Ta-Nehisi Coates On Trump, Palestine and Journalism as a “Contact Sport”

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Am I pronouncing your name right?

Kara, it's fine.

Kara, okay.

You can call me anything you want.

Kara.

Having had gone through like mispronunciation and everything, I'm sensitive about it.

Yeah.

My wife last night was Ta-Nehisi. Kara, I was like, I got it.
I got it. I can do it.
It's on. Hi, everyone.
From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is writer and the Sterling Brown endowed chair in the English department at Howard University, Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Coates is considered to be one of the leading thinkers and writers of our time, especially on race. I've read Coates forever, obviously, many of his books.
He's just a beautiful writer, just on its face of it. He's taught me a lot of things and has a unique voice in American literature and writing in general.
During the Obama administration, he was a blogger and a major columnist at The Atlantic, documenting the nation's first black president and the question of whether we were truly a post-racial society. Spoiler alert, we weren't.
His writing is a combination of personal experience and detailed reporting through a historical lens. If you haven't read any of his work, you've probably heard about his 2014 essay, The Case for Reparations, in which he makes the argument for paying back Black Americans for the economic impact of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and policies like redlining that have contributed to the Black-white wealth gap.
It was one of the reasons he won a MacArthur Fellowship, which is also known as the Genius Grant. So, you know, I have not gotten one of those yet, though I fully deserve it.
That essay and Coates' memoir, a book-long letter to his son about being black in America between the world and me, which I also made my white sons read, and they love, have also put him in the political crosshairs. That book has been banned or attempted to be banned in a number of states.
And his latest work, The Message, has also fueled debate, even though it's not at least foremost about race. It's a travel log of trips to South Carolina, Senegal, and Israel-Palestine, and it's the last one that's put Coates in the spotlight,

this time calling out the oppression of Palestinians in Israel and the role that

the U.S. plays in the Middle East conflict.
But more than anything, this is a book for his students

at Howard about the impact and importance of writing. And it is beautiful writing once again.

And we waited till after the election specifically,

because we wanted to hear his thoughts as Trump 2.0 begins. Ta-Nehisi, thanks for being on On.
I appreciate you being here. As a listener, it is a pleasure to be here.
Good. Well, we try to have substantive conversations.
I know that's hard these days. We're going to talk about the new book, The Message, of course.
But obviously, I have to ask you about the election. So talk a little about your thoughts about the outcome of the election right now.
How do you feel it in the context of the things you're interested in? You know, I don't know. I don't know.
I have, to be straight with you, kind of tuned out from the news. Oh, yeah, a lot of people did.
I think we know what's going to happen. We might not know the details of what is going to happen, but I think, you know, Trump has never been a guy, at least in terms of this office, to say what he was going to do and not do it, or at least not try to do it.
So I think I'm pretty clear on what to expect. So I am processing my own thoughts about the campaign.
I guess one of the reasons why I've tuned out is I am kind of in an internal debate about what information is good information and what is bad. And I'm not clear.
And I thought this, you know, even before the election that up to the minute updates of, you know, whatever machinations are happening or appointments might be or might not be. I wonder, like, how much worth that has for me ultimately.

Yeah. For you or many people.
I mean, it's, there's a lot,

there's like 24 minutes of news and 24 hours of information.

Right. Exactly.

There's a lot of information, but not a lot of facts, right?

I just had that discussion with Yuval Harari about that is the information

has overwhelmed us like a flood when before it was a desert and kept very

closely by, you know, the elite, whatever you want to consider the elites. And now it's everywhere.
I'm going to steal that, by the way. Please do.
That's great. Please do.
Please steal everything. I'm a shoplifter myself.
But you went to Howard University. You've been teaching there.
It's also Kamala Harris's alma mater. And the place where she was going to have a victory celebration on Tuesday.
You sort of started the book dedicated to the people you're teaching, the young people. How do you talk to them after this? I did, actually.
Weirdly enough, I'm teaching a virtual course right now because it's in the middle of book tours, so I couldn't teach, teach, but I really wanted to have my hands there, so I'm teaching. So I had to talk to them, like night.
Um, like, so the next day I had to talk to them and you know, what I told them was, I know you're feeling not great right now. Um, and you know, there's depression and all of that, but, but this really is your moment.
Um, the message is, is steeped in, you know, a notion of, of, of black writing, and that is not merely writing by people with a, you know, a certain chromosome count or DNA. It really is about an experience.

And that experience has been one of, you know, unremitting oppression, repression, you know, extremely challenging circumstances.

