Transcript of Ta-Nehisi Coates On Why Books Scare People

I'm Ayesha Rosco, and this is the Sunday story from Up First. Every Sunday, we do something special, going beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. A decade ago, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates ignited a national conversation with his article in The Atlantic titled The Case for Reparations. A year And later, he released his book, Between the World and Me, which explores the realities of being Black in America. Now, in his new book, The Message, he takes readers on a journey to three places: Africa, the American South, and the Middle East. He starts in Senegal, where he visits the Door of No Return, a memorial to the victims of the Atlantic slave trade. Then to South Carolina, where his previous book has been the subject of book bans. And finally, to the West Bank, where he found himself reckoning with his own understanding of the conflict there. Ta-nehisi Coates joins me today. Ta-nehisi, thank you for being here.

Thank you for having me.

You start out talking about this book almost as if it's an overdue writing assignment. You promised an essay for a writing workshop and you never got to it. Instead, it feels like the world this book. Is that really what happened?

I did have an overdue writing assignment. I definitely did. What it was supposed to be was the chapter on Dakar, actually. That second semester I was at Howard, I traveled to Dakar, Senegal. And I had told them when I got back that I was working on this thing, and they were submitting their essays. And so in the spirit of workshopping, I would submit mine, and I never got it done.

When did you know that you would do this book?

I've been meditating for some time on the power of literature and art, and I've felt for some time that people have a very, very narrow view of politics, and that literature and art actually influence our politics more than we think. I think we forget that, for instance, the infamous Charlottesville rally began with a statue. You can say statues are not very important, but why were these people so inflamed? That you had a situation where it rose to the level of the White House and the President at the time, and you had somebody that ended up being killed. What was it about that? And so I maintain that our culture, our arts, our monuments, our memorials, our stories, our movies, our television shows, they actually have a lot to say about our politics and a big influence on our politics.

When you say politics, like when you were looking for this book, did you look for it to be a message ahead of this specific presidential election? I'm going to guess you might say you wanted it to be bigger than that, but people are thinking about the election.

They are. I didn't know. I really didn't know at the time. I didn't know what the situation would be. I certainly did not know we would have a first Black woman and a Howard alum, of all people, actually running for president. So that I was not aware of.

But were you thinking about maybe Biden, Trump? Were you thinking about that politics? Or you were thinking of what type of politics? But it is.

But Ayesha, ultimately, it is that. It is that politics, ultimately. It's just not just that. What I maintain is that there is a moment where all of us go into, hopefully, all of us, go into a voting booth and we make a choice between candidates. And oftentimes, I find that people are somewhat frustrated by the choices they have. Well, there are choices that are being made even before you go into that booth. And my argument and the message in part, one of the arguments, is that a large part of that is around what we think of as issues and people who we can actually find viable or who we believe belong within the range of choices that we have. I remember when I was writing the case for reparations, what I thought about all the time, over and over again, was this Dave Schiappa skit about reparations, where Black people get reparations and they go out and they blow it on a bunch of stuff. And I thought that was funny, obviously. But when I thought about writing, one of the things I thought was I have to move reparations out of that idea in the imaginative space, that it's just a cash give away to Black people, which they will then go and waste.

I was thinking culturally, even then, even though I was thinking about a political issue.

Well, in the book, it also seems to, obviously, it's about culture, but you take it into a the politics of place or the art of place, culture of place. Maybe I'm trying to sound deep when I said that, but do you know place can be very important? You go to Senegal, you go to South Carolina, you go to the West Bank in Eastern Jerusalem, Palestine. What is the connective tissue that you found between those places?

There's a meta-aspect to the message, where on the one hand, it is making an argument, but on the other hand, it tries to demonstrate that argument also. And one of the arguments that's made very early in the book is that I believe that the most powerful writing is that writing that clarifies that writing that makes the world tangible. Writing is an abstract art form. You know what I mean? You're talking about words. So how can you use words to make people feel what you feel, to make them feel like they saw what you saw, or experienced what you experienced? And in my experience, and perhaps this is just because of my training as a journalist, and maybe you'll see some of this yourself, that is very hard if I have not gone through some aspect of the experience myself. So if I have not gone to the place, but I want to write about the place, a lot of times I have found myself getting into trouble like that. And so for the message, I wanted to make sure that even as I was writing about something that can sometimes seem abstract, writing its relationship to politics, culture, its relationship to politics, that I myself was not abstract as a writer.

