Ta-Nehisi Coates, the DEIty

A decade ago, in June 2014, the Atlantic published a cover story with a simple declarative title: “The Case for Reparations,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The piece had taken him two years to write, and the work paid off — with praise sweeping through the ranks of media, prizes from the most prominent elite institutions. The piece was named the “Top Work of Journalism of the Decade” by New York University’s journalism institute. It was hailed as a rare piece of writing which pushed open a cultural dialogue about a controversial subject.

This conversation had been taking place among liberal elites and in all the high places they command — at the Kennedy School and in the New Yorker and National Public Radio — but in August that year it exploded into something more when the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri became a flashpoint in America’s racial reckoning. Coates’s examination of America’s incapacity to truly deal with its history of sin, slavery and persecution went from being the stuff of ethical and intellectual debate to creating the basis for an entire movement — bridging the gap between the high and the low.

The country we inhabit is still inextricably connected with this moment, which unlocked a new connection between the crusader and the corporate. Street protests in the wake of police shootings — always framed almost immediately as racially motivated, whether they really turned out to be or not — were fueled not just by protesters’ own frustrations but by a new system of extraordinary power and financial weight. The biggest corporations in the world began making promises to change their ways, committing to installing diversity, equity and inclusion programs in their workplaces, and pledging billions of dollars toward causes of “racial justice” — as if that’s something you can order up next from the new McDonald’s app.

What this money was supposed to achieve was never very clear, but it was money, and it was there for those smart enough to seize it. In 2020, as cities descended into violence and buildings burned in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd, the cash flowed even faster. The dollar amounts offered by Wall Street and Silicon Valley are astounding — a Washington Post analysis of donation commitments in 2020 alone totaled nearly $50 billion. The corporate image from that summer of love came when, emulating Colin Kaepernick, Jamie Dimon went to his bank lobby and took a knee. The revolution will be televised, it will not be silenced, and it will be brought to you by JPMorgan Chase.

As any successful author does, Coates — even his detractors admit his work is often beautifully written — inspired lesser imitators. The Ibram X. Kendis and Robin DiAngelos of the world offered institutions convenient forms of delivery for corporate tithes toward their supposed race-related failings. Presented as an ambitious project to make the world a better place, the grift was barely hidden behind the threat toward stock prices for those who didn’t toe the line. These racial reckoners were irritating and obvious, but they did not come cheap: for the low, low price of a new foundation, you too could get your company off the naughty list. A modern version of Jesse Jackson’s shakedowns of the past with an intellectual veneer, in actuality the hucksters were the real-life version of Greenzo from NBC’s 30 Rock, a tacky environmental mascot fueled by corporate dollars who eventually goes drunk with power. “They love Greenzo in every demographic: colored people, broads, fairies, commies,” Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy announces proudly, before adding: “Gosh, we’ve gotta update these forms.”

Coates did not fall into the trap of this new version of a very old game. Instead, he wrote. Always interested in strains of comic book and nerd culture, Coates went to Marvel to create Black Panther and Captain America comic books (riling author Jordan Peterson, because it presented villain Red Skull brandishing his version of 10 Rules for Life). He wrote a series of books, including his 2015 bestseller Between the World and Me, where he writes movingly to his son about the challenges of living in a black body in a white world: “You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heel, and to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.”

Such emotional writing earned Coates the praise even of some of his critics. But beneath the pathos, there was a disturbing undercurrent which indicated a total lack of empathy for those he sees as other, disconnected from himself. Writing of the first responders who died trying to rescue the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York, Coates compared them to cops who shoot unarmed black men: “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”

This is one version of Coates — the Civil War scholar, the thoughtful critic, the serious young father, wrestling with the weight of the worst aspects of human nature and trying to discover a path through the darkness, driven toward more extreme positions because of years of frustration. And there is another version, whose attacks are continuous with his entire lifetime of work, not some departure.

In 2024, once again, Coates released a book amid an intense real-world conflict: this time it is The Message, a middle-aged travelogue of sorts, in which Coates visits three locations and offers his commentary on the lessons gained. But his visits to Senegal and South Carolina are not the reason this message is controversial — by now everyone knows that it’s the third place: East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Coates depicts them as the most racist place on earth, the closest modern equivalent to the Jim Crow South of his father’s past: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel.” He denounces Israel’s presence there as occupation and frames the state’s very existence as an affront to humanity.

As Coates took to the circuit to promote his new book, Israel was fighting a war that attempted to rescue hostages held since the brutal attack from Gaza in October 2023 and to end the immediate threats posed by Hamas and Hezbollah, engaging in a series of audacious raids and targeted attacks that drew international controversy and roiled the politics of America’s Democratic Party. Once again, he was in the thick of it — in a moment that offers a lesson on how things have changed, and how Coates himself has been part of the changing.