And out of that, you know, has, you know, come, you know, just this profound body of literature and writing and journalism, as it would with any other group of people, and as it does with other groups of people who find themselves under such circumstances. And what I really wanted to emphasize to them is that this is their time.
The time is now. This is the tradition that they're in.
And this is not the worst moment in that tradition, even if it is a particularly challenging one. And so, you know, as depressed as they may be as people, you know, as writers, weirdly enough, they should be excited.
Right. Because it gives them a challenge.
I mean, you talked about that a lot in the book. We're going to get to the book in a minute, but I was particularly touched by your father when he wasn't paid that day or when he had a union job moving salt.
Is that correct? That's exactly right. And, you know, I thought that moment when he comes home and you said, daddy reads all the time, daddy reads to learn, was sort of what you might want to say to the students, right? That the unfairness or fairness doesn't, isn't really the point.
It's how you react to it. Yeah.
Yeah. It's the thing that of your control.
We all wish that we had a just world in which people, regardless of race, sexual orientation, or gender, class, etc., were respected. Where they were not made the targets and the butts of other people's cruelty and jokes.
Where they were not scapegoated for the problems of the world. We all wish we lived in that place, but we don't.
And so part of our job, you know, and I recognize everybody does not share this point of view, but it is, you know, my point of view and why I even became a journalist in the first place. But part of our job is to bring that world into existence.
And we don't do that by covering our heads and, you know, burying them in the sand. Or being an irritant, you know, being an irritant.
No, no, no. And I actually think that's a great point, though, like what you just said about being an irritant, because I think that there is a certain kind of person who has decided that somehow that's what the world needs.
you know? Tweeting out or unloading your particular thoughts at the moment of what you think, as opposed to maybe taking some quiet time, you know? Right. No, absolutely.
So one of the things I always say when I was talking about tech people, which I deal with almost all the time, was that they confuse a meritocracy with a meritocracy. So they feel like they got there on their own two feet.
And when in fact, it was through a series of special pushes up the ladder that they got all the way through. And they always seem confused when I say that.
Can I ask you a question about that? Yeah, sure. And I want to, because, and I'm sorry, I know I'm the one being interviewed.
No, please go right ahead. You're a journalist.
But you have so much expertise on this. And, you know, one thing I've thought about a lot is, why are they so opposed to the idea of any sort of moderation? Like, where does this theory come from that everybody should be able to say whatever they want in any place they want? Because the people who designed the systems never felt unsafe a day in their life jesus think about that you know you know i had an interesting exchange when we were living in shaw i was my one of my sons is six five the other's big you know he's a big guy and we were walking down the street and it was dark and so as a woman does i looked around like you know what i mean like i'm always like oh look at that alley look at women just just do that, naturally.
You can ask any woman. And my sons were both like, what are you doing? And I'm like, oh, does it occur to you, does it? You know, as a man, as a white man.
So it was really interesting. I think that's what it is.
They never felt unsafe. And when they do, what they consider unsafe is the feedback of normal criticism.
And then you're attacking them. And then everything.
And ultimately they don't really care. Ta-Nehisi, they don't care.
Do they have like a vision of a better world or like? Well, I think when their mottos are move fast and break things, that tells you a lot, doesn't it? That tells you a lot. Yes, it does.
It doesn't say move fast and change things or move fast and improve things or move fast and adapt. It says break.
I think they like to break the world. And so, although I think a lot of, some of them are very scared, especially who bought Kamala Harris.
So let's talk just a tiny bit more about this. I know everyone is trying to figure out what happened.
All the hot takes are exhausting me at this point. I certainly got it wrong.
One of the things we heard a lot of the echoes of something you wrote in 2017 after Trump won the first time, and you wrote, the collective verdict holds that the Democratic Party lost its way when it abandoned everyday economic issues like job creation for the softer fare of social justice. I think it's good to remember that that was the consensus, and you pushed back against that.
You basically said it was a racist backlash to Barack Obama. How do you look at this one? Is it still the economic issues versus, because Kamala Harris, you know, as many have pointed out, really did talk like a Republican.
She wasn't really leaning into social justice except for abortion. She certainly leaned in on abortion, but that's a different thing, I think.
I have heard that there's been this whole thing about, you know, she was too woke or, you know,

trans folk or, you know, like maybe that's why. And I just think, like, well, first of all, she didn't run on any of that.
That's the first thing. She was hanging out with Liz Cheney, but go ahead.
She was. She was.
I mean, the Biden administration was not really, I mean, they did all of the economic policy stuff that I think, you know, a lot of people have been clamoring for.

They actually tried to do it and did, you know, quite a bit of it.

And they still lost.

I think this is a thing that people say for two reasons on, you know, and I want to speak to a general and then I want to speak to something very specific. I think in general, it is very uncomfortable to think that perhaps policy is not the thing that people are always responding to in our elections.
That is disturbing, you know, and it's especially disturbing when you think that maybe it's, you know, something like race or gender or racism and sexism. You know, I can remember the studies that, you know, the political scientist Michael Tesla did, you know, on Obama where, you know, race affected everything down to like what people thought about this man's dog, you know? And so like taking that picture of the American people is disturbing.
It's not what we like to think about ourselves. And then I think there's something very specific happening with trans people in this country.
Because, and this is bothersome to me. I didn't see much talk about trans rights or anything like that.
You know, I wouldn't say the Democratic Party has really distinguished itself. You know, in advance of that.
She certainly didn't. And she certainly didn't.
She certainly didn't. And so what you're left with is, do you want these people to disappear? Like, do you object to their presence on the planet Earth? Do you want them to die? Like, do you see them, as a friend of mine once said, as redundant? As like, people who should have no public face whatsoever? Is that what we're talking about? you know because i mean i i didn't see it in the campaign which says to me maybe you object to it

being in the air right so maybe you object to them um which is dark and disturbing right i would say that you're correct about that i think go away or be quiet be quiet i think is more than you know uh which sort of you know feeds into protests that which was silence equals death, essentially. But Cara, you know, the thing about that is even the be quiet part of it, it's like, okay, so they say nothing, but Trump is actually the one that's doing the highlight.
That's correct. That's correct.
So then it becomes they're just existing. You know what I mean? Right.
And the fact of them existing is now a problem. Well, because they did stick their head above the parapet, right? They did for a moment.
And, you know, more than quiet, they want to take away trans kids' rights in schools and sports. They're obsessed with sports.
They started with bathrooms, and then that didn't work as well. But then sports was the, there's always an entry point to this kind of stuff.
You mentioned President Obama. During the campaign, he called out black men and said they were coming up with excuses not to vote for a woman.
You were super critical of that message. According to CNN exit polls, one in five black men voted for Trump.
Listen, voter turnout for Dems was down compared to 2020. Do you think Obama was right? Was misogyny a part of it at all? White women certainly voted for Trump.
I mean, people of color generally were very supportive of Harris in comparison. And you were critical, by the way, of Obama's respectability politics during his tenure.
I was, and I was critical of that statement, too. There's just no way in the world that misogyny and sexism did not play a role for men and for Black men, you know? I don't think that that is really debatable.
I will point out, as the numbers stand right now, there really wasn't much change in terms of the support of Black men, you know, for Biden and for her. Having said that, having said that, I don't think it's ever wrong to challenge any privileged group, you know, about their attitudes or their status.
I do think, though, when you're in a campaign and like what you're trying to do is get that group to go out and support a candidate. I'm not sure why that is the message.
The lecture. Right.
Like we really wouldn't accept that or expect that for anybody else.

You know, we would not say that Kamala Harris or whoever should go out and say, lecture white working class people on their racism when she's trying to get their vote. Right.
You know what I mean? Like, I wouldn't advise that. You know, I wouldn't advise that at all.
You know, and so I don't know too many black men that support Trump, but it's hard for me to believe that they would hear that and say, oh yeah, okay, that's going to get me off of the chair and go vote for Congress. You know, it was such an unusual...
Right, you suck. You suck.
Go vote. You know? That's kind of an Obama trade.
It is. But if it's not, if that's not like normal campaign, like what are you doing then? Right.
Like what exactly are you doing now? But one of the things that Trump did as a hustler supreme or the greatest troll in history was using ads and social media campaigns to pit groups against each other, us versus them. This is not a new thing.
Do you think that resonated more than the Democrats always big umbrella or rainbow coalition message? I think Charles Breaux wrote in The Times that it was the end of the rainbow coalition. Was freedom to abstract? Do you think there is the end of the rainbow coalition? I mean, I don't know.
I mean, not for me. You know, I mean, in terms of my politics, I mean, to me, what that means is a belief in a world in which, you know, people from different, you know, backgrounds all are united on a similar idea.

And that idea is that, you know, people should be equally respected, you know, and enjoy the benefits of a democracy and the bounty of this world equally. And so I do think that sometimes we assume that because people are suffering or under some sort of condition of material deprivation or have experienced material deprivation, that they will therefore be sympathetic to other people who are experiencing deprivation or oppression or whatever.
That is not true. That is not true.
And so I think that's a thing that has to be

grappled with in left politics, period, you know, across the board, you know, and maybe is not, you know, always. I also think, um, the dynamics, the political dynamics of the African American community are not like other communities.
Um, and what I mean by that is we are a community that have been that has has been here obviously, you know, um, for over 400 years, but most of that time we were enslaved. And when you are enslaved, it's not that you don't have politics, you do, but you're constantly choosing between awful choices.
You know what I mean? Like, like it's, you know, uh, I want to run away because my master is abusing me, but if I run away because my master is abusing me, he will then abuse my mother. So what do I do? That dynamic was basically true for us even after we were emancipated, election after election.
I mean, you're trapped between people who either outright despise you or people who don't want to be seen in public with you. And so what that means is our way of voting and considering candidates is very different than people who, you know, have come to this country and really do believe in the American dream, you know, as it's, you know, often proffered and are not, you know, into seeing presidential elections as this is the best we can make of it.
Right, right. And also not everybody everybody's the same, of course.
Not everybody's the same. One of the things that you talked about, because Harris sort of tried to go around that in a lot of ways, and bad choices is what you said about Harris and Io right before the election because of the Biden administration's support of Israel.
It seems like she lost a large percentage of Arab American voters in Dearborn. Some sat it out, a lot sat it out, and some went for Trump, but sitting it out seemed to be the trend more than anything.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's thrilled for Trump, which doesn't

bode well for the Palestinians. How much of a role do you think the war played in the election itself?

I think quite a bit, but maybe not in the way people think.

How so?

From what I can tell, the vote count is not large enough to have made a material difference in that sort of way.

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I think, I think, I think, I think, How so? From what I can tell, the vote count is not large enough to have made a material difference in that sort of way. I do think, though, like, I was at the DNC and I watched them run on all of these sort of, you know, quote-unquote Rainbow Coalition values.
And, you know, they had Fannie Lou Hamer up there, you know, who had been excluded, you know, from the Democratic Party, honored Shirley Chisholm, honored Jesse Jackson, who actually was the last person to push for an Arab American to address the DNC, honored the Central Park Five, all these people who had been left out while they were in the act of leaving people out. And I think, like, that creates a kind of identity schism or a messaging problem.
Not even, no, not messaging. An incoherence in your actual beliefs.
It's not just messaging. It's an incoherence in your actual beliefs.
So here we are saying that we oppose American apartheid. but we are supporting the exporting of bombs and planes to be dropped on a group of people in support of an apartheid regime.
And I don't use that term lightly. I know it's a controversial term, but I don't use it lightly.
I use it having seen it myself. I use it having, you know, done, you know, quite a bit of reading and reports from human rights organizations.
And frankly, you know, I use it, you know, because the former prime ministers from Ehud Omar to Ehud Barak use it in their description, you know, of the country and its possibilities or dark possibilities for it. So we have to ask ourselves a question.
Like if Ehud Omar says this country is headed towards apartheid, right? And we're against American apartheid, what does it mean to say we will always support them? Like what do we, you know, like there's an incoherence in it. Incoherence is actually a better word.
I mean, what you're talking about, for people who don't understand, is the Palestinians were not allowed on stage at the Democratic National Convention. Yes, I'm so sorry.
Forgive me. That's okay.
I was there myself. They, of course, had all kinds of ways to communicate, but this was a big deal.
And the Harris people met with them offstage and things like that. But this is what you mean by leaving people out.
And not wanting to attract the controversy, I think, is what they were doing.

There was a lot of not risk-taking.

When on Trump's side, there was a lot of risk-taking.

I think Trump went to Dearborn.

I think he went to Dearborn.

Or Elon giving away a million dollars.

It was a lot of risk-taking.

And she is risk-averse.

That is, you know, having known her since he was a DA, she's a risk-averse person.

So they were always being – they were always modulating, I think, in a lot of ways. Let me just get to one thing.
We're going to talk about that part in the book, by the way. Every episode, we get a question from an outside expert this week.
The question comes from Wajahat Ali, author of The Left Hook Substack and co-host of the Democracy-ish podcast. Ta-Nehisi, in your book and in your recent speeches, you have said that as a Black man, you cannot sit by and stay silent after witnessing the apartheid conditions and occupation of Palestinians.

There is a need for intersection and solidarity.

Many black and POC voters feel the same way.

However, they also feel a sense of massive betrayal by some pro-Palestine activists and groups, Muslims and Arabs, who decided not to vote for Harris, to punish her, and either sit out, vote for Stein, or Trump. And I'm sure you've seen the videos where they say, we're done.
We gave it everything. We knew the assignment.
You failed the assignment. What do you say to those Black and POC Americans who are tapping out of the movement, and how do you heal these rifts? I haven't seen those videos.
Actually, I literally have not seen them. And again, this goes back to, I think, where we started our conversation.
Like, I can't tell you how much of people yelling about this on social media really represents a feeling among, for instance, the Black electorate. I don't know.
So I'm always hesitant to give it too much credence. It could be that this is 5 or 10 or 50 really, really loud people.
And there were a number of black men, black male celebrities, who came out and said they were going to vote for Trump. But those of us who are familiar with those figures know that those people probably don't vote anyway.
And so there's a way in which people's volume can be confused with what's actually going on. Having said that, I can give you my perspective on this, which is pretty simple.
Look, as I said earlier, we have always been lesser of two evil voters. That's just what it is.
And I do think there is some wisdom, you know, in not overly fetishizing presidential, you know, elections. You know, and so, like, voting for Kamala Harris, I don't think necessarily means that you think genocide is a great idea.
You might vote for her and feel like that's the person who you feel, you know, you can best pressure and organize against. That was my feeling.
Having said that, it is far, far beyond my capacity and my capability to talk to people, as I did, who say to me, one-sixth of my family is dead. You know? Who say, you know, like the bombs are being dropped on my family right now and say to them, you must support the person who has made no promises not to keep killing your family and may well keep killing your family.
It's cruel. It's cruel for me to say, you have to support that person.
I don't have that envy. You know, I have my own political calculus that I make and I'm sure there are, you know, plenty Palestinian American, you know, activists and Muslim and Arab American activists who would disagree with that and, you know, say that I am, you know, ultimately supporting, you know, genocide.
I will carry that. I'll take that, you know.
But for my part, I get it. I get it.
I can't say that. If I was in their shoes, what would I do? I don't know.
I'd be really angry. I would be really,-new Nissan Murano.
Okay, that email is done. Next on my to-do list, pick up dress for Friday's fundraiser.
Okay, all right, where are my keys? Oh, in my pocket. Let's go.
First, pick up dress, then prepare for that big presentation. Walk dog, then...
Okay. Inhale.
One, two, three, four. Exhale.
One, two, three, four. Ooh, who knew a driver's seat could give such a good massage? Wow, this is so nice.
Oops, that was my exit. Oh well, that's fine.
I've got time. After the meeting, I gotta remember to schedule flights for our girls' trip, but that's for later.
Sun on my skin, wind in my hair, I feel good. Turn the music up.
Your all-new Nissan Murano is more than just a tool to get you where you're going. It's a refuge from life's hustle and bustle.
It's a place to relax, to reset, into spaces between items on your to-do lists. Oh, wait, I got a message.
Could you pick up wine for dinner tonight? Yep, I'm on it. I mean, that's totally fine by me.
Play Celebrity Memoir Book Club. I'm Claire Parker.
And I'm Ashley Hamilton. And this is Celebrity Memoir Book Club.
Today Explained here with Eric Levitt, senior correspondent at Vox.com to talk about the 2024 election. That can't be right.
Eric, I thought we were done with that. I feel like I'm Pacino in three.
Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. Why are we talking about the 2024 election again? The reason why we're still looking back is that it takes a while after an election to get all of the most high quality data on what exactly happened.
So the full picture is starting to just come into view now.

And you wrote a piece about the full picture for Vox recently, and it did bonkers business on the internet. What did it say? What struck a chord? Yeah, so this was my interview with David Shore of Blue Rose Research.
He's one of the biggest sort of democratic data gurus in the party. And basically, the big picture headline takeaways are...
On Today, Explained. You'll have to go listen to them there.
Find the show wherever you listen to shows, bro. Well, let's talk about those conversations, some of them in your book, The Message.
It's really about how stories and reporting shape our realities. And you talk a lot about storytelling and distortions.
So I want to talk a little bit about the importance of journals, especially for the next four years in just a bit. But The Message encompasses essays about trips you took to South Carolina, Senegal, and Palestine.
Jon Stewart said you're grappling in this book. I would agree.
You talk about these trips for people who haven't been there and read the book and what you felt you were grappling with specifically on your trip to the West Bank. Talk very quickly about these trips and why you structured it this way.
It's the journey of you as you try to figure it out, correct? I mean, which is what any journalist does. Yeah.
I mean, so the first thing is they are addressed to the writing students. They are.
Right. And so part of that was a lesson I was trying to impart on them.
And that is that, you know, writing is not just sitting down at a desk or a table and receiving inspiration. You have to go places.
You have to see things. You know, you have to talk to people and you have to, you know, be willing to feel one way when you get one place and be surprised and feel another way and go through the whole full range of emotions.
And you bring that back and you write it. And so these were three places that I ended up going and also three places where story is obviously very, very important, certainly in Dakar, Senegal, and in Africa as a whole, which is the origin point, uh, for the narratives that power racism and white supremacy.

