Background

Ta-Nehisi Coates was born in Baltimore, Maryland on September 30, 1975. His father, William Paul Coates, was a former member of the Black Panther Party. The younger Coates explains the derivation and meaning of his name as follows: “[F]or the record, Ta-Nehisi (pronounced Tah-Nuh-Hah-See) is an Egyptian name for ancient Nubia. I came up in a time when African/Arabic names were just becoming popular among black parents…. My Dad had to be different, though. Couldn’t just give me a run of the mill African name. I had to be a nation.”^[1]

Ta-Nehisi Coates studied journalism at Howard University for five years but failed both British and American Literature, and thus never graduated. Nonetheless, he was appointed as a visiting professor at MIT, one of the most prestigious universities in the country, where he complained about his disadvantages in “racist” America because of his skin color. He was also hired to write for several prestigious publications between the late 1990s and 2007, when he worked variously for the The Washington City Paper, The Philadelphia Weekly, The Village Voice, and Time. Moreover, he has been a guest columnist for The Washington Post, the Washington Monthly, O Magazine, and The New York Times (which once offered Coates a job as a regular columnist, only to have him turn it down).^[2]

Anti-American, Anti-White

Coates is an anti-American racist in the vein of his idols Jeremiah Wright and the late Malcolm X. In Between the World and Me, his most celebrated book—one which earned him a MacArthur Foundation “genius award”—he writes: “’White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, ‘white people’ would cease to exist for want of reasons.”^[3]

Raised with racist attitudes toward white people from an early age, Coates found a pretext for his racial malice in a September 2000 incident when his friend and former schoolmate, a young man named Prince Jones, was wrongfully shot and killed by a white undercover policeman in Maryland. Jones’s death, says Coates, “took me from fear to a rage … and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my days.”^[4]

On the morning of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that occurred a year after Jones’s death, Coates, stoned on marijuana, felt (by his own account) no emotion whatsoever as he stood on the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building and watched the World Trade Center collapse in the distance—largely because he believed that his own racist homeland was getting a dose of what it richly deserved. When he subsequently saw video clips of police and firefighters—whom he viewed as symbols of racist American institutions—trying to save civilians amid the ruins of the Twin Towers, Coates felt only contempt for those rescuers: “They were not human to me,” he recalls. “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.”^[5]

Hired by The Atlantic

Coates initially gained wide public acclaim in 2008 when he wrote his first article for The Atlantic, titled “This Is How We Lost to the White Man.” In that piece, he explored entertainer Bill Cosby’s controversial criticisms of black male criminality, black fathers who had abandoned their children, and the violent lyrics of gangsta rap. Coates likened Cosby’s perspective to the self-help black conservatism that Booker T. Washington had espoused a century earlier. Soon after Coates’s article appeared, The Atlantic hired him to write a regular blog column. Today he is a national correspondent for the same publication, writing about culture, politics, and social issues—with a particular emphasis on race.^[6]

First Book Published

In 2008 Coates published his first book, a memoir titled The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood. In it, the author reflects upon his relationship with his father, the street crime that surrounded him throughout his youth, the challenges he faced as a student in Baltimore-area schools, and his eventual enrollment in Howard University.^[7]

America’s “Fear of a Black President”

In 2012 Coates drew much attention for his article “Fear of a Black President,” which asserted that “part of [Barack] Obama’s genius is a remarkable ability to soothe race consciousness among whites,” and to downplay his own blackness in order to mollify an “infantile” country that feels threatened by any black man who fails to “talk in dulcet tones” at all times.^[8]

“The Case for Reparations”

In June 2014 Coates wrote what became perhaps his most famous article, “The Case for Reparations,” which claims that “America begins in black plunder and white democracy,” and that the entire remainder of U.S. history has been little more than an ugly continuation of that sinful genesis. While reparations payments to contemporary blacks would be, by Coates’s calculus, insufficient to truly settle the historical score, they would at least serve as a statement acknowledging that “the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences” is “the price we must pay” to address the fact that “American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution.”^[9]

Condemning America’s “White Supremacy”

