Ta-Nehisi Coates Keeps Me From Despair

I’ve always liked Ta-Nehisi Coates.

He’s roughly my age and the world he experienced in Baltimore and Washington during the early War-on-Terror years coincided with my time in both places. I know the culturally ghettoized, socially tiered existence within which he made his name as a writer. Crucially, I read some of his earliest work in Washington City Paper—then a free print publication scattered across park benches in the capital—years before he became a sensation with his first memoir, The Beautiful Struggle.

But putting aside my spiritual fidelity to the man, I can say now that Ta-Nehisi Coates is the truest successor to James Baldwin that I’ve seen in my generation.

I’ve thought this for some time, but it’s really in evidence with the way he’s leveraging mainstream media’s embrace of him. With access to TV morning shows, Coates can reach large numbers of well-meaning older people whose sleep would be otherwise untroubled by their imperial mode of living because they don’t recognize it as such. Coates productively disturbs their slumber in ways that most of us simply don’t get the chance to.

Unlike 99.9% of even popular authors, Coates got invited to promote his new book on the CBS Morning Show. It was an outrageous, galling, and revealing six-minute interview in which Coates showed restraint, moral conviction, and poise.

One of several key exchanges from the six-minute clip came when his interviewer launched into a screed that basically threw Coates under the bus: