Ta-Nehisi Coates talking:
Malcolm and the Panthers had a tremendous influence. These are my first sources, you know, of skepticism, the notion that one should be skeptical of the narratives that one is presented with. That’s the first place I learned it.
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. The African-American tradition, in the main, is very, very church-based, very, very Christian. It accepts, you know, certain narratives about the world. I didn’t really have that present in my house. As you said, my dad was in the Black Panther Party. The mainstream sort of presentation of the civil rights movement was not something that I directly inherited.
And beyond that, you know, I have to say, that just as a young man and as a boy going out and navigating the world, the ways in which the previous generation’s struggle was presented to me did not particularly make sense. And so, notions of nonviolence, for instance, when I walked out into the streets of West Baltimore, seemed to have very, very little applicability. Violence was essential to one’s life there. It was everywhere. It was all around us. And then, when one looked out to the broader country, as I became more politically conscious, it was quite obvious that violence was essential to America—to its past, to its present and to its future. And so, there was some degree of distance for me between how—my politics and how I viewed the world at that time and what was presented as my political heritage.
And instead, I very much gravitated, you know, to my dad’s sort of political activism with the Black Panther Party, and really to Malcolm X, who, you know, I would argue, influences this book, who had a very, very pragmatic, tactile view of America and of history. You know, I can remember in “Message to the Grass Roots” him saying, you know, “Don’t”—you know, he’s critiquing nonviolence, and so he says, “Don’t give up your life. Preserve your life. It’s the best thing you have going. And if you’ve got to give it up, make sure it’s even-steven.” And some hear that as braggadocio, but for me, it was a profound claim about the value of your body, that your body is the most essential thing you have, and it should not be sacrificed because these folks down in Mississippi or Alabama are out of their mind. Preserve your body. And that, to me, was just so beautiful and so real. It was not esoteric. It made perfect sense to me.
He was the most honest man. He’s the first honest man I knew of, somewhat. You know, I knew other honest men, but, you know, in a bit of hyperbole, he was the first honest man—he was the first person I heard, and it matched what I saw when I walked outside. It matched what I saw when I opened up my history books about the country. It just seemed, you know, when he says—you know, when Malcolm says, if violence is wrong in America, then violence is wrong—that is such a, you know, essential critique, that should be levied, as far as I’m concerned, before any president that stands up on Martin Luther King Day. Either violence is wrong, or it’s not. You know, one has to justify it. And so, that was just profound to me.
living in fear. I can remember, as I talk about in the book, being a young man coming out of my elementary school, seeing what should have been just an after-school yard fight and seeing one of these boys pull out a gun, and being very, very present at the age of, say, 11 years old that children were walking around with the ability to end the lives of other children, are going into middle school, and having an entire ritual totally devoted to making sure I was safe—you know, concerns about what I was wearing, concerns about who I was walking to school with, concerns about how many people I was walking to school with, concerns during lunchtime about where I was sitting, where I was spending my time—and at the same time being aware, dimly aware, that somewhere out in the world the majority of Americans did not have to carry that fear with them, you know, and then eventually understanding how that was connected to our politics.
When people hear the term “political prisoner,” especially on the left, it becomes a kind of abstraction. Folks are aware of injustice, and they’re aware that there are folks in prison who are in prison, you know, largely because of their activism. Eddie Conway is central to my first memories. My parents used to take me to, when it was open, the Baltimore city penitentiary to see Eddie Conway—I was talking to my dad about this recently—from the time I might have been one or two years old. I mean, literally, my first memories are of black men in jail, specifically of Eddie Conway. That was a huge, huge, huge influence on me, I mean, when you talk about like this notion of—just going back to your question, Juan—of violence, knowing that that was present.
And, you know, I had this conversation with my dad recently. I asked him; I said, “Well, why did you take me into a prison? Why would you take a three-year-old, four-year-old child into a prison?” And my memories of this are mostly of being bored and seeing the gates and, you know, the kinds of things that children will remember. And he said, “I wanted you to see the face of the enemy. I wanted you to see what you were up against.” You know? And so, in many ways, everything I’ve done as a journalist, up until and including this book, really begins like right back there. You know, it’s very difficult for me to imagine myself here right now without those experiences.
And let me just say how happy I am that he got out. You know, at some point in my mind, I probably began to conceive a world in which he would die in prison, and I’m happy he didn’t.