In a subsequent article that same year, titled “Acting French,” Coates recalled: “Like many black children in this country, I did not have a culture of scholastic high achievement around me. There were very few adults around me who’d been great students and were subsequently rewarded for their studiousness…. I mostly thought of school as a place one goes so as not to be eventually killed, drugged, or jailed.” Moreover, Coates deemed it futile to “urge young black children toward education so that they may be respectable or impress the ‘right people,’” because the latter—whose minds had been poisoned by “a country rooted in white supremacy”—would inevitably “remain unimpressed.” “For most of American history,” Coates said in the same piece, “it has been national policy to plunder the capital accumulated by black people—social or otherwise. It began with the prohibition against reading, proceeded to separate and wholly unequal schools, and continues to this very day in our tacit acceptance of segregation….”^[10]

Scholarly Stints at MIT & CUNY

As noted earlier, Coates has been able to secure multiple journalism jobs despite having dropped out of college. Even more unusual is the fact that in 2012-13 he was the MLK Visiting Scholar for writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—virtually unheard of for someone without a PhD, let alone no bachelor’s degree. Moreover, in the fall of 2014 Coates joined the City University of New York as its Journalist-in-Residence.

Between the World and Me: Reflections on Race

In 2015 Coates published Between the World and Me, which became a #1 bestseller, captured the National Book Award for Nonfiction, earned the author a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and garnered nearly universal praise from the political left. Written in the form of a letter to his 15-year-old son, Samori, the book articulates a father’s worries about the dangers his boy will inevitably face as a black male growing up in America. Telling his son that “you have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels,” Coates urges Samori to live boldly and defiantly rather than “constrict yourself to make other people comfortable” in a nation where blacks always have “the gun to our head and the hand in our pocket.” In his 2015 book as well:^[11]

• Coates presents American history as an unbroken narrative of white-on-black atrocities. The nation, he charges, was developed “through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me [blacks] the right to secure and govern our own bodies.”^[12]
• With regard to a number of recent, highly publicized killings of blacks by police, Coates informs his son that “there is nothing uniquely evil” about these officers who were “endowed with the authority to destroy your body.” They “are merely men,” he explains, “enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy.” “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body,” Coates elaborates. “It is heritage.”^[13]
• In particular, Coates articulates the outrage he felt over a July 2014 altercation where an African American New Yorker named Eric Garner died of a heart attack after having resisted several police officers’ efforts, which included a headlock/chokehold, to arrest him for illegally selling cigarettes on the street. Medical examiners subsequently concluded that his death was the result of an interplay between the policeman’s hold and Garner’s multiple chronic infirmities. But Coates describes the incident as one where Garner was simply “choked to death for selling cigarettes.” The officer’s intent was “neither important nor relevant,” writes the author. “It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.”^[14]
• Contending that the racism of earlier ages persists virtually undiminished, Coates writes: “As slaves we were this country’s first windfall, the down payment on its freedom. After the ruin and liberation of the Civil War came Redemption for the unrepentant South and Reunion, and our bodies became this country’s second mortgage. In the New Deal we were their guestroom, their finished basement. And today, with a sprawling prison system, which has turned the warehousing of black bodies into a jobs program for Dreamers … our bodies have refinanced the Dream of being white.”^[15]
• Coates makes numerous references to these so-called “Dreamers” and their fanciful “Dream” which, by his telling, offers a false depiction of the United States as a decent, generous nation. It is a Dream, says Coates, that “rests on our [black people’s] backs, the bedding made from our bodies.” In the tradition of pre-Civil War America where “slavery was the dream,” Coates declares, today’s Dreamers are guilty of “pillaging Ferguson,” “torturing Muslims,” bombing wedding parties” with drones, disingenuously “quoting Martin Luther King,” and “exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong.” They “accept this as the cost of doing business,” says Coates, “accept our [black] bodies as currency, because it is their tradition.” As Coates sees it, “the policy of Dreamers”—rooted in “the reduction of the black body”—literally created “the killing fields of Chicago, of Baltimore, of Detroit,” where black-on-black crime has turned entire neighborhoods into war zones.^[16]
• Indeed, by Coates’s reckoning, even these intra-racial black transgressions (and others like them) are ultimately attributable to white racism. For example, he describes the violent abuse he received from his father during childhood as “the correct and intended result of policy” rooted in white supremacy. His father beat him, says Coates, “with more anxiety than anger” because he (the father) was “so very afraid” that “someone might steal me away, [which] was exactly what was happening all around us” in “White America.” Expressions of concern about “black-on-black crime,” Coates adds, are nothing more than “jargon” and “violence to language” intended to obscure the guilt of whites who oppress blacks in every way imaginable. “To yell ‘black-on-black crime,’” he argues, “is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding.”^[17]

