Stone: And Wisconsin is one of the cooler states. Wait until he has to campaign in the South.
Corner Stone
He keeps making a vagina symbol with his hands every time he rests them against his stomach.
Corner Stone
He keeps talking about taking the power out of DC and putting it into local gov.
Corner Stone
HAHAHA! He’s using the American flag for the E in his last name Walker.
Yeesh! The Kohl’s coupon talk again!
Corner Stone
Kohl’s uses slave labor, Gov. That’s how they make such cheap shit to sell you.
REAGAN! LAFFER!
Corner Stone
REAGAN!! Foreign Policy!
Baud
@Corner Stone: It’s time to finish what we started in Grenada.
kc
@Corner Stone:
Ugh, just switched over to that. Walker is a nasty piece of work.
Joel
@Another Holocene Human: I saw Freddy posted on Poltico with some trolling pro-polygamy talking point. Glad he found a good home.
Corner Stone
Our Sunni allies in Iraq? Who does he think they are?
Corner Stone
I think somebody schmeared vaseline on Scotty Boy’s face.
kc
@kc:
He just declared his loyalty to Israel.
Corner Stone
This guy ‘s a bobblehead putz.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: It hit 90 in Madison today.
Elizabelle
OK. You got me to turn to Walker speaking. Weirdly, he is more handsome in person and speaking. Not to say he’s saying anything appealing. But he looks less like Charles Pierce’s “goggle eyed homonculus.”
Although he is still Scott Walker.
My take: he looks comfortable with himself and might come off better than the “reluctant to be great” Jeb! Again. He. is. Scott. Walker. He has a record and results.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus: Oh wow. I hope all the cheese is ok.
Corner Stone
“And so, that is why I am going back home and not entering the race for president.”
JustRuss
@kc:
That struck me too. Without context, it has kind of a “bodily fluids” vibe to it. I expect he has a good reason for using that phrasing. Looking forward to the book.
Corner Stone
He keeps stepping on his own campaign lines. Just end it Scotty Boy!
Elizabelle
“As great as the country we inherited.”
Nice words, but that is never what happens with Republicans. They hollow it out, all the while proclaiming their patriotism.
Emerson: along lines of “The more he talked of his honesty, the faster we counted our spoons.”
Tree With Water
I’ve gained new perspectives about it all in the introduction of this book I’ve just started reading:
The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance And The Origins Of The United States of America; Gerald Horne; New York University Press; 2014.
Corner Stone
Sorry, Scotty. The number one predictor of success in America is the SES of your parents on the day you are born.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: Worry more about the beer. Jeebus, get your priorities straight.
Omnes Omnibus
@Corner Stone: This is why I don’t think he is ready for the Majors.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus: OMG, I assumed the beer was better protected! Is there anything Walker hasn’t destroyed in Wisconsin?
Baud
@Elizabelle: Did you ever do your Bernie summary?
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: He is verily the Plagues of Egypt.
Trentrunner
@JustRuss: Read his words. Coates rejects dualism, is an atheist, and suggests that the emphasis on “souls” in black culture/history misdirects attention from the way black bodies have been used, abused, raped, whipped, chained, redlined, jailed, and shot.
I think he has a point.
Cervantes
Coates:
Yes, and as Baldwin observed:
Corner Stone
@Omnes Omnibus: Get ready for a lot of RWNJ pundits proclaiming how he did it without any teleprompter!
Cervantes
@kc:
Exactly.
Perhaps you’ve answered your own question.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
I would choose locusts over Walker.
Elizabelle
@Baud: I need to! I will do it tonight, and maybe on the Fournier thread, cuz that one could only get better.
Jeffro
@JustRuss: I think he uses it because it focuses on the physicality of what was/is done to black people (chains, whips, separated families, and then, later, redlined residences, back-of-the-bus seating, inner city schools, recent incidents like Trayvon Martin and more) and makes it much more concrete.
“Black people” seems more abstract than “black bodies”. But I’m sure he will address it himself in an interview soon and doesn’t need my guesswork.
Baud
@Elizabelle: Maybe you can get one of the front pagers to front page it.
And don’t do it in an old thread — no one will see it.