Appearing on CBS News’s normally sedate morning program, host Tony Dokoupil — a convert to Judaism, with two children who live in Israel — confronted Coates in a moment that went viral before the segment even ended:

I have to say, when I read the book, I imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards and the acclaim, took the cover off the book, the publishing house goes away — the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist. So then I found myself wondering: why does Ta-Nehisi Coates… leave out so much? Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the first and the second intifada, the café bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits? And is it because you don’t believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?… What is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state that is a Jewish safe place and not any of the other states out there? Why is there no agency in this book for the Palestinians? They exist in your narrative merely as the vic-ims of the Israelis, as though they were not offered peace at any juncture.

The interview was combative by the standards of morning television, but it was not particularly acrimonious. That came after, when Dokoupil’s colleagues created an internal firestorm, spawning a series of struggle sessions and lightning from on high, from that most terrifying of entities, the “CBS News standards and practices team and the in-house Race and Culture Unit” — which has the very important task of monitoring “context, tone and intention.” Dokoupil was chided by company authorities for having the audacity to question Coates so directly, because ten years on from “The Case for Reparations,” it is assumed that the case has been made. Dokoupil had unintentionally done the unthinkable: he had asked a series of tough questions of someone who is no longer to be questioned.

The New York Times’s John McWhorter — a Coates critic, who has described The Message as deeply unimpressive — wrote in response to the controversy:

The idea that Coates should not have been asked such tough questions reflects a pernicious image of Black people, and Black men in particular, that first gained traction in 2020 and 2021, when antiracist virtue signaling too often transmogrified into an extreme grotesque… If it had been a white author in the hot seat that day, I find it impossible to imagine that anyone would have sounded any internal alarms. Certainly no one would have summoned the Race and Culture Unit.

In short order, Coates himself proved that the line of questioning was more than apt. In a follow-on interview with Trevor Noah, asked about the October 7 attacks, the author considered what it would take for him to have personally joined in the slaughter of Jewish concertgoers. “I haven’t said this out loud but I think about it a lot,” Coates said, imagining a life as a younger man living in the “giant open-air jail”; he might, he said, very well have signed up to parachute into the fray. “The wall comes down, am I strong enough, or even constructed in such a way, where I say, ‘This is too far’?” Coates daydreamed, 1,200 dead men, women and children laid out before his bloody fantasy: “I don’t know that I am.”

Interviewed for New York magazine by Ryu Spaeth, Coates displayed the trait he’s now perfected as a personal art form — intentional vagueness in answering the question of what comes next.

His job now, as it has always been, is to speak truth to power, not figure out what one might actually do with it. When I asked Coates what he wanted to see happen in Israel and Palestine, he avoided the geopolitical scale and tended toward the more specific — for example, to have journalists not be “shot by army snipers.” He said that the greater question was not properly for him; it belonged to those with lived experience and those who had been studying the problem for years. Pragmatism, at any rate, has never been his concern. As Stossel told me about working on “The Case for Reparations,” “I was trying to push him in the direction of ‘Well, how would this actually work in practice?’ And he, shrewdly, was like, ‘Well, I’m not going to get into that.’”

Coates today is an indictment of the discourse he helped create: the latest in the long line of African-American antisemites beloved of the left. The unending nature of racial recrimination, corporate-backed and branded, guarded by the high walls built for our elites, has birthed a wheeling ouroboros where grace and forgiveness for our fellow man is impossible. The Message isn’t the thoughtful or considerate writing of a man ten years younger — it is a simplistic, deliberately and aggressively antisemitic piece of hate. And even in some fantastical end where Coates’s original mission was achieved — if with a Thanos-like snap of his fingers Coates’s ”Case for Reparations” were put in place overnight — there would still be an Israel. And that is unacceptable to him.

Since that Atlantic cover story changed his life, the central question of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s cultural impact has been this: is he primarily motivated by love for his own, or hatred for the other? The Message definitively answers the question: he hates his perceived enemy much more than he loves his putative community. He hates who he fights against more than he loves who he fights for. That is not a mission of love, but a pathology of hate.

There will be another Coates book, of course — he sells too well for there not to be. You can reasonably expect the form it will take: bearing witness to the world, he will arrive at a great moral truth, which will be simple and pure. And yet when this great mind is asked for solutions, having divined the moral truth that’s eluded all the great thinkers and historians who have read and worked for generations, he will be blank. That’s not his job. It’s yours. He makes the case. You go to the struggle session. He takes the prize. You do the work.

Perhaps it was always this way — the mission of a Sharptonesque radical, even dressed up in fancier words, is still a case for pogroms. Coates’s work at Marvel Comics, combined with his caricatures of Jews now, reveals that his core skill has always been, fundamentally, cartooning. Command of rhetoric can only go so far in masking the core of intellect and perception that a writer must have. Ta-Nehisi Coates, without them, is a tragic figure — not just an antisemite, but depressingly, boringly, ordinary.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 2024 World edition.