Conservative author and columnist Daniel Greenfield characterizes Coates as “an absurdly privileged second-generation radical stuck on self-pity, touring European capitals while whining about racism, responding to white liberal adulation with fresh reserves of victimhood…. He’s a success story whose topic is his own oppression…. The more the media panders to Ta-Nehisi Coates, the more he claims to be the victim.”^[19]  Adds Greenfield:

“White supremacy is Coates’ religion. It causes all things and explains all things as Ta-Nehisi Coates attempts to peddle the shopworn Afrocentric ideas he grew up with to a modern audience. White people represent the omnipotent evil that Ta-Nehisi Coates needs in order to pretend to be an oppressed man engaged in a struggle while marketing that same struggle to the evil white people….

“The world of Between the World and Me is a cramped place in which white people are forever spindling, exploiting and mutilating black bodies … White people have oppressed Ta-Nehisi Coates in every literal and metaphorical sense possible, before moving on to oppressing his son and his descendants after him until the sun finally explodes and the earth dies. White evil is a remorseless historical force that has taken everything from black people while giving them nothing except visiting professorships at MIT.

“Between the World and Me is bad poetry. It’s a racist screed that masks its hatred in self-pity. Its strained attempts at lyricism are meant to cloud and confuse the underlying toxic ideas….

“Ta-Nehisi Coates is always on the verge of being shot by a police officer. Any police officer. When he isn’t sipping lattes at Starbucks while churning out new memoirs about his oppression, he is always one second away from having his ‘black body’ shattered by a random passing police officer or firefighter. This pretense of vulnerability is just bigotry. If a white person had written a memoir in which even minor encounters with black people instilled in him a sense of panic and hatred, the same critics praising Coates would be calling him out as a racist. But it’s a testimony to Coates’ black privilege that the same paranoid racist screed turned inside out is instead described as ‘passionate’ and ‘moving.’”^[20]

Honors & Awards

Among the numerous professional honors and awards Coates has received are the following:

• 2012: Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism
• 2013: National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism
• 2014: George Polk Award for Commentary
• 2015: Harriet Beecher Stowe Center Prize for Writing to Advance Social Justice
• 2015: MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, or “genius grant,” and its accompanying $625,000 stipend (for Between the World and Me)

“America’s Most Pampered Racist”

In light of the long list of job offers, professional honors, and monetary rewards Coates has received in exchange for his work as an agent of racial discord, conservative author and activist David Horowitz described him in 2016 as “America’s most pampered racist.”

Supporting Bernie Sanders for President

In February 2016, Coates announced that he was supporting Senator Bernie Sanders‘s campaign for U.S. President. It was “awesome,” said Coates, that “an avowed socialist” like Sanders was seriously “contending for the Democratic Party nomination.”^[21]

Continuing to Advocate for Reparations

In a June 2019 interview with The New Yorker, Coates revisited the theme of reparations. Among his remarks were the following:

“The case I make for reparations is, virtually every institution with some degree of history in America, be it public, be it private, has a history of extracting wealth and resources out of the African-American community. I think what has often been missing—this is what I was trying to make the point of in 2014—that behind all of that oppression was actually theft. In other words, this is not just mean. This is not just maltreatment. This is the theft of resources out of that community. That theft of resources continued well into the period of, I would make the argument, around the time of the Fair Housing Act.”^[22]

That same month, Coates testified at a House of Representatives hearing on H.R. 40, a bill that, if passed, would establish a commission to study the issue of reparations. Among his remarks were the following:

“Yesterday, when asked about reparations, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offered a familiar reply: America should not be held liable for something that happened 150 years ago, since none of us currently alive are responsible. This rebuttal proffers a strange theory of governance, that American accounts are somehow bound by the lifetime of its generations. But well into this century, the United States was still paying out pensions to the heirs of Civil War soldiers. We honor treaties that date back some 200 years, despite no one being alive who signed those treaties. Many of us would love to be taxed for the things we are solely and individually responsible for. But we are American citizens, and thus bound to a collective enterprise that extends beyond our individual and personal reach…. We recognize our lineage as a generational trust, as inheritance, and the real dilemma posed by reparations is just that: a dilemma of inheritance. It is impossible to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery….

