The Miseducation of Ta-Nehisi Coates

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah, aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

The Atlantic's correspondent Tanahasi Coates is out with a new book, We Were Eight Years in Power, covering the past eight years of his development as a journalist and writer.

What has he learned about America, the world, and himself?

What does he expect the future to hold?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi folks, Matt Thompson here, executive editor of The Atlantic.

My co-hosts and I wanted to do something a little different for this episode, a conversation with our colleague Tanahasi Coates.

Instead of the usual roundtable discussion, the three of us each sat down with Tanahasi and asked him our own questions in three distinct interviews, which you'll hear back to back.

It's a little longer than our standard fare, but I think you'll find it's worth it.

If you want to break it up, feel free to skip ahead.

We've put the timestamps for each part of the episode in the show notes.

Each interview goes deep in a number of directions, but we decided we'd each start from a different point.

I asked Tanahasi about the past.

Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic's editor-in-chief, asked our colleague to reflect on the present day.

And finally, Atlantic contributing editor and CBS anchor Alex Wagner asked Tanahasi to look forward.

We've omitted our usual closing question keepers, but I think we'd all say that these conversations themselves are a moment we hope we don't soon forget.

So now, enjoy.

Here's my interview with Tanahasi.

Hello, Tanahasi.

Hello, Matt.

Thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

I wanted to go back to the question that I asked you back in August after Charlottesville.

Uh-oh.

I said this.

Tanahasi, among many things, you are a good reporter.

What questions?

What questions do you have right now?

What are you wondering?

What are you most curious about?

I'm not really curious about any of this right now.

That's part of the problem.

What do you mean?

Why is that?

All the reporters are jumping down your throat.

Why can't you be, why aren't you curious?

I feel like

I know.

I feel like I spent, and Jeff, I've talked to you about this, but I spent eight years when I was really, really curious asking questions in this particular vein, in the vein of, you know, why Charlottesville happened.

I don't feel particularly curious about this particular conflict anymore.

I think, at least as a journalist, I think I understand.

That was a really interesting moment.

And it was interesting to hear that arc.

When I encountered that in your book, reading the book, that sense of you had asked, you'd pursued these big questions about race and us in America, and you'd found answers.

You'd come to a place.

So I wanted to use this opportunity to go back through some of the questions that you were asking in the beginning of your time at the Atlantic, 2008, 2009,

those earlier years,

and ask you about some of the questions, some of the answers that you found.

I don't imagine that you will have found answers to all of these, but some of them you might have some interesting ones on.

In 2009,

you wrote, I increasingly wonder what role black plays in anything.

If you looked at the cultural practices that hold poor black people back, would you find more synergy in middle-class black America or poor, white, Latino, Asian America?

If you looked at the cultural practices of poor black people in cities, how much would they differ from the practices of poor people in cities historically?

What would you say in answer to that today?

I would say not at all.

That's so fascinating to hear that.

I remember wondering that.

I think I came to the Atlantic at a period where strong cultural arguments had been made to explain

what was going on in black America.

So all those sort of socioeconomic statistics.

And the big one was,

this is going to be a little complicated, but important, I think.

The big one was the presence of fathers in households.

So the stat that I remember I would hear over and over again, 70% of African Americans are born in homes where, you know,

the couple isn't married.

That had great resonance for me, actually, because I had written a memoir that argued, I think, subtly, if not directly, for the importance of fathers and

what it means to grow up in a neighborhood where fathers are not present.

And so

I guess I was somewhat disposed to that, but it was something about the tenor in which that statistic was raised and the way the question was raised that always rubbed me the wrong way.

And one of the beautiful things about The Atlantic and that period of blogging is you could ask questions, you could seek out the answers, write a blog post, and that was your day.

That was your job.

Your job was whatever's curious about you, go pursue it, turn it into content.

And you would do it.

And so I sat out looking at this question and I remember calling over to, I want to say it was the CDC because the stat that they use is

overall, how many African,

what percentage of African-American babies are born into married households?

But that's not actually the correct question because two variables play a role in that.

One is the number, the actual number of single mothers who give birth to babies, but also the number of married births that actually happen.

So it could be the case, the single births actually stayed the same, but married births actually decreased.

Do you understand what I'm saying?

Like there could be no actual uptake in that.

So I call it a CDC.

There's a blog post about this somewhere.

And I got the raw numbers.

I actually could see throughout history, you know, over the past 30 30 or 40 years, what had actually happened.

And what was fascinating was, yes, in fact, there was a peak in the actual live birth rate, that's what they call it, among single black mothers.

But that ended roughly, as I'm recalling it, at some point in the 90s, and then began to precipitously decline.

So actually, raw numbers, there actually were much less black babies being born to single

mothers today.

I'm sorry, not in raw numbers, ratio, ratio,

today

than than there were, you know, I mean, when, for instance, when I was a kid.

And that was profound to me because no one, you know, was really talking about it like that.

And I put that to, you know, various experts in the field.

And, you know,

it was pretty clear that, you know, I was on to it.

And the ability,

the luxury, in fact, to get that answer for myself.

I mean, I can't tell you how empowering that was.

Like, suddenly I knew.

I just knew.

I knew that, you know, when people use that stat, it wasn't true.

It actually was the wrong stat.

And it didn't matter who said it, didn't matter what sociology degree they had.

I knew because I had the numbers, I had done the reporting, I had called, you know what I mean?

I had the data, I had made the graph, you know what I mean, that showed the data.

And, you know what I mean?

If you got a problem with me, you talk to the CDC, brother.

You know, like, like, I had it so clear.

You know what I mean?

Um, that was just a moment of great, great empowerment, man.

One of the themes in

your most recent essay, um, and the one that concludes the book

about Donald Trump and

whiteness's role in making this presidency,

you say something like, you know, in the phrase white working class, one word is doing a lot more work than another phrase in that formulation.

And it was striking to go back to 2010 and

see you talking about the black agenda and the role of blackness in policy.

And you asked this question a couple of times, but once in 2010, you said it this way.

You said, I don't know what a black agenda is.

I can think of very few policies which I would say are good for black people, but aren't good for most of America.

Surely changing the way we approach incarceration would help black men, but were there no black men in this country, we would still do well to think about how we incarcerate people.

I'm at a loss to see what we gain by simplistically racializing problems that may well have a racial component, but aren't wholly and in many cases even mainly racial problems.

To be clear, that component should be called out.

But it seems you implicitly alienate allies when you claim that broad problems are the property of specific communities.

That's an argument a lot of people make the day.

And I argue against.

Yeah, that was why it was surprising to me.

What year was that?

2010?

That was 2010.

I remember thinking that, though.

I do.

I mean,

I was, and this gets overlooked because in 2010,

frankly, to be just blunt with you, I didn't have the level of popularity that I have now.

I was grappling with, I think, like Barack, because I think that's Barack Obama's formulation.

Right.

And I was grappling with that.

And it seemed correct.

But, and I might have the chronology wrong, but I know one of the things that was happening at that point is I was beginning to read a lot of American history and a lot about the Civil War.

And I was probably just beginning to tip into sociology.

Well, the history showed a particular record and a centrality to white supremacy, anti-black racism, however you want to put it, in American history that I didn't understand.

I was just beginning to understand that,

as I said, the largest, most deadliest war in American history had been waged over the right to enslave black people and to expand that right, in fact.

I mean, that's huge.