Um, you were fit for enslavement. That's like the rough version of that argument.
And African-Americans have themselves tried to you back. And certainly a tradition that I was raised in how I got my name was to prove to folks that we had and to claim certain things.
And one of the things I am trying to confront in that chapter is whether that story at all is important. In other words, whether human rights derive at all from the quote-unquote accomplishments of a people, and obviously I conclude that they do not.
The second portion of that is in South Carolina, which has, since the Civil War, just been a site of how the American story is told. And in that case, it pulled me in with Between the World and Me and the attempt to ban that and to, you know, push out this brave teacher who was teaching the book in a writing class, no less.
And Kyra, this is what I mean about like needing to go places, because I went down there to a school board meeting to see, you know, what was going to happen to this teacher in relation to my book. And I went down there ready for war, expecting to see the worst possible things.
And I'm not saying the worst possible things aren't happening down there, but instead what I found was a community that believed that part of having a worldly and educated child was having them exposed to different works of literature and writing and understanding it. You know, it wasn't, you know, necessarily a group of people that shared all of my politics or all the things, you know, that I believed in, nor should that be the case.
But people that believed you should read different things and know things that, you know, you shouldn't, you know, go out in the world and say, I didn't read that because my school banned it, you know, that that was a bad idea. Well, one of the questions how writing create allyship is a central takeaway from your essay and your trip to South Carolina.
And in a lot of ways, when I was reading it, it reminded me of a thing I say all the time, which is believe what you see, don't see what you believe, right? It's really hard. As a reporter, it's really hard.
It is. And when they accuse us of that, I'm like, you know, you're right.
It's very hard to believe what you see over the other one. But you compare Israel to the Jim Crow South and lay out a number of ways you saw that Palestinians are being treated like second-class citizens.
It reminded me of an interview I did with Isabel Wilkerson about her wonderful cast. You talk about the settlements encroaching on the land.
You talk about domination by resources like water, the domination by time with bureaucracy. Talk about what you experienced there and how these issues played a role.
Oh, man. I wonder when I'm going to get asked about this and I won't be emotional about it.
I wonder when that's going to happen. Never.
That's good. This was one of the most important trips I took in my life, if not the most important.
In some ways, even more important than going to Senegal and going to Africa for the first time.

and it was important because you hear all these stories when you're growing up of what

segregation was and what Jim Crow was and then you see it and you see it in this place

that could not practice it without the dollars coming from the country that you are a citizen of. And so, you know, to make this absolutely explicit, I spent time on the West Bank where there are license plates for Israeli citizens and then there are license plates for quote stateless Palestinians.
I drove on, or I rode on roads that were demarcated for two. I just remembered something.
Actually, the other day, I was talking to somebody that was on the trip with me, and I had totally forgotten about this, and it didn't even make it into the book. A really poignant part of the book is in the old city of Hebron, where I went, which was probably the most explicitly segregated, as in people who were born there, whose grandparents had lived there, are not allowed to walk down certain streets.
That was the place where, for instance, I was stopped from walking down the street and asked to profess about my religion and only allowed if I gave the right answer. So this was clearly a segregated place as I understood the word to be.
This was on top of talking to people

who laid out the bureaucracy of what it means,

for instance, to build, to expand on the land,

because the land is so regulated.

And the fact that one group of people

can get permits to build, another group cannot.

So we leave there at the end of the day,

and we're on this road, and we drove,

at this part of the trip,

we drove along the quote-unquote Palestinian roads, and I had to pee. And I was like, I don't know if we can stop.
Like, I don't know if we actually, like, are allowed. Like, where is the rest stop that we can actually go? And I had this long conversation with my friend, Eve Ewing.
Like, I really had to go to the bathroom. Can this actually stop? Or we went on our way to Haifa? Or do I have to hold this all the way to Haifa? You know? And fortunately, Bus Dropping navigated it.
And we could, but this was a constant thing if you were Black in the South. Like, the bathrooms were a constant thing.
You had to negotiate, you know? And so, I mean, just in so many ways, it just reminded me of a past that, you know? It had echoes, yeah. Yeah.
They all have echoes of each other. Now, to be clear, you took the trip before the October 7th Hamas attack for the war in Gaza.
I did. I did.
Did that change your perception of what you saw and what's happening there? No. No, not in the least bit.
Why is that? It did for a lot of people, as you know. Yeah, no, not even a little bit.
So the first thing is, I don't know how to describe this, but in the 10 days I was there, it felt like there was this low hum of violence always, even when I didn't see too much direct violence, but it just felt like... I literally said to somebody at one point, this does not look like it has a nonviolent solution.
I'm just being frank. I'm not wishing for that, but I'm saying this does not feel like it's headed anywhere good.
The second part is something that I've said repeatedly and I will continue to say. Um, I have core beliefs and those core beliefs are not dependent on what other people do.
Um, I do not believe in apartheid. I'm against it.
It, it offends something, you know, core in me that goes through my ancestry. There is nothing that any group of people can do that would make me say that they're worthy of apartheid.
Nothing, nothing. Um, the example I've often used is the death penalty.
I'm against the death penalty. It's just a core belief.
I'm just against it. And there is nothing any human being will ever do.
If they said to you, oh, they killed my daughter and... Yeah, no.
Even terrorism. No, no, no, no.
Do you get why people are disturbed, how it shifts people? I do. I mean, I understand the emotional response.
I do. I do.
And I understand even more. So listen, I was with a group of people who were Israeli vets who had turned against the occupation and, you know, campaigned very loudly against the occupation.
And members of that group were killed on October 7th, you know? And so I watched them grapple with that and return to their principles, even as members of their own organization were killed. And so like, if they can do that, you know what I mean? Like they who are on the ground and, you know, surely I can, but yes, I do.
I mean, I don't, I don't want to sound, you know, cold. I don't want to sound like, um, um, I don't get it, but like we, and I mean, when I say we, I mean, we as Americans, right? Because we are supplying all of the planes.
We're supplying the bombs. You know, we are underwriting this.
We are the ones who claim to have a special relationship with Israel. I don't want to hear from people who want to speak out about the massacres Hamas perpetrated, but have nothing to say about the blockade, on the enclosure, on turning Gaza into an open-air prison.
Because I think you don't value human life equally then. Not consistent.
You're not, like, you're not consistent. So one of the things that you got, we got a lot of pushback for that, and critics have said you don't have foreign policy experience to write on this subject.
You've said in response, and I'm paraphrasing here, I don't need a PhD to call out apartheid when I see it. Do you see their point a bit that these issues should be called out by Israelis or Palestinians? And why do you think so many critics go to foreign policy expertise when they criticize your essay? I mean, no one's criticizing Elon Musk for being in a Ukraine call, though he has zero expertise, less than zero.
But, you know, he's rich, so he must know. How do you push back on that? Because it's such a fraught thing when you're saying, I'm going to stick with my principles, even though I know you're hurting, and I know you think this is anti-Semitism or whatever.
How do you do that? And how do you push back against the idea? You have said that, essentially. You know what you're seeing.
Well, I would say three things. The first thing is that chapter of the message is not just based on what I saw.
It's based on all of the reading that I did. It's based on the reporting.
It's based on talking to Palestinians themselves. It's based on, as you know, I mentioned before talking to IDF,