Elizabelle
@Omnes Omnibus: We will be happy if we get locusts to eat.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: Oklahoma won that in the raffle.
Jeffro
@efgoldman: Great minds and all that (while I was typing out #81)
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@kc:
Other people have already responded, but the quick-n-glib answer is that African-Americans have rarely been given the status of “people” in this country and are usually treated as mere bodies that can be manipulated as others please.
satby
@JustRuss: I suspect it’s because for so much of our history blacks were barely considered people. That usage sounded very apt to me, it invokes a historical view.
Edited to add, obviously I wasn’t the only one who thought of that.
currants
@dedc79:
Huh, wonder why?
For me, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is that essential. I am a woman in this country. TNC is black in this country. FdB is…in this country.
kc
@JustRuss:
I see it fairly frequently on Twitter as well.
Keith G
@satby:
Plus as a bit of prose, it lands with a chest rattling thump. It jars.
It is great writing.
Daulnay
Well, we know Benjamin Wallace-Wells is an idiot. No one with a functioning mind seriously quotes Freddy.
Poopyman
@Joel:
Bold talk for someone who can’t get laid.
Elizabelle
Am reading the NY mag article on TNC, and it’s a good one. Thank you, Anne Laurie, for putting it up.
He’s 6’4, hmmm? Somehow does not look it in his photos (headshots, always) … I like that TNC arrives at his positions via thought and study, and writes so well. Working on his French, too. Not one to shy from a challenge …
RSA
@Jeffro:
That was my thought, too. I imagine he considered “people”, “lives”, and other word choices. “Body” is physical and unexpected. By using the singular, Coates also alludes to more metaphorical uses of “body”, some religious, to refer to a group of people.
Though I could be reading too much into this. I don’t know.
Aunt Kathy
@schrodinger’s cat: IIRC, the negativity, the despair, really, came to the forefront with the deaths of Trayvon Martin, and then Jordan Davis. Before that, his blog consisted of a lot of discussion of his own continuing education, the pursuit of his unofficial degree, and gaming, and food.
Trayvon and Jordan pulled out the “target on our sons’ backs” despair. With good reason. He hasn’t been the same since.
BruceFromOhio
@kc: Wondered as much, how that stood out.
– ‘bodies’ evokes so much more than just a person or people: communities, gatherings, nations, families, slaves, prisoners, victims – it forces rethinking the reality of what was, what is, and that’s powerful.
– Cleaves the person from the fate, as in, ‘you can kill me, but you cannot defeat me,’ or ‘yes, it was awful and it still is, but I am still here.’
As one for whom the expectation is set low, he promotes the challenge of raised expectations, and that can only be a good thing.
adepsis
Re “black bodies” – academics use it frequently and Coates does his research. I found this useful –
johio
@JustRuss: “black bodies” brings “Strange Fruit” to my mind immediately.
johio
@Aunt Kathy: yes, but perhaps even more importantly, his son reaching mid teen years. How could that not affect everything about his view point.
JustRuss
@adepsis: Thanks for that. I suppose “black people” does carry a lot of cultural baggage that gets stripped away when we talk about “black bodies”.
Archon
Coates negativity about America’s future can get a little grating but no writer is better at articulating how comprehensively the decked was stacked against black Americans for most of our history.
His writings especially make a mockery of those that want to analogize the immigrant experience to African-Americans. A lot of people don’t want to believe that white Europeans fresh off a boat with zero English had infinitely more rights and opportunities then blacks who had been here generations.
Anne Laurie
@adepsis: Yes, and Coates has also credited feminist writers for pointing out how much abstract dehumanization is concealed behind the discussion of “bodies”.
As in, “feminists are just fat ugly hairy failures as women who are angry that no man wants to have sex with them”.
As in, “black bucks and baby-mammas”. Not humans, less than human, just… bodies.
leeleeFL
@johio: That just came to my mind a second before I read your comment. I think that “bodies” dehumanizes Black people, partcularly Black men and boys, in the way white supremacists do. Cap choices are deliberate. I have said many times since Trayvon Martin was murdered that if I was the Mother of a Black son, he’d never leave home without me. Not one person has argued the point…no matter what color they are.