I mean, that's like a Jupiter in the solar system.

That's going to exert some gravity on things.

And then the sociology, which could show you that, in fact, if you compare it on a micro level, poor black communities to poor white communities, they weren't even in the same league.

What people consider a black middle class and a white, they're not the same.

They defy, again, this term, one of those words, do more work than the other.

You can't make these blanket comparisons.

That was a knowledge that I was increasingly coming to and reading, but I was not aware of that before I came to the Atlantic.

I really wasn't.

And the job gave me tremendous space to read these like academic papers and you know just

you know think

and you know to be honest with you um

like when i hear that question you started with

i don't feel myself pursuing a question in that sort of way right now yeah and that that is scary that scares me a little bit Say more about that.

Is there something in that question, I guess, that

rekindles a curiosity or an interest in you?

It reminds me of

probably where I always should be.

Like, I probably should always be in that space.

And I think over the past probably three or four years, a lot of that time has been

spent with me reporting the results of being in that space.

Yeah.

Maybe that's understandable.

Yeah.

Well, you also talk, and you write about this

really excellently in the book, about

the situation that you have come to occupy as a writer and thinker.

I mean, one of the questions that you specifically asked as long ago as five years ago was, why do white people like what I write?

Did I ask that five years ago?

You did.

You asked that in 2012.

Wow.

But under the current of that question, I hear another one lurking, which is about radicalism and conservatism and the role of each of them, having Malcolm X and Martin

at the same time.

Back in 2009, you were asking this question about conservatism, and particularly conservatism

as a way of enacting change.

You said, what if pragmatism isn't enough?

The danger of a conservative approach, of too much respect for institutions, is that it's always liable to deeply underestimate that rot eating away at the girders.

Only a deep and fundamental overhaul will do.

Is the radical critique in these two specific cases of Obama correct?

Foreign policy and the economy?

I wish I had the knowledge to answer that.

What are we underestimating this time, you asked in 2009?

What are we missing by not pushing ourselves toward a fundamental critique of the country?

I'm curious how you would answer that now,

and whether in that time your home path has brought you closer to radicalism or to conservatism.

Well, I mean, it's easy to to answer.

The latter is clearly radicalism.

It's so funny.

I still feel kind of limited in answering that question.

I mean, obviously, the easy thing for me to say is that

we overlook the deep, trenchant

effects, after effects, current effects of white supremacy in the nation.

I don't think in 2009,

if somebody had told,

I don't think that Donald Trump would be president and how he would get there being president following Barack Obama, I think that would have been dismissed out of hand, which says something about us.

Our imagination's too.

Yes, that's exactly it.

That's exactly it.

But also,

I suspect.

That there's a kind of economic critique that can be made here too, that I'm just not, I just don't, don't have the facts, you know, to make.

But I know that we had, you know, I do have enough, you know, facts to make that, you know, we had this huge, huge economic crash and that most of the people who were implicated in that were not punished and were not handled in any way.

You know, I just published the first white president, and I think like one of the mistakes that people make is because if I say something is an essential element in something, it means that it's the only element in something, which are actually two different things.

You know, it's one thing to say, listen, without this, it wouldn't work.

And it's another thing to say, only with this, it would work.

I say that there are probably some effects, you know, to folks losing their homes, to them, you know, losing large amounts of wealth, you know, and not seeing anybody, you know, punished and seeing, you know, some of those same businesses bailed out.

That wasn't the area, that wasn't the line of questioning I pursued.

But I don't doubt that that had some effect and generated some degree of anger, you know, in

the country at large.

Yeah.

It would.

It just makes sense.

It makes me angry, you know?

Right.

Yeah.

There's this line that you,

that

I could read you sort of testing out over the years.

And it

exists again in

We Were Eight Years in Power.

But the way you put it in 2009 was oppression corrupts just as often as it ennobles, perhaps more often.

And you've sort of like danced towards different formulations of that idea.

Tell me about how you you came to that and what does that mean to you today?

And particularly, what does it mean when you think about

the folks on the losing end of our unequal society at the moment?

I come out of, you know,

roughly, not completely, but I come out of a black nationalist school of thinking.

And I think like all

forms of

resistant nationalism, that's what I'll give it, you know, by which I mean I don't mean the kind of triumphalist white nationalism, but say, you know, a nationalism, a revolutionary nationalism that seeks to, you know, establish an idea of peoplehood, of place

against a backdrop of oppression.

There's always the danger of ennobling oneself in that struggle.

To say,

you know, you have your foot on my neck.

And that very fact makes me better than you.

I'm not the one doing, you know what I mean, the choking.

So I'm automatically, which which elides the question of whether I would do the choking if I were in your position.

You always got to remember that.

You always, and you know, because I use these words, you know, whiteness, white supremacy, da, da, da, da, da.

And I always remind people by which I do not refer to anything genetic, particular, you know, about, you know, having ancestry from Europe.

That's not what I'm talking about.

That's not what I'm talking about at all.

I am ultimately talking about power.

And I'm just seeing too many cases, you know, throughout history where people who, you know, were oppressed or had, you know, a foot on their neck, you know, get up and turn around and do it to the, you know, the next group of people.

That's what happened here.

The Irish who come here, you know,

are oppressed.

Oppressed.

You know, what happens in the police departments of New York City?

Is that oppression ennobling for them?

The Italian Americans who face discrimination when they get here, does that make them more compassionate

to black people who are struggling?

No, no no on the contrary actually you know makes them you know the exact opposite um

i hold that true for black people too you know um i think there are things that you can learn from your experience if you're wise you know but um i don't want people to ever you know get in their mind that

whiteness exists because white people have fair skin, because they have blind, because they're from you know, that's not, it's power.

It's power.

And you should never make the mistake of thinking you would necessarily be any different if you were in their place.

Well, there's a part in between the world and me where I talk about

like an evolving consciousness.

And I came to

Howard University in 1993, very, very curious,

but

with a kind of

I think crude and not particularly well constructed nationalist politics.

I wasn't sure about a lot of things, but it's something to be at a black university in a history department dominated by black professors

to have somebody talking to you about African history.

And

you have to grapple with the fact that people that you consider black, and you have to understand at that point, my formulation of what black meant was very, very different.

So black people, you know, and sold black people, you know, into slavery and had been doing that, you know, for quite some time.

The popular logic or the popular vocabulary, the way it was talked about, was that, you know, black people were actually, you know, stolen, as if white people marched into,

you know, Africa and stole black people out of Africa,

which I think,

A, awarded

black folks that kind of nobility that I was talking about earlier, that one, one should, you know, strive to avoid.

But B,

I think given the political construction of what black meant, it allowed us to avoid some relatively painful questions.

Now,

what I subsequently learned is those questions aren't that painful at all.

The fact of the matter is black, at least as a racial identity, is a constructed thing.

And

the Ashanti, who are slave raiders,

are not thinking of themselves in relationship to the people that they're rating as other black people.

Why would they?

What meaning would that have for them outside of white supremacy, outside of racism?

It would have no meaning at all.

Europeans in Europe slaughtered each other.

For some, you read up on something like the 30 Years War.

And again, I had the time to read, you know, stuff like this here at the Atlantic.

And you see people doing the most horrible things black folks get here.

And we think, well, they're only doing this.

You know, that's because our skin is a no, no, no, bro.

No, there's a long, long history of people who we consider white, who we would call white, doing other things to other people who we would call white.