you know, veterans who had turned against the occupation. So there's a lot going on in that chapter that undergirds, you know, my belief.
But even if I had done none of that, we are in a dangerous place where we need foreign policy expertise to say apartheid is wrong. There's a kind of academicizing, if that's a word, that goes on, you know, where people think like you need college degrees to determine like whether you should slap a kid or not.
You know, it's absurd. It's absolutely, absolutely absurd.
And I think what happens is people who know they have lost the moral case try to retreat behind a kind of false knowledge or a kind of patina of intellectualism that is not real. And the third thing I would say is, okay, I don't have expertise.
I'm not a foreign policy person, but I can name you off the top of my head, numerous Palestinians who could be in my chair, who you could be talking to.

Not you.

You literally care.

But you know what I mean?

But people who think that, fine. Don't talk to me.
Don't talk to me. Go talk to them.
You know? If you don't believe me. But putting aside a critique, what should people there and Jews do, which they have done to make sure they were safe after the Holocaust?

Obviously, Zionism predates the... What should people there and Jews do, which they have done to make sure they were safe after the Holocaust?

Obviously, Zionism predates the Holocaust.

And what should they do now? Do you have any solutions for that? I do. I do.
I do. I have one, and people don't like to hear this, but it doesn't matter.
They should go to war against the knowledge blockade that prevents Palestinians from narrating their own history and their own experience in popular spaces. It's just completely unacceptable to say, we are looking for a solution to this problem, but we're not going to hear from a broad swath of people who are experiencing the brunt of the problem.
Like, that to me is like, it's like a big, big missing piece. It's a huge, gigantic missing piece.
And I think people want to leap past that to get to two state, one state, my national state. But like, I mean, there are just so many, you know, smart and intelligent people that, you know, I know I talk to, you know, that could really, really hold forth on what this world should be.
And so I don't know how you get to a solution to apartheid without talking to the people living under apartheid, without giving them the same. You know, it's like I did that interview on CBS, you know, all kinds of, I mean, God.
What interview was that? I didn't hear about it. Right, right, right, right.

Like, you know, all kinds of people saw that.

Yeah.

And I would just ask, when was the last time a Palestinian writer, journalist, you know, thinker, intellectual, got an interview like that, that that many people would see?

You know, and so I just think without that, you know, like this conversation about, you know, solutions, well, stop by talking to people. Stop by letting the people that, you know, like this, this conversation about, you know, solutions.

Well, stop by talking to people.

Stop by letting the people talk, you know.

We'll be back in a minute.

The first chapter of the message is called Journalism is Not a Luxury. I want to finish up on that idea.
Between the World and Me is a letter to your son. As you said in this book, you're writing to your students at Howard.
The introduction you tell them, it's never enough for the reader of your words to be convinced the goal is to haunt. I love that.
I thought that was fantastic. I was thinking about a movie I saw recently, and I said to my wife, the movie's haunting me.
And it was weird before I read your book. I can't stop thinking about it.
It is. It's like over there, oh, look, it's sitting there in that chair and looking at me.
Talk to me about what you mean by haunting. I think it's a perfect way to describe what is effective, but what does that mean for you as a journalist? So one of my favorite, um, writers is Jennifer Egan.
No, I love Jennifer Egan. Oh, I interviewed her.
She's amazing. Oh man, she's incredible.
That last book was even better than the first one. Yeah.
Oof. Boy, oh boy, oh boy.
Would you download your mind? No, I would not download my mind. I don't want to remember that.
No, no, I would not. I would not.
That book was so... I mean, we don't get there, but it was...
I loved what she was doing. That fucked me up.
That book fucked me up. But when you're saying journalism is not a luxury, is that what you're trying to do, haunt people? Yes, yes, yes.
And because I think if you can do that... Like, you just asked this question.
You asked, would I download my mind? So there's all sorts of things going on in the candy house, right?

Mm-hmm.

But there are core political questions that are being raised in there.

You know what I mean?

Like, it's not just a treatise on, you know, the singularity or, you know, AI or, you know, these sorts of things.

You know? But the reason why, you know, we're having this conversation about it now is not because of, just because of the politics, although the politics is important, it's because she's a beautiful writer. It's because the writing is haunting.