Be a vessel for that. Yes. Now, I was very fascinated by your journey to Africa, to D'Acourt. In that essay, you talk about the stories that Black people were told about their origins, their inferior, all of this. And then the stories that we tell ourselves to counteract that. We're the descendants of royalty, where all of these things. But then you reject all of that. But then when you get to Senegal, you get to the door of no return, even though you know the truth of it, that likely few enslaved people actually went through that door. You're moved to tears when you're leaving that place. What happened to you there?

I'm still trying to figure that out.

Well, yeah, because I was shocked because as a writer, you kept saying in that essay, you didn't have words. I'm like, How you don't have words? You're a writer.

Well, what happened... It's so funny. It's like I always tell my students not to say that. But the message is in many ways an incomplete work. And I think in Africa and in Dakar, that is where the incompleteness shows itself the most. I am on the one hand of the mind, and I conclude at the end of that essay, that in fact, to base your self-worth as a people, to base your self-esteem on being Black or being part of the African diaspora or part of the Black diaspora on the same metrics of the people that enslaved you, on the same metrics of the people that ethnically cleansed and genocided this continent is a mistake. That the worth of a people do not live or the worth of any people, any people in this world, cannot live in stone, it cannot live in monuments, it can't even live in great works of writing. That it is in act self-evident, that it's within the bones, it's within the flesh. And so all of this conversation about who we are the descendants of, our need to put ourselves in the shoes of people that did great things or made great work jokess, is to, in fact, to repeat the mistake.

And so once you abandon that, what are you left with? What is your relationship to this country? What is your relationship to this continent? And that was That's really what I was in pursuit of.

And what is it, though? Because I think it is so complicated as a Black American, born in this country, to go to Africa and to feel... I think often, I haven't been, But I know people will feel a connection. But then there's this push and the pull because people will say, But you're not from here. You don't know your home here. I'm sure you've heard of the diaspora wars. You know this. There are Black Americans who say, I'm not African. I've never been there. That's not me. So I guess, how do you reckon with all that? And what is it to us? What is Africa to you?

I can't make anybody feel a certain way. And I wouldn't ask anybody. If you don't feel a connection to Africa, that's certainly your right and your ability. There's some of us that are, well, basically all of us who are the descendants of slaves who have ancestry in the Southerners country, and we don't feel that either, some of us. So I think that'll be up to every individual person. And by the same token, I didn't go there looking for acceptance necessarily.

Or like a kinship or something like that.

Well, maybe kinship, but not necessarily acceptance. I didn't show up. You had to break out the drums for me and say, Welcome home, brother. I didn't need that. What I will say to you is what I found probably the most concrete thing I found was two things. The first thing is, and this is out for one trip, I do want to say got. This is the site of my creation as an African-American. My great, great, great, great, great And then in the plantations of this country here, we were genocided and created into a new people. But the process begins there. The great epic that I rooted myself in, the great Black American epic, the great Black diaspora epic, I was at the origin point. That was deeply moving. That was incredibly, incredibly moving. So moving that, what I would say is if there was one flaw in the trip I took, I don't know that I saw the people. I certainly didn't see enough of them. What I saw was ghosts. You know what I mean? What I saw was visions of myself and to some extent, America. But by the same token, it's very, very hard to capture a place or capture the complexity of a place in one trip in three or four days.

And obviously, that trip and that writing, I really think a lot about that, I think, and thinking about the connections to the continent.

You got to go.

I got to go one day. I got to go. You also go to South Carolina. You talk about a teacher who risk her job to keep teaching your book between the world and me. And this is where you get into book bands and censorship. And I mean, that's like politics, having an impact on art, art impacting politics. But you say in one passage that much of the hoopla about book bands and censorship gets it wrong. What do we get wrong?

Oh, so much. I mean, I can't remember what exactly I was talking about in that passage. But I think the first thing I would say off the top is that I, as the writer and the author of the book, I am not the victim.

You were saying that. You were saying it's not personal, so you don't take it personally. It's not you are not being victimized.