You know, so these terms only have meaning, you know, when you, when you cast it backwards.

That was a, you know, a pretty watershed moment.

You know what I mean?

And it was the one, I guess, that made me suspicious of that kind of ennobling, that kind of national.

This is something innate in you that is better.

Right.

That means that if you, you know, ruled the world, everything would be just, everything,

you know, would be great.

Never, everything would be okay.

That's comforting too, by the way.

The much more frightening thing is

there's nothing noble in it at all.

You're just oppressed.

You just lost this one.

That's it.

Yeah.

That's it.

There's no grander anything in it.

You know, and I have to say, I guess not only did I represent a kind of break break from that sort of crude nationalism, I think it's actually the seed of

my break with

a lot, even the kind of arc of moral justice logic, which has in it actually some of the same stuff, by the way, the same sort of romanticism.

God is on our side.

You know, somehow we are fated to be better than.

Somehow, you know, we, you know, and it's especially when it's tinged with this kind of American patriotism, which is in of itself a kind of nationalism.

You know, it says, because America is blessed by God, it will do X, Y, and Z.

We will ultimately...

See, that language is actually very familiar to me.

And so I don't just reject it when I think about black people.

I rejected it

in total.

One of the most interesting things in the book for me as a journalist is your...

journey around language itself, your pursuit around language.

I mean,

you're hard on your essays in your notes from each successive year.

You gotta You go about very purposefully, at least in the telling of it, in the book, very purposely acquiring a language and constructing one out of the bits and pieces of these other texts.

And are there any

you've invented a number of phrases, you know, that come to mind, the gray wastes.

Are there any that you've encountered that over the course of that journey that you think

just resonate loudly with you at this moment?

Hmm.

You know, I don't invent much.

I actually borrow and I borrow at the great waist.

Yeah, I should mention it.

And you talk about that too.

Yeah, I did.

You know, what happens a lot of times is

I find that whatever,

I was just,

the language that I find often that comes out of the Academy, as thankful as I am to the Academy for its research, I think is not often

descriptive and accurate enough to describe what you're talking about.

Like the phrase mass incarceration is kind of deadening.

It doesn't capture

$23

hours a day in solitary.

It doesn't capture,

say as I just saw recently, avoiding canceling all face-to-face visits and you have to talk to your relatives only by a phone that you have to pay for.

It doesn't capture sexual violence.

It doesn't capture the broad

violence-suffused experience, the suffering, you know, that is incarceration.

And the fact that we've decided that more people today should suffer that than suffered it 40 years ago.

It doesn't.

So I'm always in search of language that gets that, you know?

And,

you know, I take my share

of criticism, you know, for that, for reaching, you know, to unconventional sources.

But I wouldn't change anything because I find for for me personally, and this is the only person I can really write for at the end of the day, much of the language around this stuff is dead.

And I always say like when I'm trying to write, I want all my facts and all my logic to be correct in terms of the argument.

But the argument should haunt.

The argument should bother you.

You should feel some type of way.

You shouldn't just like finish the piece and say, oh, that guy.

was right.

And then go on with the rest of your day.

Yeah.

You know, you should, you know, whether you think that guy was right or not, you know, it should like stick with your.

It should be consequences.

Yes, it should be consequences for the reader.

Exactly.

I want there to be consequences for the reader.

And the way I think you achieve that actually is through language.

I want to play one question for you from one of your interlocutors, Hua Shu.

Back in a 2009 issue of the magazine, you and Hua had an exchange about race in America.

We asked him for a question for you, and he sent this.

First off, congrats on the new book.

You know, I recall our conversation in January 2009, which seems like a really long time ago, and we ended by professing our shared, unshakable faith in Raisin's safety Ed Reed.

Sports has always been a site of political activity now more visibly than in the recent past.

I'm just really curious whether your relationship with sports or the role of athletes or even your own sense of allegiances and fandom, have these things changed over the past eight years?

You know, when Junior says I was a middle linebacker for San Diego Chargers for many years, when he died,

I stopped watching football for a number of years.

And

I just couldn't do it.

It wasn't even the fact that he died.

It was the way his death was talked about, which was total denialism

about what had happened and what clearly had happened.

And I went to France and I actually came back to America on tour.

And I was living out of hotels for like eight weeks.

And I very quickly started watching football again.

And

what it was, was I felt like displaced.

I, you know,

I was in the country, but not really in the country.

I didn't have a home in the country.

My home was somewhere else.

And this was a thing I had done since I was five years old.

And so it was like, it became like a home to me again, you know.

Um,

and

like I still watch now,

and I'm fully aware of what I'm watching,

and I'm fully aware of who the ownership is.

And

I don't really know what to say, you know, and I know what that makes me.

You know, it makes me a customer of something that's pretty awful that literally destroys people's brains.

It's a contradiction.

I can't be pure.

I keep looking for ways to be pure.

And I can't be pure.

This is my impurity.

None of us can be, right?

There's my last question for you.

It's not about a piece that you wrote, but about a piece that we published in 1960.

Benjamin Mays asked this question.

It was a piece that we titled A Plea for Straight Talk Between the Races.

He was talking about

a conference that had happened in Durham and a manifesto that a group of

black scholars and

leaders had produced

saying, listen, we don't like segregation, but we're okay with it.

But we want these specific things.

We want an end to racial violence.

We want protections within labor, for example, fair wages and equal wages.

But he says in this piece, Benjamin Mays, you know, he was one of the people that was there at that summit and said, you know,

we pulled, we did not say what we meant.

We did not say what we felt at that time.

All of us were deeply opposed to our segregated society, and we were unwilling in the end to say that.

We've had this thing, we've had this bargain with each other, white America and black America, where we agreed after Reconstruction, the black folks basically, to retain employment.

We agreed at the onset of redemption to be able to support ourselves, to put bread on our tables.

We agreed that we would not

speak straight.

And

can we now?

He asks basically.

I don't know that we've ever answered Benjamin May's plea.

I'm curious how honest you think the two sides of that conversation are with one another today.

And

what, if anything, goes left unsaid?

I think Black's eye right now is painfully honest.

Probably one of the most honest points in American history,

to be straight with you,

because the constraining forces do not exist

in the way that they existed before.

It's considerably harder for the white side to be honest.

And that is not

a kind of evil or malice.

It is the fact that

there's an entire identity constructed about this.

I mean, there are people in this world who check white on the census who would happily walk away from white identity.

But most of those people have other things.

And even for them, it would be hard.

I shouldn't say happily.

That's a minority, you know, as was written about the last election.

But

being white gives you so much.

It awards so much in this society.

It awards, you know,

not having to really worry in the same way about the police inflicting violence on your kids.

It means, you know, the ability, even when you're poor, to have the possibility of living in a vicinity of people who are not necessarily poor.

It means access to public schools that, you know, may not be the best in the world, but actually, you know, function.

And perhaps

And I don't know this.

I don't know this.

You know, a theorist, you know, smarter than me would have to tackle this.

But perhaps people's sense of status is always dependent on some sort of hierarchy.

And so the very idea that I am not down here, I am not the bottom.

An honest conversation means an admission that we got to get rid of race as a bottom.

There's no promise if you're white in America that you won't sink to the bottom.

That you won't be, excuse my language, but this is the, you know, to be honest, that you won't be a nigga, that you can't suffer all the things that niggas suffer.

You'd have to give that up.

