Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates is an American writer, journalist, and educator. Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic, where he writes about cultural, social and political issues, particularly as they regard African-Americans. Coates has worked for The Village Voice, Washington City Paper, and Time. He has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, O, and other publications. In 2008 he published a memoir, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth30 September 1975
CountryUnited States of America
One of the things that's really, really present in 'Between the World and Me' is, I am in some ways outside of the African-American tradition.
I would say as a journalist, I would envision travelling to other countries that have had to reckon with their past and see how they've done it: what worked, what didn't work, finding characters that would tell the story of how that process was done.
I feel some need to represent where I'm from. But ultimately, I think my only real responsibility is to - as much as possible - interrogate my own truths. This is to say not merely writing what I think is true, but using the writing to turn that alleged truth over and over, to stress-test it, in the aim of producing something readable.
My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that was exactly what was happening all around us.
We want to believe racism is an artifact of the past, and if you have a political massacre, that contradicts that.
There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.
There isn't a dude outside my dad who had greater influence on my life.
It meant something to see people who looked like me in comic books. It was this beautiful place that I felt pop culture should look like.
Forgiveness is a big part of - especially post-civil rights movement - is a big part of African-American Christianity, and I wasn't raised within the Christian church; I wasn't raised within any church.
There's a kind of optimism specifically within Christianity about the world - about whose side God is on. Well, I didn't have any of that in my background. I had physicality and chaos.
The relationship between violence and nonviolence in this country is interesting. The fact of the matter is, you know, people do respond to riots. The 1968 Housing Act was in large response to riots that broke out after Dr. Martin Luther King was killed. They cited these as an actual inspiration.
We've got in the habit of not really understanding how freedom was in the 19th century, the idea of government of the people in the 19th century. America commits itself to that in theory.
If I wrote a Jewish superhero, he'd have awesome time-traveling powers. I'd call him Doctorow.
I'm not going to break up my family, not for a book.