“Enslavement reigned for 250 years on these shores. When it ended, this country could have extended its hallowed principles—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—to all, regardless of color. But America had other principles in mind. And so for a century after the Civil War, black people were subjected to a relentless campaign of terror, a campaign that extended well into the lifetime of Majority Leader McConnell…. [W]hile emancipation dead-bolted the door against the bandits of America, Jim Crow wedged the windows wide open….

“The typical black family in this country has one-tenth the wealth of the typical white family. Black women die in childbirth at four times the rate of white women. And there is, of course, the shame of this land of the free boasting the largest prison population on the planet, of which the descendants of the enslaved make up the largest share. The matter of reparations is one of making amends and direct redress, but it is also a question of citizenship. In H.R. 40, this body has a chance to both make good on its 2009 apology for enslavement, and reject fair-weather patriotism, to say that this nation is both its credits and debits….”^[23]

Warner Brothers Contract for a Black Superman

In February 2021, Warner Bros. announced that it had commissioned Coates to write the script for a new Superman film, which would feature a black actor as the main character.

Siding with Hamas after Its Deadly Attack Against Israel

At daybreak on Saturday, October 7, 2023 — which was the major Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah — the Islamic terror group Hamas carried out a massive, multi-front, surprise attack against Israel, firing thousands of rockets from Gaza into the Jewish state, while dozens of Hamas fighters infiltrated the Israeli border in a number of locations by air, land and sea. “In an assault of startling breadth,” reported CBS News, “Hamas gunmen rolled into as many as 22 locations outside the Gaza Strip, including towns and other communities as far as 15 miles from the Gaza border. In some places they gunned down civilians and soldiers as Israel’s military scrambled to muster a response.” Said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a statement: “Citizens of Israel, we are at war. Not an operation, not a round [of fighting,] at war! This morning Hamas initiated a murderous surprise attack against the state of Israel and its citizens.” By Sunday, October 8, at least 600 Israelis had been killed and 1,800 wounded, making it the deadliest day Israel had seen in decades. Also by October 8, more than 300 Palestinians had died in retaliatory Israeli airstrikes against Gaza. Moreover, Hamas took hundreds of Israelis hostage, including dozens who were American citizens, and moved them to the Gaza Strip. The terrorists also paraded Israelis’ mutilated bodies in Gaza to cheering crowds of Palestinians.

On October 8, 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that officers from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, along with agents of Hamas and three other Iran-sponsored terrorist groups, had recently attended meetings in Beirut to plan the operation. Said the Journal: “Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group.”

On October 14, 2023, Coates was one of 82 signatories to “An Open Letter from Participants in the Palestine Festival of Literature,” which lamented the plight of the Palestinians and harshly criticized Israel — not only for its military response to the recent Hamas attack, but for its alleged longterm mistreatment of the Palestinian people:

“We are writers and artists who have been to Palestine to participate in the Palestine Festival of Literature. We now call for the international community to commit to ending the catastrophe unfolding in Gaza and to finally pursuing a comprehensive and just political solution in Palestine. We have exercised our privilege as international visitors to move around historic Palestine in ways that most Palestinians are unable to. We have met and been hosted by Palestinian artists, human rights workers, writers, historians, and activists. We have stood on stage with them. Many of these people, including the festival organizers based in Palestine, are in fear for their lives right now. One festival organizer is locked down with their child in Ramallah, sharing updates about the people killed by armed settlers last night. One partner in Gaza, a magazine editor, is no longer answering messages.

“Israel has imposed what it calls a ‘complete siege’ and told 1.1 million people in Gaza to evacuate within twenty-four hours. To where? After six days of bombing that have already killed 2,215 people, 724 of them children, in the fourth major aerial bombardment in the sixteenth year of closure the question—to where?—rings unanswerable around the world. When Israel’s top general refers to Palestinians as ‘human animals’ and the US State Department deletes a statement calling for ‘a ceasefire,’ then we fear we are watching an ethnic cleansing on a scale unseen in decades.