That is,

if I were white, could I say that?

Could I do that?

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I mean, giving up, you know,

freedom from the fear.

You know, of my kid dying the way Trayvon Martin died.

That's a lot.

I mean, they would have to come down here with us.

And that's tough.

That's tough.

It's a tall order to be honest.

Black people are forced to be honest.

They got you.

You got nothing to lose.

You know, white people have so much to lose.

All right.

Tanahasi, thank you.

Thank you for taking the time.

Thanks, Aye.

Stick with us.

In a moment, Jeffrey Goldberg's interview with Tanahasi.

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Hey, Tana Ozzie.

Hey, Jeff.

Tana Ozzy, I don't want to probably do more than 10 minutes at Trump with you, but you have this big piece out on our cover right now.

It's the basis of the longest original section of your new book.

I want to get down to the meat of the piece, but talk about the disagreement that we had about the headline for the piece when we were actually producing this thing.

The disagreement was that

the headline, the first white president, would be confusing.

And I have to say that Jeff was not the first person to say that to me.

When I first began conceiving of the essay, I had this idea, oh, you've got to call it the first white president.

That's what it is.

Trump is the first white president.

That's who he is.

And you were very adamant in that way.

I was.

I was.

And, you know, people who even were sympathetic to it, the first thing they said was, wait, but we've had other really racist presidents.

So it's not like that.

That's super racist.

Like, super racist.

So you can't say, like, it's not that.

It's not like Woodrow Wilson level racism, even in this, even in the last century.

Exactly, exactly.

So it's like, you can't really say, I said, no, no, no, it's not, it's not that.

You know, it's actually much more complex than that.

It's the idea of negation.

that the notion of white identity means that you need to have something to compare it against to say, I am not.

What am I not?

As Stephen Colbert said years ago who am i if not not you

and the idea of white identity is built on negation of black yes yes yes by which i mean i always have to say this not um

having blonde hair or blue eyes or you know any sort of phenotypical feature but the idea that that you know is something that you can organize a tribe and empower people around that's always based on the negation of something else right you know and in this case in order to have a tribe there's got to be another tribe that you're not that's right right that's exactly right and so um trump had the great you know fortune or luxury of actually having a black person in the white house to measure himself against in other words another president not just evoking black people in in a political way uh in terms of say a sister soldier or willie horton or or whatever but literally somebody at the white house who had you know had policies that you know he he could run against you know there's a piece in buzzfeed and this was after you know we had you know decided to go forward with this and it was about trump's foreign policy and the piece was all about the first question he asked these guys is was obama for it right you know so this notion of negation even in you know that's just normal that could be normal politics every no president wants to be like the president before yeah yeah yeah but is that the and you would know this better than me but is that the poll on which for instance there was great there was some at least uh continuation of national security policy from bush to obama more than you know folks on the left obama didn't like to admit it but yeah there there was.

Right.

To answer your question

in 10 seconds, is you have to be a bigger man to say, oh, you know what?

Not everything my predecessor did was crazy.

All presidents also eventually realized that.

This one.

But is this one realizing that?

Because my president is a realistic person.

Well, this goes to a separate issue of cognition.

What does he recognize?

What is he capable of under?

So, which goes to my question about whiteness and birtherism.

So the question is: was birtherism, which Donald Trump championed and actually, you know, partially invented, was birtherism

a strategic choice?

Did he see the future and say, this is the way I'm going to undermine President Obama and get to the White House?

Or was that just an almost animal instinct on his part?

I don't know because that gets too much inside his own head.

And there's a lot of debate about that, even like with the tweets.

Like, is this strategic or is this actually impulsive?

You know what I mean?

I have a hard time answering that question.

I just know that the fact that his political career effectively began with birth arism,

I don't think it's a mistake or is like notional when you think about it.

He probably couldn't have imagined that it would get him all the way to the White House, but he probably looks back with fondness on his decision.

But

come back to the headline of the piece, first white president.

So, you know, I had this idea and I had, you know, pitched it to Scott this way and talked to you, you know, obviously you.

Scott's Dostoevsky, the editor of the print magazine.

Yes, yes, yes, and talked to you, obviously, about this.

Sorry, I'm doing that podcast thing where I have to say things.

No, it's good.

It's good.

I'm fine.

All right.

And so I think we got to, we had all, you know, fact, check, copy all in.

And we, you know, went, Scott, you know, and you and I, you know, had a great disagreement.

I sent this, you know, really terse email about how confident I was that this had to be the title.

It had to be, and I can't, Jeff, do you remember what the other title was?

It was something a little softer.

It was something along the lines of the whitest president or the whitest white house.

We were playing with white, white.

And I got to say, Jeff, I think more than in in any other case since I've been at the Atlantic, I actually do think the headline mattered this time.

Yeah, no, and

I think it worked.

I was just worried about, I was worried about people scratching their heads.

And then I started polling other people

outside the Atlantic.

And I told a couple of very smart people this, and they were like, oh, yeah, of course he's white, because it was a conscious, people who voted for him consciously were rejecting the blackness of the pre- And I was like, oh, okay.

So Tanazi's right.

Yeah, and you know how hard it is for me to say Tanazi is right, but I think that just shows my bigness

as a leader.

So magnanimous.

Oh, I know, right?

It was a good choice.

I mean, the piece obviously explained the point.

But here's my question for you about that.

And this is where I've gotten into arguments where I'm defending the piece against people who are saying, you know, Tanahasse has given us a single point answer for a complicated, a complicated set of decisions made by tens of millions of voters.

So my question for you is this.

All white people who voted for Donald Trump are racist?

No.

Okay, go on.

No, all white people who voted for Donald Trump are most certainly not racist.

But all white people who voted for Donald Trump have no problem

with, as far as I'm concerned, a white supremacist being in the White House.

In other words, racism is not disqualifying for them.

Right.

But what if they're...

Among other isms, by the way, among other things.

Well, I mean, we'll just focus it on this one.

There's misogyny and everything else.

But stick with this in a way, because there's a counter, counter-argument to what you're saying, which is that if you overlook racism,

right?

You are complicit in racism.

It doesn't necessarily make you Richard Spencer, you know, or a neo-Nazi or something like that.

But if you're not taking a side against racism, then you're no better than the racist.

Yeah, I wouldn't go that far.

I've read that.

I've read that.

And I would not.

And Chate kind kind of raised that you know i guess john chate and new york magazine yeah he raised that you know in relation i i wouldn't say that um because reasons for why people think i mean listen i mean if i looked at my life and i saw things that i was not particularly conscious of at particular you know points um

to say i was no better than people who were consciously invoking it, I just think that's a bit strong.

Isn't one of your other arguments, broader arguments, that many, many white people in America are unconscious to their privilege.

I don't, sorry, I don't want to sound like academic jargony here.

Right, I try to avoid the word privilege.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, me too.

But they're unconscious of

the system in which they're participating.

And so, again, that doesn't sound like an excuse, really.

You got to know you're an adult.

You've got to know what you're living in.

The fact of the matter is that's not a mistake.

I mean, and this is not conspiratorial.

You know, after the Civil War, there was a very conscious effort made to tell the story a certain way.

I mean, literally, like the lost cause, it's

a school of history.

You know, the Dunning School that decided to tell history in a particular way that shaded certain things and emphasized other things.

Those monuments that people are fighting over right now.

I mean,

those are not put up out of sentiment or nostalgia.