Howard University in the intellectual life of the African-American people in the United States.
this theme of the book of living under a system of plunder and about surviving and how you deal with that and how you struggle against it, within that are the beautiful things that black people have forged, you know, even under really, really perilous conditions. For me, Howard University is one of the most loveliest, for me personally.
To try to explain this, Howard is one of several historically black colleges and universities, is, I think, rather unique in terms of its size and in terms of its scope. It is a beacon point, the Mecca, as I call it, as it calls itself, you know, in the book, for the entire black diaspora around the world. And so, to come to Howard University at the age of 17, as I did, and to see black people from Montreal, to see black people from Paris, to see black people from Ghana, to see black people from South Africa, to see black people from Mississippi, to see black people from Oakland, to see biracial black people, to see black people with parents from India, to see black people with Jewish parents—you know, things that I had not encountered in West Baltimore—to see black people who took semesters off to go to other countries and live, to see black people with deep interests in other languages, it was tremendous.
And really what it showed me is, even within what seems like a narrow band, which is to say, you know, black life, is in fact quite cosmopolitan, is in fact a beautiful, beautiful rainbow. And to see all of these people, you know, of all these different persuasions, and to have that heritage—you know, Toni Morrison went to Howard. Amiri Baraka went to Howard. Lucille Clifton went to Howard. Ossie Davis went to Howard. And I was aware of that when I was there. Charles Drew went to Howard. Thurgood Marshall went to the law school. Being aware of that and having all of that brought to bear, again, it’s one of those things that I can’t really separate from my career as a writer.
one of the people I met, you know, whose life was very, very different from mine, whose background was very, very different from mine, was my friend Prince Jones. He was a child of Mabel Jones. Mabel Jones was born the child of sharecroppers in, you know, just deep, deep poverty in rural Louisiana. Through dint of her own intelligence, through dint of her own work, through dint of her own efforts, she raised herself up, became a doctor, went to LSU, served in the Navy, became a radiologist, you know, accumulated some amount of wealth, raised two beautiful children. One daughter went to UPenn. Her son, Prince, had the ability really to go to any Ivy League school, was tremendously, tremendously intelligent, chose Howard University, was attracted to this heritage, this legacy, went there.
And one evening—at this point, Prince was engaged to be married, had had a young daughter—one evening a police officer, who was dressed as an undercover officer, dressed as a—who was an undercover officer dressed as a criminal, was in pursuit of some other suspected criminal, somehow confused the two, followed my friend Prince Jones’s Jeep from Prince George’s County, Maryland, the suburbs of Maryland, through Washington, D.C., out into the suburbs again, into Virginia, where he shot him. And his explanation for this was that Prince tried to ram his Jeep.
But see, again, you know, it’s the people who are empowered by the state to kill who bear the responsibility, ultimately. And I have oftentimes tried to imagine myself in Prince’s shoes, finding out that somebody is following me, who’s literally dressed to be a criminal, you know, at 2:00 in the morning, across three different jurisdictions. How would I respond? Prince was shot, you know, mere yards from his fiancée’s home. Nothing was done about this. The officer was never prosecuted. The officer was in fact put back out on the streets to continue applying his trade. I had to sit with that for 15 years. And again, that was one of the events, not—you know, to say nothing of what his mother’s sitting with it—but that was, you know, another big, big element in wanting to write this book.
And this is towards the end of my interview with Mabel Jones, and she is trying to describe the impact of Prince’s death on her life and just on how she sees the world. Prince had a sister, and so, you know, I asked her about this, and she went here.
“I now wondered about her daughter, who’d been recently married. There was a picture on display of this daughter and her new husband. Dr. Jones was not optimistic. She was intensely worried about her daughter bringing a son into America, because she could not save him, she could not secure his body from the ritual violence that had claimed her son. She compared America to Rome. She said she thought the glory days of this country had long passed, and even those glory days were sullied: They had been built on the bodies of others. ‘And we can’t get the message,’ she said. ‘We don’t understand that we are embracing our deaths.’
“I asked Dr. Jones if her mother was still alive. She told her mother had passed away in 2002, at the age of eighty-nine. I asked Dr. Jones how her mother had taken Prince’s death, and her voice retreated into an almost-whisper, and Dr. Jones said, ‘I don’t know that she did.’