I don't. And I'm also not the person that's going to suffer. I mean, every time one of these articles come out, to be frank about it, I sell more books. So I think my personal offense and to make it about me misses the point. The people that are hurt, the people that are really hurt are the children and the students there. And they're not necessarily hurt because they need to be exposed to my voice or my books or whatever, or they need to adopt my politics or my particular view of the world. But I know that the seed of me as a writer is so much varied literature in terms of its type, genre, perspective, et cetera. And what all of that literature had in common was to open the world for me and to say that I was free to find my own politics, my own views, my own future. I did not necessarily have to even believe everything that was said within my own house. But see, that scares people. That really, really, really scares people because there is a style of parenting that says your job is to inculcate your child with your particular beliefs and not have them deviate in any real way.

And the danger of writing, I mean, the danger of the wider world, period. But because of the way writing works and how many wider worlds it can expose you to, is that you might lose control of that.

Is there a reason why you think writing catches more than even other forms of media? Because you would think with the Internet and all these things, that would be much more dangerous than the writing.

No, the writing is extremely dangerous, and the books in particular are very dangerous. And again, this is one of the reasons why I wrote the message, because I don't think we perceive this. In fact, I think the people who are in favor of book bands understand the power of books much, much better than those that oppose them. Books are an intimate art form. I write about this in the message. Books are intimate. It's a one-on-one connection. So that kid in South Carolina, that 15-year-old, 16-year-old kid, is taking between the world and me or whatever other book they're reading. They're taking it into their bedroom And they're having a connection with them that nobody else can actually perceive. Even if you took the book from the kid and read it yourself, you would still not have the same interaction because the way books work is they are necessarily a union between the imagination of the reader and the words that are on the page. Everyone's experience with a book is different.

Because you see what you visualize, what you connected to, what it reminds you of, all those things.

That's right. I mean, haven't you heard somebody say, they saw the movie that was based on a book and it was like, I didn't like it. It wasn't quite what I saw.

It wasn't what you saw. Yeah, that wasn't what you saw. I didn't think they would look like that. I didn't think they would sound like that.

The writers of books have the ability to achieve an intimate connection with every single reader. And you start talking about people's children. I mean, people start to feel that way about that.

I guess, do you fear the book bands and what they are trying to or what is being accomplished through these sorts of actions?

Do I fear the book bands?

Yeah. Do you fear them? Do you feel like...

I don't know if I fear them. I don't know that I fear them. But I do think people's worlds can be closed. And I guess I fear that more than I fear the book bands. I fear an effort to close the minds of young people in this country.

When we come back, we discuss the part of his book that has everyone talking. Stay with us. Who's claiming power in this election? What's happening in battleground states? And why do we still have the Electoral College? All this month, the Thru-Line podcast is asking big questions about our democracy and going back in time to answer them. Listen now to the Thru-Line podcast from NPR.

For a while now, you've probably been hearing about book bands, how they're gaining momentum everywhere in Texas, in Missouri, Florida, and Pennsylvania. On the Code Switch podcast, we're taking a look at why.

Why are so many books suddenly considered so No Dangerous to kids?

Listen to our new series on the Code Switch podcast from NPR. Hey there, this is Felix Contreras, one of the co-hosts of Alt Latino, the podcast from NPR Music, where we discuss Latinx culture, music, and heritage with the artists that created. Listen now to the Alt Latino podcast from NPR.

The longest essay in the book is on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and that's the one that's going to get the most attention. It's likely the one that will have the most impact on you. Why did you choose to delve into this topic, which is one of the most, if not the most, fraught topic of public discourse today?

Well, the fact was probably my most celebrated work of journalism is the case for reparations. Whether I liked it or not, or whether I thought much about it or not, I had already delved into it. That essay has a section in which it talks about reparations from the state of Germany to the state of Israel as recompense for the survivors of the Holocaust or those fleeing the Holocaust, in fact, of fleeing Nazi Germany's existential violence to Israel. Reparations for that is used as an example. And I was roundly, and sometimes loudly critiqued for using that as an example. And I had to reckon with that. There's a way of reckoning where you release a statement or maybe you make a speech somewhere, maybe you talk about it. But I'm a writer. And just like I had written that section, it felt only right to reckon with this in my writing. And the way to reckon with it wasn't necessarily to sign a petition saying I support a certain group's rights or I support a certain perspective. The way was to go see it. And to figure out what had happened, why I had used that example, whether I was wrong.