Or missing people who were killed in war.

Those are put up as a deliberate political.

Right.

And in many cases, they actually say so.

Like the one, you know, Mitchell Andrew took down, one of the ones ones he took down in new orleans literally said for the preservation of white supremacy it wasn't even right you know vague it wasn't like

i'm not quite kidding you can interpret that any way you want right

so i mean when you have that when you have not just the history but the popular culture reflecting that when you have you know gone with the wind you know being you know most popular book in america when you have birth of a nation being a seminal film that has an effect after a while where you know

you know i don't want to say that people don't have responsibility you know for their own choices or for their own conscience, but I will say that the winds push you in a certain way.

You know, I mean, so I think it's too broad to say you're no different.

I think that's a little too much.

Isn't it amazing in a way that we're still fighting the Civil War?

I'm not just talking about Robert E.

Lee and the statues

and all of that.

I mean that.

According to your argument, at least, Donald Trump is president in part because this country has never actually grappled with what actually happened in the Civil War and and Reconstruction.

This comes to this point that we've talked about in the past: about the difference in the way Germany remembers what it did

and what the U.S.

remember, how the U.S.

remembers what it did.

And I'm not equating, I'm not playing that game.

I'm just saying these are the original sins of these different countries.

Talk about that for a minute because I think this is all against this backdrop of memory and willful forgetting.

Well,

if you have a war in which you know, six, 700,000 people die,

a war, you know, whose casualties to this very day are more than all the other wars that this country has fought put together, that's just astonishing.

You know, in a five-year period, that number of people die.

And you don't grapple with the reasons for why that war was fought.

And if the reasons are actually quite accessible, if they're documents in which, you know, the people who inaugurated that conflict literally say, this is why we're fighting, and you erect an entire historical school to cover that fact.

And if you make policy, you know, based off of that fact and, you know, in the immediate aftermath that ignores the very source of it, it's really no surprise that here you are, you know, 150 plus years later, and you're still

fighting this.

You know, Trump, you know, he made this comment

that he's just really deeply deeply disturbed.

He said, well, you know, they're going after, you know, Robert E.

Lee.

Who's next?

George Washington.

He owns, you know, he owns slaves too.

And it just shows like how people like Robert E.

wasn't someone who just owned slaves.

It wasn't like, you know, he did five other things.

Oh, and he did this one bad thing.

He also, he's singularly known for fighting in a war to preserve, also expand slavery.

One founded America and one rebelled against it.

And one rebelled.

One tried to destroy it.

One built it and one tried to destroy it.

I mean, those are two different, you know, two different things.

And so that shows

the level of

misunderstanding of what actually happened.

So the South's greatest victory was not on the battlefield.

The South's greatest victory

was that

it came after.

So

walk us up to today.

I want to ask you this question in a somewhat pointed way.

You're known as a pessimist about sort of the course and direction of history.

I wish people didn't consider me a pessimist.

I'm not.

Well, we're going to go into that a little bit because you are.

I'm so not.

No, but.

No, no, because it's a real subject.

And you and President Obama himself have sort of argued that.

The default setting in American politics is a deep naivete.

So there you're being pessimistic.

And I think that's why I appear to be pessimist.

So it's not that you're pessimistic.

No, it's not.

It's just that everybody's a little bit too optimistic.

A large majority of people are not geeky.

Wait, wait.

All right.

Come back.

Come back to the.

I forget that I just diagnosed diagnosed you as an inveterate pessimist.

Now come back to this question.

I won't defend myself.

Come back to this question about what has gotten better since the failure of Reconstruction, since that program sort of died

between then and now.

That's actually a very, very easy question to answer.

Good.

You don't have debt peonage labor, which was basically effectively a second slavery after slavery.

That's a good thing.

That's a very, very good thing.

I was just told this weekend while I was reporting in Chicago that at one point in the 1880s, Alabama had a surplus.

78% of the surplus was based on convict-lease labor of black people.

Basically, a surplus after slavery effectively built those.

You don't really have that

anymore.

That's a good thing.

In the South, in general, you know what I mean?

Folks can vote, although you're fighting that battle every day.

But folks actually can vote.

Now I think you sound a little over-optimistic from what I know about voter suppression.

Yeah, now.

All right, just slow down.

Now you're going too far.

Slow down, Mr.

Rogers.

Right, right, right, right, right.

The American military is integrated.

And there's no question about that.

You know, the military has been, you know, whatever

my problems might be in terms of, you know, foreign policy and wars we fight.

It is ahead of the country in terms of, you know, dealing with exactly the history that we've been talking about here.

That's a very, very good thing.

Police departments in this country are integrated.

They have huge, huge problems as far as I'm concerned, but they are integrated.

I'm here at the Atlantic.

You know, magazines like the Atlantic,

across the board, media organizations hire black people to write black things.

That's a very, very, very good thing.

There's a long-term argument between you and President Obama.

Sometimes it's been conducted at long distance, sometimes it's been face-to-face.

A long-term argument about the nature and course of history.

He invokes this, the expression, the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

You have argued in the past that sometimes there isn't.

There's no moral arc, no such thing.

But if there was, it just sort of bends toward chaos.

Obviously, events of the last

year

put a thumb on the scale for your interpretation.

At the very least, you could say that the arc sort of went sideways for a little while.

But do this run

a little bit?

Does the election of Trump prove to you that Obama's fundamentally sunny outlook about the course of history and the course of American development, the self-correcting nature of America?

Does it give lie to that?

No, I didn't need Trump to be right about chaos as far as I'm concerned.

Had Hillary Clinton won, I still would have maintained it because chaos is not

evil.

It's not the walk of American history bends towards evil.

What it is, is it bends towards, I don't know.

I don't know.

But you just described a minute ago

some really measurable progress in integration of the military, of police, of journalism, of the end of debt peonage.

So over 100 years or more, you could see positive movement.

Yeah, but I could also tell you a story over the past, say, 30 or 40 years that show the basic wage gap between African Americans and whites remaining the same.

I could tell you a story over the past 10 or 15 years that shows the wealth gap between blacks and whites.

Actually, in fact, expanding.

I could tell you a story about the rise of mass incarceration and a penal system

that I think we're at 750 out of every 100,000 Americans incarcerated, an ungodly percentage of that being black people, as compared to 1970, when we were much, much closer to where the rest of the world was.

And so

the point is

that there's a danger in looking for themes.

No, no, no.

I think there's a danger in saying because black people are no longer enslaved and because because there's no debt peonage, necessarily the next 150 years will continue this upward swing.

We are destined to win.

That's the danger.

God is on our side.

Justice is on our side.

We will win.

There's no sense.

And

Jeff, I hate to bring in your own identity in this, but

If you looked at what, the 2,000 years of the Jewish experience in Europe, what, I mean, you can find 100 years probably pre-Holocaust where you say, wow, man, things are looking really, really good.

You know, but you just never know.

You just never, never know.

And so I think,

you know.

No, I mean, it's an interesting point.

I mean, and I know you're not suggesting an end to African America the way that

I'm not saying that that's like destined to happen too.

But what I'm saying is like, you just don't.

You don't know where you are in the arc.

You don't know where you are in the arc.

And so to be here and say, you know, it looks like next 150 years is going to be great too.

Right.

Maybe.

We'll hope so.

So what does the election of Barack Obama mean, though?

And we don't have to put it in a 200-year spectrum.