Ruckus
@kc:
Why “black bodies” and not “black people?”
I believe that’s because that’s what the racism reduces black people to. Just black bodies. It is intended to remove any hint of humanity. Racism is meant to reduce you to something that can be used and tossed away or just tossed away, because it is meant to cancel any humanity on the thing it tries to turn someone into. Ta-Nehisi Coates uses it to make that point, if I am not mistaken.
Ruckus
@efgoldman:
Wouldn’t that be near to his eyes? Perhaps to dark to read but still near the organs required.
Debbie
@Archon:
Don’t you think his negativity is justified? Christ, how long to make things right?
Matt McIrvin
@Aunt Kathy: He calls it his “blue period”. Still ongoing, as far as I can tell.
lefthanded compliment
@Elizabelle: “He has a record….” Hell, the man hasn’t even been indicted yet.
Another Holocene Human
@Trentrunner: Isn’t “souls” a way to talk about the psychological and spiritual effects of the depredations enacted upon Black bodies? How does he address that?
Another Holocene Human
@Jeffro: Pretty sure “black bodies” is a term with a pretty long history in radical/academic literature.
currants
@efgoldman: Among other things, of course! But it’s probably not the first characteristic that makes him….a person who has not found an essay essential, ever.
RaflW
Amazing article.
Except for the brief twaddling mewl from one F. de Boer that got quoted. I guess every fine rug has it’s one bad knot.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Holocene Human:
The fact that he’d let people in who were… in some cases frankly kind of clueless, and still have polite discussion going on on one of the most explosive topics in American life, always struck me as some sort of miraculous act of forum moderation. Of course it wasn’t a miracle, just extremely hard work; I think it was exhausting for Coates (and his assistants) as well. And actually he was pretty merciless with the banhammer when somebody was actually being disruptive.
For a while he actually had W**l Sh******y in there doing what he does. Don’t know if they eventually banned him or he just got bored with being knocked around. It maybe should have been an eject-on-sight.
It’s possible that Coates shouldn’t have bothered in the first place. I think it wore him down, and he wasn’t able to do it so much once the “blue period” began in earnest. But I thought it was amazing that the forum even existed for a while there.
But here’s the thing: I was and am a fairly clueless white guy myself. So I’m writing from that perspective.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Holocene Human:
Yes, and I think that gave me a prejudice about it: it took me a while to see it as something other than some sort of obscurantist academic jargon. I had to keep reminding myself “when he says bodies, he means bodies literally”.
But that’s generally what they mean in the academic writing too.
Barry
@Schlemazel: “If Freddy ever said that about me I would use the quote on the dust jacket. That is a strong endorsement from that asshole.”
Freddie’s gone from being a ‘leftier than thou’ guy who occasionally has a point. to a f_ing ‘all about MEEEE!!!!’ prime a-hole.
He just keeps on digging.
Barry
@schrodinger’s cat: “I used to find the comment section of his blog at the Atlantic too goody goody. I prefer the jackals and hyenas of Balloon Juice to the enforced civility.”
TNC was like a movie samurai. He’d just suddenly, quietly and casually turn away from somebody, wiping his sword clean (which you never saw being drawn), while that guy fell over in ten slices.
Barry
@kc: “Why “black bodies” and not “black people?””
To emphasize the physicality, intimacy and brutality.
Because, for example, ‘exploit black people’ is not as harsh and accurate as ‘exploit black bodies’.
ochone
re the use of ‘bodies’, i second or third some of the comments above. it’s everywhere in poststructuralist, feminist, post-colonial writing, you name it. it’s an attempt at a paradigm shift in the human sciences, toward irreducible materiality, a corrective to some of the waffle of humanism. and while in this context it’s negative, it’s often used positively too, a way of affirming real lived experience.
at this stage it’s a bit cliched and jargony, because it hasn’t quite reached the level of ‘common sense’ of previous ways of talking about people. but some of the commenters above have given a lot of food for thought, the way in which it might be especially suited to thinking about black history in america. i also have a lot of faith in coates’ ability to have thought it through and to use it creatively.