Please Can We Talk About Ta-Nehisi Coates' CBS Interview?!
By sTACY LEE KONG
Image: Gregory Halpern
Content warning: This newsletter contains mentions of anti-Black racism, police brutality and genocide. Context links may contain graphic images and/or video.
A note on language: As I’ve mentioned in every newsletter I’ve written about Gaza since Oct. 7, it’s super important that we take care with our language when discussing Israel and Palestine, because the way we talk about this situation has real consequences for real people. So to be clear, when I critique the Israeli government and military, I am not critiquing all Israelis, much less all Jewish people. I also think it’s important to push back on attempts to characterize critique of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as antisemitic. Furthermore, it is disingenuous and actually dangerous to conflate Zionism with Judaism, as this list of prominent Jewish writers has argued. Lastly, when I use the words colonization, genocide, apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing to describe Israel’s actions, that’s based on the analysis of organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, the International Federation for Human Rights, the United Nations, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace as well as academics who study genocide and South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice to bring genocide charges against Israel. It is also based on the language Israeli officials and public figures have used themselves, 500+ instances of which have already been collected by Law for Palestine.
Think back to 2014. It was the year of eyebrows on fleek, and the original True Detective, and the infamous elevator fight between Solange Knowles and Jay-Z. That year, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared over the Gulf of Thailand, and Boko Haram militants kidnapped 276 girls and women from a school in Nigeria, sparking the global #bringbackourgirls campaign.
And. In Staten Island, NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo killed Eric Garner, an innocent Black man whose dying words (“I can’t breathe”) became a rallying cry for protesters in the nascent Black Lives Matter movement. In Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown, an innocent 18-year-old Black boy who the New York Times then described as “no angel,” highlighting the ways mainstream media outlets have amplified and encouraged anti-Black racism. In Cleveland, Ohio, police officer Timothy Loehmann killed Tamir Rice, an innocent 12-year-old Black boy who was holding a toy gun. And in the pages of The Atlantic, journalist-turned-public thinker Ta-Nehisi Coates published “The Case for Reparations,” a deeply reported, 16,000-word article that traced a direct line from chattel slavery as practised in America starting in the 1500s (before there even was an America) up until June 19, 1865, to the many ways Black Americans are disenfranchised and oppressed today, and in the process pushed ideas that had for years been considered overly radical into mainstream discourse.
That is to say, at the time that Coates was writing “The Case for Reparations,” the horrific results of anti-Blackness and police brutality were going viral over and over again, but the term “structural racism” wasn’t yet widely used in media. “It’s kind of hard to remember, but even as late as 2014, people were talking about the Civil War as this complicated subject,” Coates’ editor, Chris Jackson, told New York magazine features editor Ryu Spaeth in the latter’s recent profile of the writer. “Ta-Nehisi was going to plantations and hanging out at Monticello and looking at all the primary documents and reading a thousand books, and it became clear that the idea of a ‘complicated’ narrative was ridiculous.”
Coates comes to a similar conclusion in his new book, The Message, which is “interested in patterns of domination, in how oppression replicates itself in different contexts, and in the ‘related traumas of colonialism and enslavement,’” Spaeth says.
Which is why it spends so much time on Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians.
I for one am grateful for Coates’ moral clarity
To be even clearer: while I haven’t read The Message yet, based on Coates’ media tour and all the excerpts I’ve read so far, it seems like a mediation on the philosophical and practical similarities between Israeli apartheid and American apartheid, which was better known as the era of Jim Crow laws, and an uncompromising, clear-eyed statement of Coates’ morals.
And that’s making people uncomfortable.
Perhaps the most obvious example is Coates’ recent CBS Morning interview, where co-anchor Tony Dokoupil started by accusing the writer of being an “extremist,” then pushed him to affirm Israel’s right to exist, asked why he was “offended by a Jewish state,” questioned why he hadn’t included ‘appropriate’ context (i.e., mention the things Palestinians had done to justify their treatment), implied only an antisemite could have written The Message, wondered again what Palestinians had done to deserve their own oppression (the subtext: because they must have done something) and ended by reassuring him that he was still invited to the High Holidays. (Dokoupil did not disclose that his ex-wife and two children live in Israel, btw, and obviously he did not recuse himself from the interview, for those of us who are taking notes on what counts as objective in Western media—and what doesn’t.)
While Dokoupil was attacking Coates—and there’s really no other word for this interaction, which was bizarre in any context, but especially for a morning show???—neither of the show’s two Black co-anchors said a word in his defence, or even attempted to redirect the conversation. Instead, Gayle King and Nate Burleson sat largely silent while their colleague barely allowed their guest to speak about his time in Palestine and what he saw there, much less his experience at the ‘door of no return’ on Gorée Island, which is located off the coast of Dakar, Senegal and was a key stop on the transatlantic slave trade, or his time in a South Carolina town where the school board considered banning his 2015 book, Between the World and Me, because it made students “feel bad to be Caucasian.” Or, frankly, his overarching thesis, which is that colonization and oppression are linked, whether it is happening at home or abroad.