And so one of the things that when I, you know, this idea of journalism not being a luxury, which I borrowed from Audre Lorde, is the notion that your ability to haunt is directly tied to the fate of the world, that the power of your writing, it is not enough to just write in such a way so that people finish it and put it down and say, oh, that seems correct. You know, you need them to do what you just did, which is to say, would you download your mind? You know what I mean? Like, that means it's sticking with you.
Like, somewhere in the back, this idea, this notion that she was trying to raise has stuck with you. And I try to get, you know, my writers that I'm teaching to write in that way.
You know what I mean? Like, that's the goal. I know that's always my goal.
No, it's true. And you say your, quote, task is nothing less than doing their part to save the world.
We've been witnessing the splintering of the media landscape for a while. I've been part of that, honestly.
We've talked about its impact on the election. How do you think young journalists should best go about saving the world? And do you think traditional media companies are still reaching people? I, of course, went a different way 20 years ago.
But should writers become, in order to haunt people, become social media influencers or whoever it is, how do you look at the act of journalism right now as you're teaching people to be writers? And there's difference between writers and journalists too, by the way. Yeah, yeah, no, it's true.
I think that social media is probably not good. and I think that maybe there are people in this world that need it and have no other tool for, you know, getting, you know, their words out and their voices out.
So I don't, you know, I don't want to be an absolutist about this. Yeah, you don't want to be like old man on the lawn yelling at the kids.
No, no, no. I don't.
But I do think you need to understand the tool you're engaging with. And Kara, you can correct me if I'm wrong here, but my understanding of this is something as follows, that these tools are tuned towards outrage because outrage produces the highest level of engagement.
I always say enragement equals engagement. So if enragement equals engagement, you have to ask yourself what your project is.
Is your project to enrage people? Mine is not. I tell you that, mine is not.
Even if people do get enraged, I am not trying to enra... I am definitely not trying to enrage people with my writing at all.
You know? Now, it might be enraging in certain places, but that is not, like, a goal. Well, what are you trying to do, then? I'm trying to haunt them.
Haunt them. I'm a ghost, for fuck's sake.
Right. I'm trying to haunt them.
Not a zombie. I'm a ghost.
I'm a ghost, not a zombie. Yes, I'm trying to make it stick with them.
And I'm trying to, like, to haunt them for what, I think, is the deeper part of your question. And what I am seeking is the thing that, you know, I find in great writing.
And is that his enlightenment? That to understand the world in a way that I did not understand it before? You know, to see things differently? And I have deep questions over whether our social media tools, as they are currently constructed, particularly Twitter, are capable of doing that. So people who care about making a better world, you really have to ask yourself, do you think you're going to enrage yourself into a better world? Into a better world, yes.
So does the medium need to find a, you know, there's a famous quote, the medium is the message. Does the message need to find a new medium to meet new audiences?

Honestly, I think some of our oldest ones are great. I think books are incredible.
You know, I think paper magazines are, like, I have this whole thing about paper magazines. You do, you do.
I love them. I love them.
And I know that they aren't, you know, maybe we need to find, you know, a way to keep them in business. But I don't know that our media particularly are bad.
Like, literally, the tools are bad. Now, they might not make a profit.
And that could be like, we might have a business problem. But I don't think we actually have a technology problem, actually.
You've said that there are not enough Palestinian-American journalists reporting on the Middle East conflict. There were some efforts to increase diversity in newsrooms during the Obama years, not just to Palestinian Americans, but others, and again in 2020.
But it's unclear if there were actually more people of color hired, more different people. And then they've been, you know, a lot of the efforts, the DEI efforts have been rolled back.
The term has been weaponized. Where does this go? How do you think we're going to see that change again? And what will be the impact of any kind of critical reporting you're calling for? I don't know.
I don't know. And frankly, one of the things I have to do is, I am not satisfied with me accusing other people of not doing right.
So I have to find some way, once this book tour is done, once everything is done, I have to find some way to help alleviate the problem that I am so moved by. It's not enough for me to go and wag my finger at big media organizations and say, where are the Palestinians? I have to ask myself, is there any role for me to play, you know, in terms of making that true? Something behind it.
Because I don't want to be Palestine guy. You know what I mean? I have no desire to speak for another group of people.
You know what I mean? Like, that's not, you know what I mean? That's not what I want. What I want is Palestine guys and Palestine girls, you know what I mean, to speak for themselves, you know? And so I have to ask the question of what I can do to make that, you know, possible.
At the same time, Donald Trump has said he's going to seek retribution, which is an unusual word. I didn't know he knew such an interesting word.
And he's not been shy about targeting journals in the past. We've talked here about newspaper owners like Jeff Bezos obeying in advance.
I know, right? I'm not surprised in any way, but everyone else is. I always am like, you assume these people are good people? I don't know why you would assume that.
Some of them are, some of them aren't. So are you concerned about those threats of retribution? Yes, I'm very concerned about it.
I'm really concerned about it. Tell me why.
Um, well, I think, um, again, I, you know, there are people who think, you know, or thought maybe they don't anymore.

Um, that Donald Trump was ridiculous, that it's, you know, bluster and you shouldn't really pay attention to anything he's saying. And I just, I'm not one of those people.
I never was one of those people. I think you should pay attention.
and I think you should be afraid and I think you should, you know, plan how you're going to continue to do your work,

you know, under threat.

I will say one of the things that gives me comfort is again, you know,

we started here, like out of the tradition that

I... continue to do your work, you know, under threat.
Um, I will say one of the things that gives me comfort is again, you know, um, we started here, like I, out of the tradition that I come out of, journalism was never supposed to be safe. You know, it only became at some point, you know, this kind of Ivy league profession, you know, you go, you know, to, to the right schools and you end up at the New York times and you live a relatively comfortable life.
Um, it wasn't supposed to be that, you know, and I, and I guess I I guess I should be fair. There are plenty of journalists at the New York Times who that is not true of.
I don't want to slight folks on a foreign desk, etc. I don't want to do that.
But I get your point. It's not supposed to be safe.
It's not supposed to be safe. You're supposed to be challenging people.
It's supposed to be a contact sport. And I'm sorry it's that way.
And I'm sorry it looks like it's going to be more that way. But it is.
That's what it is. I agree with you.
So I was joking with someone that I'm going to share a cell with Mark Cuban because Elon Musk hates me. Anyway, I don't care.
Whatever. Good luck.
Come and get me. I shouldn't say that.
He probably will. You talked about your trip to South Carolina, which is not the only place we're seeing book bans.
You write in the essay, much of the current hoopla about book bans and censorship, get it wrong. This is not about me or any writer of the moment.
It's about writers to come. Explain what you mean by that.
What's next on this front? you know i owe my love of literature um to the public library system not just to it but