There are enough white people in America who are ready to vote for a black man for president.

There are even some people who voted for Barack Obama who then voted for Donald Trump for reasons that are not, I mean, they've been analyzed, but not abundantly clear to me.

But

talk about that because a lot of your book is obviously built around the existence and phenomenon of Barack Obama.

Well, here's the progress that I think Barack Obama represents.

If you're

really, really smart,

if you're really hardworking,

if you have the ability to talk to all kinds of different people,

if you have a really, really singular biography,

if you

are tremendously, tremendously lucky,

You might be president if you're black.

You know,

maybe you could be president.

He's twice as good, though.

Exactly.

Right.

Maybe I thought so, too.

Maybe twice at this point, underestimated as convenient.

No, and I want to be careful when I say that.

That does not mean that I endorsed policy decisions or this or that about Barack Obama or that you do either.

But just in terms of brain capacity, moral stature, maturity.

Right.

And we obviously see this in a more highlighted way than we used to because of the new president.

I've thought about this a lot recently, in part because the difference between Barack Obama and Donald Trump, that difference is a profound difference.

But

do we read too much into the election of Barack Obama because Barack Obama was a person of otherworldly gifts who happened to have the exact right biography and come at the exact right moment?

In other words, is it a unicorn experience or do you expect another black president in your lifetime?

Actually, because of the way the Democratic Party is currently organized, I would not be shocked if you got another black president.

I wouldn't be shocked if you got another one in four years, frankly.

And I have a very specific reasoning for that.

Name Deval Patrick?

Or Kamala Harris.

Because of the way the Democratic Party is currently organized, you got to be able to compete in the South.

You cannot get out of the South without black and brown people.

That just can't happen.

And the kind of energy, you know, this goes back to the point about identity politics, the kind of energy that folks get, you know, out of that when they see that, you know, for instance, if a

Democratic Party, you know, nominated a Latino or a Latino

to run against Donald Trump, I would expect a lot of energy.

I'd expect a lot of energy behind it.

I'm not endorsing that, but I think that, again, the way the party is organized right now, because the Republican Party, particularly in the South, is so white, and because African Americans and Latinos are so concentrated in the Democratic Party, getting out of the primary process, I think, actually, you know,

it's a little easier than it has been.

Let me ask you one other big, big question, which has to do with an expression that for fairly obvious reasons you don't like, race relations.

Is there going to ever be a moment, you think, in your lifetime in which race relations as such

no longer, is no longer salient as an issue.

I mean, you remember, obviously, the moments after Barack Obama was elected.

A lot of people said, hey, we've entered the post-racial moment.

What would it take to get to a post-racial moment?

Or is there just no such thing in a country that is

in a country whose entire history is wrapped up in a tension and an inequality between the two major races?

Yeah, we would be unwise to.

Well, I'll tell you what that would look like it would look like the complete elimination of a wealth gap that that would be the clearest marker of it i mean if you didn't see that it would look like um

you know your your your uh uh incarceration rates would not be you know as they are you know uh right now mortality rate mortality rates i mean there's a whole you know entire vector of you know or entire you know list of socioeconomic indicators you could look at that that would evaporate that would make that you know, look the way it would look.

But I think even if you reach that point, it would be very, very dangerous to forget about our own history.

Because even if you fixed, see, the relationship between black people and white people in this country is not really a relationship of differing skin colors.

So much of it is a relationship of power.

And so even if, you know, you lived in a world where black and white people, you know, pretty much existed as equals, you would never want to forget the lessons of what happens and how, you know, the exploitation of power can haunt a country for centuries.

Right.

You just, you just don't want to forget that.

Could you get to the policy changes?

Could be reparations for that, but it could be investment in a different kind of way.

Could you get to the policy changes that would erase the gaps, income, mortality, housing, et cetera, without a reckoning, without white America writ large saying,

oh, I see.

Our ancestors did some bad stuff.

And so therefore, we've got to repair that damage.

But it's so far, obviously, if you look at the Republican voting base right now, we're so far from that moment.

But can one thing happen without that predicate?

Yeah, it can, but not in a really,

you know, in advance of the Civil War, in terms of emancipation, I don't know there was a great reckoning.

about enslavement.

What happened was a kind of exterior, external event happened

that made enslavement in this country untenable afterwards.

So, if some sort of external event

made,

say, holding mass numbers of black people in jail, made the huge sprawling wealth gap, made segregated schools, made, by which I mean the very offices, the policies, the things that actually

make white supremacy possible in this country.

If something happened that made them impossible, yeah,

yeah.

What would that thing be?

An alien invasion.

I'm joking.

I'm joking.

No, no, no, no.

There are other things.

I mean, you could imagine

any sort of foreign conflict.

Any sort of foreign conflict.

You know, like the moment, part of what happens, part of what makes emancipation possible is black people start fighting in the Union Army.

Why do black people start fighting in the Union Army?

Because they predicted that the war was only going to go

a few months and they see that it's quickly lurching into years, you know, and they need troops.

They need black people, you know, fighting in the army.

And so the black folks go into the army and they perform reasonably well, so well that the actual army of enslavement, the Confederacy, says, you know what, we need to think about it.

We need some black people in our army, too.

But then they were scared of that.

And then they were scared of that.

Effective black soldiers would be a negation of the slavery ideology that blacks are subhuman.

But the fact they actually even considered it, that it actually, you know what I mean?

But when you're losing.

Right, but you're losing.

You say, listen, I can't.

I can't afford this anymore.

So you have to, the cost of white supremacy would have to be untenable.

We can't keep paying this.

My question is

this.

I'm picturing, I can't really picture it, but I'm picturing the power structure of Birmingham, Alabama, the power structure of Tallahassee, the power structure of northern cities and northern states as well, where the people who are in charge, I don't mean just the government, I mean the business and the law and medicine and everything else, actually wake up one day and said, you know what?

For 400 years, African Americans have gotten a bum deal out of this country.

The African American community continues to suffer suffer from the sins of slavery and things that happen after slavery.

And so we have to upend the way we think about guilt and sin.

We have to upend the way we think about spending priorities.

Like, when does that thing happen?

Because I'm an optimist.

I think it's going to happen.

Maybe it doesn't happen for 100 years, but it's got to happen.

I think you would have some sort of external event that would force people to do that.

I think that moral argument is being made, will continue to be made.

But I think something

that makes people feel like this is now in the interest of me, my wife, it has to be some kind of self-interest.

Yeah, oh, definitely.

It always is.

It always is.

Always.

Hold tight, listeners.

Next, Alex Wagner will interview Tanahasi Coates.

Let me just start by telling our audience that is unaware that we are sitting in the King's Theater on Flatbush in Brooklyn, which is an historic venue and a very large venue.

And out on the very large marquee tonight, it says, Tanahasi Coates live.

We're really sitting in a dank

dressing room that looks like he just has a bunch of furniture thrown together.

Yeah, it does have a certain Abu Grabish quality.

Yes, it does.

I mean, I know that you've been asked this question and sort of teased about it by certain members of this podcast.

What is it like to roll up to that?

I mean, there was a huge profile in the Sunday Arts section.

There's this.

Is it tedious at this point or is it still exciting?

No, it's not tedious and it's not unexciting.

I think I was talking to a buddy about this earlier today.

And I think the tough thing, I really want to write about this, but I can't figure out how to write about it without, frankly, sounding like an asshole.

I've been writing for about 21 years now.