I think a large part of this goes back to a Western refusal to engage with Palestinians’ humanity, which is how Orwellian phrasing around “escalating to de-escalate” gets taken up wholesale as if it makes sense by Western media. As Meredith Shiner put it in The New Republic this week, “to recognize Palestinians are human has become a flashpoint, a red line to not be crossed in Washington discourse, an invitation to be tagged as an antisemite, whether by your cousin at a Passover seder or by a network morning news anchor on live national television (more on that later). The Discourse tells us there is a ‘Palestinian-Israeli conflict’ and that it is ‘complicated.’ But somewhere in this word soup we have simmered long enough to deflect attention from how power works, who benefits from it and who loses everything, the remaining goop to be scraped from the bottom of the pot can no longer be accurately conveyed as ‘conflict’ but instead a stark, wrong binary between Palestinian existence and a broad definition of antisemitism, which if we choose as a society to accept, will only serve to drive us deeper into the void.”
The blowback Coates is receiving also speaks to the difficulty of dissent
But there’s something else at play too: a particular discomfort with Ta-Nehisi Coates specifically being the one to reject that doublespeak and moral equivocating. After “The Case for Reparations” he became an intellectual golden boy of sorts, a “hero of the liberal left,” as Spaeth puts it. Then-U.S. President Barack Obama invited him to the White House. He was named a McArthur Genius, among other accolades, landed book deals—and then parlayed his success and fame into non-journalism opportunities, like writing a Black Panther comic book series. And now, he’s back… only to take a very firm stance that is in opposition to the establishment approach to Palestine. No wonder there was a distinct ‘how dare you’ vibe to Dokoupil’s line of questioning; the thing about gaining acceptance in a rarefied space by speaking truth to power is, you’re not supposed to destabilize the power of the people who invited you in. You’re not supposed to apply your politic to their actions. You’re not really supposed to criticize them.
Interestingly to me, he’s doing so by acknowledging his own failings. At least one seed of The Message can be found in “The Case for Reparations.” In the article, Coates devotes a large chunk to exploring a previous example of reparations, and how it might be a model for American reparations: the 3.45 billion deutsche marks West Germany paid to make amends for the Holocaust, much of which went to the Israeli state. Reparations funded two-thirds of Israel’s investment in a merchant fleet, a third of the country’s investment in its electrical system, and almost half of its investment in railways. It accounted for 15% of the growth in Israel’s GNP. “Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. But they did launch Germany’s reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name,” Coates wrote at the time.
But nowhere in the article does he take Palestine into account.
It wasn’t until he was speaking at an event at a D.C. synagogue and a woman—journalist Rania Khalek—called him out for ignoring Palestinians in the piece, that he began to see what he’d missed. “I couldn’t quite understand what she was saying,” he told Spaeth. “I mean, I heard her, but I literally could not understand it. She got shouted down. And I’ve thought about that a lot, man. I’ve thought about that a lot.”
Two things about this: first, Coates is using the social capital he’d accrued to do what he’s always done—use research and data to dismantle unjust narratives—for a group of people that it remains politically dangerous to support. He’s doing so because he sees these struggles as linked. (“[The book] is about the nationalisms of people who are told that they are nothing, that they are not a nation, that they are not a people ... that the only place in the world that is fit for them is as an underclass or maybe not in the world at all,” he told NPR. “And the stories that we construct to fight back against that.”) This feels profound because so few members of the liberal establishment are doing this, even those who belong to marginalized groups themselves and have used the adage ‘none of us are free until all of us are free’ to advocate for their communities and/or amass power for themselves (AOC, girl, what are you doing?).
But also, I wonder if this way of speaking about Palestine feels almost… dangerous to the liberal left? The notion that this conflict is so complicated is what makes it feel intractable; the idea that the average person would never be able to understand it makes it easier for Western power brokers to support, and actively participate in, this genocide. But in The Message, Coates provides a counterpoint to that, simply by doing the reading and changing his mind. Not only does he show that it’s possible to revise your opinions upon learning new (to you) information, he also offers a model of what it can look like to course correct after having been wrong.
I think that’s why Dokoupil was so angry during that interview—and why he tried to assert his power by telling Coates he was still “invited to the High Holidays.” That was a flex, and a reminder that Coates had been invited into these spaces, but that his belonging was conditional and his access could be revoked at any time.
I sometimes feel a way about calling writers ‘brave’ because it’s often more dangerous to live these experiences than to document them. But there is something very admirable about Coates risking his professional reputation and opportunities in this way. And not to put undue pressure on him, or to give him undue credit, but: this is why The Message, and the uncompromising interviews he’s doing to support it, feel important. In some ways, this feels like 2014, when a piece of writing captured the contours of a moment and changed the way we speak—and even think—about equality.
I mean… The space of a decade is not so large. Looking at that time is a reminder of what is possible, and how ideas can shift profoundly, in a relatively short period of time, so that what was once normal feels almost unthinkable. There’s something hopeful in that.
And Did You Hear About…
The internet (or at least my Twitter timeline) going feral for Adam Brody. (It’s because Netflix’s rom-com series Nobody Wants This is really fun, fyi, and has reminded a ton of millennial women that they were a little bit in love with Seth Cohen between 2003 and 2007.)
Bogg tote bags, and why we should all take the trend-setting power of moms more seriously.
This GQ piece on the indie sleaze trend, which is actually about the way we talk and think about trends, and how much of that is just… consumption.
Journalist (and my friend) Pacinthe Mattar’s brilliant and incisive talk on objectivity, press freedom and Palestine, which she gave at Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communications earlier this week.
A PR pro’s take on how celebrities should respond to the ever-expanding Diddy case. The strategic thinking is fascinating—but also gross to think about.
This fascinating argument that analogue media are becoming the new luxury items. As the EIC of a print magazine, I am personally invested in this, obvs, but I also remember the much-lauded vinyl revival of 2006, so… I’m also a bit wary of grand pronouncements.
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