you know to my parents but very much to the in the sense that, you know, things outside of my home to the public library system. Baltimore has a wonderful public library system, the Enoch Pratt Public Library, which I spent a lot of time with and a lot of time in.
And libraries, you know, be they in schools or outside of schools are just under assault right now. And so more than I fear retribution from the state, I fear for the librarians and I fear for the libraries and I fear for like the young children, um, who would have found libraries as retreats, you know, it's kind of assault on libraries and on books.
That concerns me much more than my individual book being bad. Right.
That worries me a lot more. About where people have access to.
Yes, exactly. So in that regard, how do you, when you think about your own writing, you start off with a blog at The Atlantic, you wrote long political essays, then these memoirs, and the first Trump franchise shifted gears.
You republished your essays, and we were eight years in power. You wrote comics for Marvel's Black Panther and Captain America.
You wrote a novel, Water Dancer. There seemed to be like a conscious shift away from politics.
When you're saying, I've got to think about this after this book tour, what are you working on right now? A lot of other cultural critics like, you know, historians Heather Cockbridge and Timothy Snyder are going followings on mediums like Substack. Where do you see your next thing? Well, I signed a two-book deal after Water Jancers.
I got another book I got to write relatively soon at some point. You know, I would say that it's not so much that i shifted out of politics it's that um as a writer the trump administration was so obvious that it almost felt like the kind of writing i was doing was not like it just like i was just going to be yelling what everybody already knew that's that's what it felt like well you're a better yeller than others that.
You're better. Some writers are better than others.
But you know, with like Obama, I didn't, even though I disagreed with him over a lot of things, I didn't feel like that. You know, I felt like there was a very complicated thing going on.
I was actually trying to understand myself, you know, and that's where journalism is most powerful for me when I'm trying to actually I really do have a question that I'm trying to understand.

And I just didn't feel that same pull with the Trump administration.

So I, you know, I took the politics went in other directions.

It's in the comic books, believe me.

It's in the novel.

So what do you imagine you're interested in right now?

Like, what's your next book about?

Wow, that is a great question.

I'll tell you what I'm interested in.

I'm interested in how it feels like sports is being becoming a casino. Oh, that is a great question.
I'll tell you what I'm interested in. I'm interested in how it feels like sports is becoming a casino.
Oh, it is. Yeah.
Are you into sports at all? No, I'm the only lesbian in America who doesn't care about sports. People are always getting carried away from the game.
I'm like, what game? I don't know what you're talking about. But I'm aware of, I do know a lot about the gaming that's going on and all the internet betting and things like that.
I find it fascinating, but also troubling, obviously. I think it's long-term destructive.
Because it creates... Well, I just think if there's this much money sloshing around, you know, and you are creating incentives for all kinds of people.
You know, first of all, let me begin in my world. Like, um, to cut on shows that used to be, maybe they aren't anymore, but outlets for

journal. incentives for all kinds of people.
You know, first of all, let me begin in my world, like to cut on shows that used to be, maybe they aren't anymore, but outlets for journalists and to hear them, you know, talking about gambling and gambling lines and bets and obscure bets that, you know, that they're taking on whether somebody is going to rush for X number of yards or this person is going to do this is, I think, dangerous. I think it's dangerous because, you know, gambling is obviously a public health problem.

Like, I just think this can't be good.

Well, the presidential election was a betting.

They made them into betting.

Yes.

Down to, like, what group in Dearborn will vote this?

Yes.

Yes.

I just don't.

And so, like, you know, I have deeper questions about what that says about capitalism itself.

Like, what it says about the worth of making things. Yeah.
Or what we think about as the worth of making things. You know, versus trying to find, you know, some sort of, you know, shortcut or, you know, randomizing of stuff to get the result that you want.
I think the players themselves, I think it's probably bad for them long-term to have that much money, you know, um, sloshing around in what is a, you know, a public health disaster. I just, there is a retreat, not, not just at a state, but of, but of like institutions from their values.
I remember, you know, ESPN being an actual sports journalism network, you know, like it's really what they did, you know, and not that did. Not that it wasn't complicated or that they didn't have conflicts, but that seems to have gone away.
And many of the podcasts, many podcasts I listen to are basically underwritten by gambling money. This just feels like not good long term.
And I don't completely understand it. That's a great topic for a book.
It does say a lot about, we're not making things, we're betting on things that are made, I guess. And Cara, the point you just made about the elections, which is to say that it's beyond sports, that sports might be a microcosm of it, but it actually is beyond that.
Oh, they can bet on anything. Yeah.
So last question, in your Daily Show interview with Jon Stewart, you said something that was a lot of people picked up on, including me. We have to guard against the temptation to accept that history is necessarily the limit of who we are as human beings.
What does that mean for you right now in this political moment? I've been thinking about that for a bit when you said that. It means that just because certain things have never appeared in the world, that the world you want, like you don't really have historical precedent for it.

I don't think that that's evidence that that world can't be. That's kind of like, it should become the change we see in the world? Because some people are sort of, there's nothing new under the sun.
Yeah, I don't, I know. That's not true.
At some point, there was something new. At some point, it was new.
You know? At some point, somebody had to come up. Somebody had to come up with feminism.
Somebody had to, Somebody had to say, this is a good idea. You know what I mean? And it changed the world.
It changed the world. It didn't deliver utopia.
No idea does, but it changed the world. I think that sometimes, not to take this back here, but people look at what's going on in Israel and Palestine and say, oh, these people have been fighting for thousands of years.
Not quite. Not quite.
That's actually not true. You know what I mean? And, you know, this notion that, oh, you know, they're going to keep fighting.
There's nothing. Like, it's a way in which people who don't want to do hard work and don't want to think about hard things and don't want to do organizing get around it by saying, oh, there's nothing new just because there's no precedent for this.
I don't know. I don't know.
What you're basically doing is imagining a better world. Yes.
And I think that's a writer's job. I think that's a huge part of it, actually.
It doesn't have to be like this. It doesn't.
And I don't, you know, I won't, I don't accept that it does. All right.
Let's end on that. Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Thank you, Amanda. I did it.
I didn't have a problem with it. Anyway, thank you so much.
I really appreciate it. What a wonderful conversation.

Car, thank you. This was excellent.

on with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yoakum, Jolie Myers,

Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio.

Special thanks to Claire Hyman and Sheena Ozaki. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruta, and our theme music is by Trackademics.
If you're already following the show, you now know how to pronounce Ta-Nehisi Coates. He actually talks about it in the book.
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