“She alluded to 12 Years a Slave. ‘There he was,’ she said, speaking of Solomon Northup. ‘He had means. He had a family. He was living like a human being. And one racist act took him back. And the same is true of me. I spent years developing a career, acquiring assets, engaging responsibilities. And one racist act. It’s all it takes.’”
one of my memories at Howard University is seeing Cornel West come there, actually, with Henry Louis Gates, you know, and face Howard—they had come down from Harvard, and, you know, we at Howard kind of looked at Harvard a little askance—and really, you know, just take on the really, really challenging questions from the audience and from the students there. It was deeply, deeply inspirational. It was one of those experiences that I could only receive at Howard University.
I don’t think Cornel West knows who I am. But—and I don’t mean like I’m all that, and he doesn’t know who I am. I mean I literally don’t—I think he saw this James Baldwin quote from Toni Morrison, and I think he then went and wrote, you know, a couple of Facebook posts. I wrote a book. People can read my book—I hope they do—and they can read his Facebook posts, and they can decide whether—you know, which has more merit. People can read Cornel West’s claim that I avoid any critique of the president, or they can go—and they can go to The Atlantic and see what I’ve actually written about the president, and then they can decide which is true. I have great, great admiration for Cornel West. I think he’s made a weighty contribution to black literature and to black letters. I hope he continues to do that.
There was not an Abraham Lincoln for every Jefferson Davis. As the great historian Ed Baptist responded: Wrong, every president up to Abraham Lincoln was Jefferson Davis. It simply is—that’s not—I mean, that’s just like factual. You know, Abraham Lincoln is singular. Abraham Lincoln, before he was killed, stood up and, you know, for the first time from any sitting president, stood for the right for suffrage for African-American men who had served in the Civil War. And that’s a limited suffrage, but it was quite radical at the time. It is rumored that John Wilkes Booth was there, heard that, said, “By God, that means nigger equality! I’ll run him through!” and then shot Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln was killed by the forces of white supremacy. He stands out as unique. There’s no other president like that.
What Jefferson Davis did, the idea that somehow holding people in slavery was an essential part of America is a very, very old belief. I mean, he’s a white supremacist. White supremacy is a very, very popular and trenchant belief in this country’s history and heritage. So those two things are just not equivalent. The Ku Klux Klan is not the opposite of the Harlem Children’s Zone. The Ku Klux Klan is the most profligate domestic terrorist organization in this country’s history. The Harlem Children’s Zone is an organization just based in Harlem, that is doing good work, but that there is not enough of across this country. The Ku Klux Klan was a national terrorist organization. It is not an answer—you know, one is not the answer for the other.
I had no idea why I was in school. And what I use all the time is I think about like the French language, and I think about how in seventh grade I was in a French class. And essentially what I was given was a list of words to memorize each day, that that meant—and this determined how successful you were in your French class. But I had no notion of how one would actually utilize French. I understood that France was some other place on the other side of the world, but it was effectively an abstraction. No one I knew spoke French. French was not useful to me. I just—I had no notion. And so, you know, with no investment, with nothing at stake, as far as I could see, directly, I cut up and acted a fool in that class. You know, lo and behold, here I am some 25 years later, and you can see that the world is quite big, that in fact language is actually—any language is actually really, really important, that it allows you to see more, that it allows you to bear witness.
I have a young son, you know, who I wrote to, my only son, who I wrote this to, who is very, very passionate about the French language, at the same age I was completely dispassionate, you know, totally anti. Well, he’s been raised in a world where he can see a language can actually take you places. He knows people who actually speak French. He’s seen other things. And so, for him, it’s very, very tangible. It’s not an abstraction for him. And so, much of the things I was angled towards in school, they were abstract. I could not figure out how they actually would improve me or do anything for me, and so that was a source of great, great frustration for me.
James Baldwin lived in France. He died in France. maybe there’s something about the country that attracts African Americans of a particular creative persuasion. What I can say you is, I had never perceived myself as walking in his footsteps in that aspect. You know, certainly, he’s probably the biggest influence on me from a literary perspective. But that, you know, really comes from my wife, who had all of this—she had this long romance with Paris from the time she was a child.
_____
Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the new book, Between the World and Me. He is a national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics and social issues. He received the George Polk Award for his cover story, “The Case for Reparations.” He is also the author of the memoir, The Beautiful Struggle.
— source democracynow.org