“The governments of the USA, UK, France and others are participating in this crime by ramping up military support for Israel as it wages a war that its officials have plainly stated aims to turn Gaza into a city of tents, or even worse, empty of its people. A population of over two million people, mostly from families that were made refugees in 1948, half of whom are children, have been living under an Israeli and Egyptian blockade since 2007, and to many of them, being told to leave again is not an option. On Saturday, after sixteen years of siege, Hamas militants broke out of Gaza. More than 1,300 Israelis were subsequently killed with over one hundred more taken hostage—some of them friends and family of signatories to this letter. We deplore the loss of all innocent life and now, as we write this letter, Israel is executing the largest expulsion of Palestinians since 1948 as it bombs Gazans without discrimination.

“Our words feel small in this terrifying escalation. After so many years and so many deaths we must all, together, say this has to end, and that it can only end with a free Palestine.”

Footnotes:

1. “[William] Paul Coates” (Huffington Post, 4-10-2019); “An Interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates” (BookSlut.com, November 2008).
2. “Ta-Nehisi Coates Gets ‘Genius Grant’ for Hating Whitey” (American Thinker, 9-30-2015); “Fear of a Black Pundit: Ta-Nehisi Coates Raises His Voice in American Media” (Observer.com, 3-5-2013); “Writing a Column for the New York Times Is Harder Than It Looks” (by Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2-7-2013); “Ta-Nehisi Coates: America’s Next Top Victim” (by Daniel Greenfield, 7-27-2015).
3. “MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ Winners for 2015 Are Announced” (NY Times, 9-29-2015); “Letter to My Son” (by Ta-Nehisi Coates, 7-4-2015).
4. “A Caricature of Black Reality” (The American Prospect, 11-19-2015); “Officer Liable in Student’s Killing” (Washington Post, 1-20-2006).
5. “Why The Left Worships Ta-Nehisi Coates” (Breitbart.com, 7-21-2015); “Ta-Nehisi Coates’s New Book Betrays a Toxic Worldview” (National Review, 7-24-2015);
6. “Fear of a Black Pundit: Ta-Nehisi Coates Raises His Voice in American Media” (Observer.com, 3-5-2013); “‘This Is How We Lost to the White Man’” (by Ta-Nehisi Coates, May 2008).
7. “America’s Radical ‘Foremost Intellectual’” (American Thinker, 7-23-2015).
8. “Fear of a Black President” (by Ta-Nehisi Coates, September 2012).
9. “The Case for Reparations” (by Ta-Nehisi Coates, June 2014).
10. “Acting French” (by Ta-Nehisi Coates, 8-29-2014).
11. “Ta-Nehisi Coates Wins National Book Award” (NY Times, 11-18-2015); “Ta-Nehisi Coates’s New Book Betrays a Toxic Worldview” (National Review, 7-24-2015); “A Caricature of Black Reality” (The American Prospect, 11-19-2015).
12. “A Caricature of Black Reality” (The American Prospect, 11-19-2015).
13. “Why Ta-Nehisi Coates is in the Same Game as the Chattanooga Shooter” (American Thinker, 7-21-2015).
14. “A Caricature of Black Reality” (The American Prospect, 11-19-2015); “America Is So Overrun With White Supremacy That it Gave the National Book Award to Ta-Nehisi Coates” (National Review, 11-19-2015).
15. “A Caricature of Black Reality” (The American Prospect, 11-19-2015)
16. “America Is So Overrun With White Supremacy That it Gave the National Book Award to Ta-Nehisi Coates” (National Review, 11-19-2015); “Why The Left Worships Ta-Nehisi Coates” (Breitbart.com, 7-21-2015); “A Caricature of Black Reality” (The American Prospect, 11-19-2015)
17. “Ta-Nehisi Coates’s New Book Betrays a Toxic Worldview” (National Review, 7-24-2015); “A Caricature of Black Reality” (The American Prospect, 11-19-2015).
18. “Ta-Nehisi Coates is 2012-2013 MLK Visiting Scholar” (Shass.MIT.edu); “Ta-Nehisi Coates Named Journalist-in-Residence for the Fall Semester” (CUNY.edu, 5-1-2014).
19. “Ta-Nehisi Coates: America’s Next Top Victim” (by Daniel Greenfield, 7-27-2015).
20. Ibid.
21. “8 Black Leaders Backing Bernie Sanders” (Newsmax, 2-12-2016).
22. “Ta-Nehisi Coates Revisits the Case for Reparations” (The New Yorker, 6-10-2019).
23. “Read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Testimony on Reparations” (The Atlantic, 6-19-2019).