For most of that time, I could not support myself, much less support a family and

those were like crucial years it wasn't any years you know this was like my 20s uh into my 30s and so that's when your adult identity is really you know form getting formulated and solidifying that's who i am to my to myself right like that's who i see when i look in the mirror and it's not like i see

like i didn't dislike that person Do you understand?

So it's not like I see like, like I have like failure issues or, oh, you're a horrible person.

Like I like that person quite a bit,

you know, even if he didn't make any money.

But

when you have a large public that sees you completely, completely differently, it's just, it's bizarre.

Yeah, you talk in the book at one point about the youth in you likes the sort of adoration on the subway or the acknowledgement on the subway.

The senior citizen in you likes the comfort of the fact that the paycheck may

pay for a very good or comfortable retirement.

And then some other part of you, the the you, you, is sort of horrified.

Like horrified.

Yeah, no, it's true.

I mean, we all have ego.

So the ego part of me is like, you know what I mean?

Yes, I did it, you know.

And then

as I said, like the senior citizen party is like, okay, now I have some level of financial security.

You know, we're not going to retire into total poverty.

At least it seems like that right now.

And then as you said, the part that I most identify is like, you know,

I just want to be normal.

Like, I just want to go, I just want things to be normal, you know.

I know that you've talked with Jeff and Matt, and we sort of think of this as a triptych.

Matt and you talked about the past, you and Jeff.

Yeah, I feel like I'm being triple teamed.

You are.

Yeah, okay.

We're making it as painful as possible.

But

I wanted to kind of look forward a little bit since so much of your writing focuses on the sins of the past and sort of get a better understanding about how you not the road forward and what the solution is, but kind of where you think we're going.

And there's a a statistic that seemed particularly relevant to me in the wake of Charlottesville and in the discussion we're having nationally about immigration, which is that babies of color as of 2016 now outnumber white babies born in America.

When you hear that statistic, what does it make you think about America in 20 years?

It's tough.

Not much.

And I'll say that because our formulations, for instance, the phrase you just use of color are um things that we've created in in other words they aren't um

it's not god's law um where these lines are drawn um when we say of color what what we mean is the the people who have power in this country in in this hierarchy tend to be white but that hierarchy is is is man-made And what we know throughout American history is, A,

categories are malleable.

Things can be changed.

We don't just notice from American history.

I mean, we notice across, you know,

all this.

I'll give you, you know, the example I always think about.

You went to, say, Antebellum, Louisiana, 200 years ago.

I might not be considered black.

Do you understand?

Like, I might be considered something else, not white, but not, you know, not black.

If I went to Brazil today, if I had been born in Brazil with my exact, you know, makeup looking exactly as I look right now, I mean, they got like 50 different boxes you check.

Kaifuzos.

Yes, yes.

You know exactly what I'm talking about.

So it changes across history and across space in terms of who's in and who's out.

I'm not sure why it wouldn't be able to change again.

But here's the second thing.

Even if it doesn't change, because maybe we've entered into a space where that's hardened and that's not actually going to change.

I could see that.

Power in America is at least political power is very much tied to access to the ballot box.

And

there was a great piece in the Times, I believe about a week ago.

Michelle Goldberg wrote this great piece on minority rule.

And the argument was given the way, you know, given our constitutional system and given some of the gerrymandering, you know, given all sorts of facts, there's no guarantee that that will, the fact that you have a majority of people of color in this country, that that necessarily will be represented in our electoral politics.

So you don't, I mean, the Supreme Court's going to be taking up the issue of gerrymandering.

Yes.

And,

you know, I

reviewed a book in the Times book review called Rat Fucked, and it was all about the gerrymandering process and how it's grossly distorted our American politics.

There's a level of fluency around the ways in which

certain parties have perniciously undermined basic representative democracy.

And I guess I would ask you:

are you

at all optimistic that that fluency on that issue leads to any amount of change for the better?

I don't know.

Here's what I'll say: I think Barack Obama resulted out of a, it's easier for me to speak on what's already happened, right?

Because that I know.

Um, Barack Obama, I think he's very proud.

The fact of a black president resulted out of a country that was fundamentally, in some real way, was different than it was 40, 50 years ago.

I mean, I don't think, even, you know, 20, 30 years ago when I was a child.

I don't think you can really, really deny that.

But we've had so many times,

and not really so many, but a particular set of times where things were, you know, really, really moving forward in this country.

And then they shifted backwards in a really, really dramatic way.

There are moments of progress in this country where you look at them under, you know, a microscope and you see that, in fact, for certain groups, you know, that that progress was purchased at their expense.

I think that there are a number of writers, reporters, pundits, etc., who can give you the bright and sunny possibility.

I think that just you just need to be aware.

I'm not saying I'm right.

I really don't.

I feel like I am laying out

the real risks that don't get talked about enough, that people should be aware of.

Like, this can go bad.

I'm not saying it will go bad.

I'm certainly not saying I hope it'll go bad.

But people should be really clear that there's no sort of destiny, that we aren't destined for it to go better.

I think we need to be aware of that.

When you talk about

meaning as a writer, ancestry and history has been hugely influential.

But I wonder about community and how

you forged community

in your life and sort of

is that different than how you found meaning as a writer.

That's a great question.

Why you really read the book?

Jesus, this is impressive.

Hmm.

Well, I guess those two things are tied together.

The first real community I could really speak of outside of my family, you know, as an adult was going off to Howard University

and being with a group of people who

necessarily were pulled there by the ties of ancestry, by which I mean how it was made by, you know, a group of people who made it, you know, into a certain thing.

It was like, I did it when you came to Howard.

You got something that you didn't get anywhere else.

And all of us were aware of that.

And so, yeah, I would have to say community is very, very important.

You know, I would have to say that.

Is that the same community that you have now?

It is.

It's really wild.

All of my, like, I would say, not all of

maybe 80%,

80% of my closest friends I met there.

I met my wife there.

you know um and if not my closest if i said you know like if i expanded out to my social web in general I would say that, you know, 90% probably of my, you know, my closest friends, if I didn't meet them at Howard, I met them through somebody else who went to Howard.

So it was tremendously important in my life.

And it installed, I think, just a kind of purposefulness that, you know, has really carried into my writing.

Do you feel like

there is a, I mean, in the context of sort of black intellectualism in the 21st century, is there a community or is it a group of individuals?

I think there are communities

within

that broad sort of black intellectual tradition.

It's probably always been that way.

There are people who feel drawn, more drawn to other people.

And I think they tend to

group together.

I was going to say that like Between the World and Me sort of that I thought that before Between the World and Me and then after Between the World and Me, I got criticized.

And then I was like, oh, there's no, but that's not actually true.

I criticized people before Between the World and Me came out.

So that's like a kind of, you know, woe is me answer.

It's not actually accurate, you know.

Do you, when you talk about this book, Young Writers, or

it's sort of dedicated to young writers,

where are you getting, where are you getting your information from?

Who are you looking to?

So I would say, A, that community I

talked to you about in terms of Howard University, but B,

the larger community of writers, many of whom I don't even know, who I just read and I have great, great admiration for.

Who should we be looking out for?

I mean, probably out of everybody writing today, like the journalist, in terms of what I do that I admire, most probably Elizabeth Colbert.

She has a tremendous talent for marrying just really clear, concise writing with incredible reporting and a

biting sense of humor, like almost like sub-tweeting, like,

you know, between her sentences.