If I was wrong, why was I wrong? And that's what that essay is largely about.

Do you feel like journalists are naive believe in their coverage of the conflict?

I think we have a structural problem. I haven't been able to get these numbers, and maybe at some point I would, but I would be very interested, for instance, in the number of Palestinians who are working in the bureaus of major newspapers, major magazines, major stations in Jerusalem. I'd be very interested in that. I'd be frankly interested in how many Black people are. I would like to know that I think we are getting a certain perspective of the world, of that conflict that originates in people who don't always have direct experience in what it feels like to be deprived of your ability to determine your future while another group of people who only live walking distance away They have that power.

What do you think that would show, or do you think that the people who are affected by the policies are not the ones who are telling the story? Is that what you mean?

Well, here's what I would say. I am here talking about this book as a Black writer, and I'm being interviewed by a Black journalist who went to the same school as I did.

I didn't go to Howard. I did.

Yes, you did. Yes, you did. There is a conversation that you and I can have that is very, very different than the conversation that somebody who doesn't have that experience has. That doesn't mean I'm not going to talk to anybody else. That doesn't mean I shouldn't talk to anybody else. It just means that there is a certain perspective and a certain tenor to this conversation that comes out of our shared experience. I think we recognize that across journalism. I think we would say if the New York Times, the Washington Post, did not have any Black people covering race in this country, I think we would say that's a problem. I think we would say that that doesn't quite work for us. And I think we have said that. I am asking that we exploit that same standard to Israel, to Palestine, to the Jerusalem Bureau, the same standard that we would hold anywhere else, not a new one. And that doesn't mean that white people shouldn't cover race. Certainly, in fact, it absolutely does not mean that. It just means that other people should cover it, too.

Ultimately, what do you want the message of this book to be for those that read it? What do you want this to say about you? Because in the book, you said each of your books represent a part of you and a version of you. A child. So what is the message? Is the message that child that went out and got kicked out of school because she took it too far? Who is the message?

I don't know yet. I don't know yet. I mean, that remains to be seen because the book just came out. What I do know is this. It is a book that is concerned with the world that is not here and is not necessarily directly present in our lives. What I mean by that is the message is very, very much concerned with the tradition of Black writing and with the Black freedom struggle, and thus my ancestors who came before me. And it is very, very deeply, deeply concerned with that generation of writers, Black, White, or otherwise who have not yet come. And what I am trying to do is use this book to forge a link between those two worlds. That tradition means something. It represents something. It calls on us to do things and to say things and to write things. And those things will not always be convenient. I think about the moment, and I talk about this, I've talked about this before, before I took my trip to Palestine. And I was going with a friend who's a writer also, and I was thinking about how scared I was. Not that anything would happen to me, but I just had this feeling that I'm going to see something, and when I come back, I will not be the same.

And I didn't want to go. But I thought about Adi B. Wells with a price on her head, going through the south, reporting on lynching. And I thought about Frederick Douglass telling his story of enslavement while his own relatives were enslaved at that moment, and he himself had a price on his head. Me and my friend, we said to each other, What right do we have to our fears? We have promises to keep. And this is a book about promises that I have to keep to the stories I heard when I was over there, and to, as I said, my ancestors who came before me and to the writers who are yet to come.

Ta-nehisi Coates. He is the author of The Message. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Martin Patience and Andrew Mambo. It was edited by Ed McNulti and Liana Simstrom. The engineer was James Willets. The rest of the Sunday Story team includes Justine Yann and Jenny Schmidt. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Ayesha Rosco. Up First will be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Have a great rest of your weekend. Want to hear this podcast without sponsor breaks? Amazon Prime members can listen to Up First, sponsor-free through Amazon Music. Or you can also support NPR's vital journalism and get Up First Plus at plus. Npr. Org. That's plus. Npr. Org. This Hispanic Heritage Month, Codeswitch sits down with Mexican-Cuban-American journalist and author Paula Ramos to discuss the rise of US Latinos to the far right. It's a small but growing shift in American politics. Paula Ramos thinks she knows what's behind it. Listen on the Code Switch podcast from NPR.

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