I absolutely adore her work.

I absolutely adore her work.

In the book, you talk a little bit about finding outlets that allow you to be private again.

And one of them that you mentioned is comics, Black Panther comics.

What else makes you what other activities, what other projects that you engage in make you feel like you return to yourself?

Well, I'm still studying French.

You know what?

I find that things that

when

palais enforcé poultite.

ah, messi, messi.

I feel like I still suck.

No, you don't.

Still suck.

But, you know, what I'm saying, though, to that is, it's still a struggle, though.

Yeah.

Like, it's still a struggle.

And that, remember, I was telling you, like, I was like, I want things to go back to normal.

When I'm speaking French, that's how it felt before when I was a writer.

That's so fascinating.

Wait, what's that about?

It just felt like everything was a struggle.

Like, life was a big struggle.

So I was in France for a year with my family.

And the best thing I used to joke with my son about this, that it was like

every day I went outside, I was trying to walk on roller skates.

And everybody else had been born with roller skates on.

And I think that's how I felt about the world for a long time.

You know, before, you know what I mean?

Pre-pre-Atlantic.

Do you have some kind of like self-defeating wish for it to be that hard again?

Not defeating because I never felt defeated.

Like you have to understand, I didn't feel defeated, but it felt like struggle.

It felt like, okay, like it feels like the world is going this way and I'm going this way.

Right.

And it has, it felt like that from the time I was a child.

I mean, you could go, like, given the kind of family I was born into, given how my dad was, you know, crazy black hippie, given that household, how different that was from the neighborhood I was living in, given the values and how different they were from the world, it always felt like I was kind of like walking against the wind.

And it's funny because like I hated that.

But if you, if it, if that happens to you long enough, you live like that long enough, you will begin to like internalize it.

And it just becomes, okay, that's the world as I know it.

Right.

And then, so, when the wind's at your back, it's like, this ain't hard.

This ain't the world.

Come on.

Come on.

This is too, there's a trick.

There's something going on here.

So I do the French.

And the other thing is, um,

I um, I swim.

I swim, which I basically learned as an adult.

Interesting.

Yeah.

And did it take you a while to pick it up?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

So I first started learning in 2015.

I now have to stop myself from speaking in French.

I first first started learning in 2015.

And then

I had to drop it for a little while.

And then I picked it up again in this January.

And

I go to that pool.

Well, that's not true.

I was going to say no one cares who I am.

You're so honest.

Yeah, it's not true.

People do recognize me.

At the swimming pool.

Yeah.

But they don't care.

Do you understand?

Like, right.

I mean, like, when you're doing laps, is it somebody?

It's not like doing the crawl next to you.

They might see you or you're just in the game.

I a oh you look familiar then I see you on TV like it's that sort of but in general it's like God that dude sucks right like that dude really boy he's having a hard time man I don't know about him I don't know if he's gonna make it and that's the world as I know it that was the world as I knew it and so there's something like this sounds bizarre but it's like some S ⁇ M shit or something like it's really sort of a sadomasochistic pastimes speaking French and swimming whoa um

I don't know what's going on in my head it's very I feel like a shrink right now.

It takes me back to where, you know what I mean, the world as I knew it.

It just feels natural.

And that seems important.

It is.

In moments like these.

It is.

It is.

Let me ask you one more question and then we'll let you go.

You have this really beautiful

sort of paragraph in the book where you talk about your wife who is

was once a denizen of sort of liberal arts, Yale Doctoro, et cetera, and has refashioned herself a scientist.

I thought that you expressed this really beautiful sentiment that her

metamorphosizing, metamorphosizing?

Metamorphosis into.

Her metamorphosis into a scientist was in itself a form of resistance.

We do not have to be

what they say about us.

Right, right.

And that you had underestimated or not thought about the simple pleasure of watching someone you love

find another part of themselves.

I'm paraphrasing.

That's basically it, though.

Can you tell me a little bit what that was like as her husband and as someone who has gone through his own metamorphosis in a way?

I think people are like poorly, maybe I had this wrong, but I think people are generally poorly prepared for

marriage in this society.

I think

like,

I mean, you know it's hard and it's said it's hard, but I don't know if this is like the breakdown of, you know, the importance of the church in our lives, but there's no,

I don't find that people are well prepared for it i i know i wasn't prepared for i mean we were together almost 15 years before we even got married um but

i um i didn't know what was

i understood partnering with somebody because

that might be the best most efficient way to live And I got that you would feel emotionally, but I was really prepared, you know, for the idea of all of that, you know, romantic infatuation to fade away.

Like that, that was fine i was actually prepared for that but i wasn't i didn't understand that you get

other things

and i maybe i did but i hadn't thought about what those other things were

um and i thought

babies yeah

yeah babies right yeah yeah yeah i mean i was i knew that right i knew that but i didn't know so we got together when i was really young you know um

for instance i was like 21 and so

i haven't said it was like levels.

Like, I thought, okay, I met this woman when I was 21.

That's who she is.

And I didn't understand that like she could become somebody different, but kind of still be the same thing that you like actually fell in love with, like at its core, but actually

different.

Watching

someone go back to school in their 30s,

watching someone go through what, you know, what it took to get admitted to an Ivy League school, go back to that school,

struggle with people whose brains are 10 years younger than them.

I mean, decide to be a doctor.

I mean, who does this?

Your wife?

Yeah, I mean, evidently.

And then watching that person struggle day in and day out, you know, having them talk about how they chop up bodies and.

dissect things and see all sorts of disease and the fact that they have a new, you know, level of knowledge.

I just got surgery on my neck and i was telling her about it and that she can understand things that i don't understand right like a whole body of knowledge that i don't even this is not like i read this book you should read right but this is way over here um it has just been a privilege to see like it's inspiring to watch do you think that she's felt some of those same feelings watching you get to where you are yeah she says that she says it but i it was like i was driving down the same road though I didn't say, you know what, I'm in this lane.

I'm going to go all the way over here and I'm going to drive.

You know what I mean?

So it's a little different.

but she certainly says that she didn't foresee all of this, you know?

Well, it sounds like a beautiful partnership.

Yeah, it's all right.

It's all right.

We do okay.

You're doing okay overall, my friend.

Thank you.

Thank you for your time.

Thanks, Alex.

Now, that's how you do an interview, Jeff Boulder.

No.

She was excellent.

And that'll do it for this week's episode of Radio Atlantic, which was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Katie Green, Kim Lau, Marissa Johnson, and Anna Bross.

Thank you so much to our colleague Tanahasi Coates for sitting down through not one, not two, but three separate interviews.

Thanks as always to my co-hosts, Jeff and Alex.

Special thanks to Xandra Clark for recording us on site in New York and to the King's Theater in Brooklyn, where that recording was made.

The one and only John Batiste is the genius behind our theme music.

His immortal rendition of the Battle Hymn of the Republic will play in full after these credits conclude.

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You'll find detailed show notes linked from the episode description.

Most importantly, thank you for listening.

Watch out for the arc of history.

I'm told it bends towards chaos.

We'll see you next week.

Lord

in glory

My eyes and the force of the coming of the Lord.

He is trampling, defending where the great rattle sword.

And lose the faithful lighting of the terrible Swiss war.

His troop is marching on.

Glory, glory,

hallelujah.

Glory, glory, high.

Hallelujah.

God,

glory.

hallelujah.