Award winning author, essayist and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, joins Errin to discuss his new book, The Message, his views on the purpose of journalism, the unique position Black journalists have in America, and what he makes of the current political moment.
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On today’s episode
Our host
Errin Haines is The 19th’s editor-at-large and writer of The Amendment newsletter. An award-winning journalist with nearly two decades of experience, Errin was previously a national writer on race for the Associated Press. She’s also worked at the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.
Follow Errin on Instagram @emarvelous and X @errinhaines.
Today’s guest
Ta-Nehisi Coates is an award-winning author and journalist. His books include The Water Dancer and The Message. He is currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English department at Howard University.
Episode transcript
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Ta-Nehisi Coates:
My mom had this very profane saying, which I cannot repeat on this podcast.
Errin Haines:
Why this podcast? Go for it.
Ta-Nehisi:
Do you really want me to say this?
Errin:
Uh, definitely
Ta-Nehisi:
I would tell you in private, it’s that kinda language. It’s kind of language that if we were just talking. I would say.
Errin:
Amendment uncut. Let’s go.
Ta-Nehisi:
I can’t put my mom out there like, dang.
Errin:
We’re not gonna put, we’re not gonna put your mom out there. Okay, fine. Tell me later.
Ta-Nehisi:
We’re out there like that. I’ll tell you later.
Errin:
Hey, y’all, welcome to The Amendment, a weekly conversation about gender, politics, and power from The 19th News and Wonder Media Network. I’m your host, Errin Haines, and today I’m joined by award-winning novelist, essayist and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates to discuss his new book, The Message. Now, The Message has gotten a lot of coverage for its section dedicated to the Israel Palestine conflict, but there’s a lot more in this book that I wanted to dive into as one of the most consequential writers of our time. I wanted to hear more from Ta-Nehisi about how he’s thinking about our politics and the role of journalists in this moment.
Thanks for doing this again, friend. I appreciate you.
Ta-Nehisi:
Thanks for having me.
Errin:
Absolutely. Well listen, I want to get right into The Message, which I have been digging into. And there’s a lot to unpack here quite a bit.
Ta-Nehisi:
I only picked the uncontroversial things. I picked the easy things.
Errin:
Exactly. And only tell us that our task is is no less than to save the world. So yeah, I mean, you start the book talking about the purpose of writing in the first chapter. You say journalism is not a luxury. What do you mean by that?
Ta-Nehisi:
Well, it derives from a remarkable Audre Lorde essay that my good friend, Eve Yewing gave to me to read years ago when I was actually even beginning to consider this book. And the essay is called “Poetry is Not a Luxury.” I think I’m getting this right. But Audre Lorde’s argument was basically that the job of poetry is to clarify the world. That there is an essential connection between that clarification and activism, that you can’t act upon what you cannot see. And I basically took, you know, the same idea and applied it to that opening essay that you’re talking about. It defines a lot about how I teach my students at Howard.
Errin:
I mean, clarifying, I feel like has always been the role of journalists, but I’m wondering how you are thinking about the role of journalists now, and if you think that there’s a particular role for especially Black journalists in this moment.
Ta-Nehisi:
Alright. It’s about to get spicy.
Errin:
Let’s go.
Ta-Nehisi:
It’s true. I mean, theoretically we’re supposed to clarify, but I don’t know that we always do that. I mean, the example that sticks in my head, for instance, is when the New York Times all those years ago decided that for no good reason, as far as I’m concerned, that they would call waterboarding “enhanced interrogation” when they called it torture, you know, when other governments did it. I don’t think that’s a choice of clarification. I don’t think enhanced interrogation, for instance, is clarifying. I think across the board there are things that we do as journalistic practices that may not be clarifying. You know, for instance, if you think more domestically – and this is getting better – but the way we report it on the cops as though the cops don’t lie. Like, just openly quoting cops, you know, there’s this kind of deference to authority. And I think that actually leads into your other question about Black journalists. I think having people who come from communities, where let’s just say, uh, the relationship to authority is much more complicated. I think it’s actually quite helpful.
Errin:
Yeah. To be a Black journalist. I feel like in a lot of ways, can be clarifying to the way in which we approach this work. I mean, we are not.. going with the police example, you know, we are not talking about bad apples. We are trying to talk about an entire system. Right? That needs to be addressed.You know, when we’re seeing racism, we’re not gonna refer to that as racially tinged, because that really doesn’t say anything that doesn’t clarify anything.
Ta-Nehisi:
Or racial tensions or race relations or all the, you know, that vocabulary, which really does not clarify at all.
Errin:
And language matters so much. How are you thinking about, or how did this book make you think about your own evolution as a journalist and what your obligation is in this moment?
Ta-Nehisi:
I mean, my mom had this very profane saying, which I cannot repeat on this podcast.
Errin:
Gimme the sanitized version of it.
Ta-Nehisi:
Um, the sanitized version is, she wasn’t raising young Black men to go stand on the corner. And you can imagine how my mother actually said that.
Errin:
Yes, I can. I am actually right now.
Ta-Nehisi:
Yeah. And so like the basic gist of that was just, you have to do something. You know what I mean? You gotta be part of the solution. Not part of the problem, and not even not part of the problem, but not just sort of standing around letting the world go by. Whatever you choose, whatever your trade is gonna be, you got to be part of the solution. And I chose writing. And so it was always like in the background that whatever I would do with writing, forgive me for being cliche, but you know, part of it would be to make the world a better place. You know? And so, I’ve taken that with me. I’ve always had that with me. There’ve been times in my career where I wasn’t able to act on that in the way that I wanted to, you know? And fortunately now I’m at a position where I really can.
Errin:
I mean, you talk about in The Message about the vindication tradition, right? And really correcting the record. And I do feel like, especially as Black journalists, I think about you, I think about some of our other colleagues, that are very much about correcting the record, which you know, there’s certainly been a backlash to. And we’re gonna get into that ’cause for folks who do not want the record corrected because of the myths that they would prefer continue to kind of exist and persist in our kind of national consciousness and imagination, that vindication tradition though. Why does that matter? How do you feel like journalism is a part of that?
Ta-Nehisi:
I mean, this goes back for us, right? Like we just have this like long tradition of Black journalists and that being the job, from clarifying what slavery actually is to clarifying what lynching actually is, to clarifying what our police departments are actually doing. I mean, it just feels like correcting the record has always been part of us. I think what is different now is that in this generation, some of those people who are doing that work, have gained access to mainstream publications that White people pay attention to and that is incredibly troubling, you know, because White people are not some, uh, how do we put it? Like undistinguished mass of racism, you know? There are a number of people who just don’t know. You know what I mean? Just don’t understand. And so the idea that you can now make the case to them with all of the resources that some of these institutions have. The one I talk about in the book, of course, is Nikole (Hannah-Jones) in 1619 project. Like, the idea that that could be made at the level of the New York Times. Yeah. That’s a different thing. That’s a different thing. It’s threatening.
Errin:
It absolutely is. You say in the book, “it is impossible to write truthfully of Black people in all our genius and folly, in all our joy and anguish, and not disturb those who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed.” And I think that that’s exactly it. This disturbs people in a way that they do not necessarily wanna be. And so that I think is so much of the response that we’ve seen.
Ta-Nehisi:
And actually, this is like one of the things I thought about even when writing a book, I think maybe those of us who are more sympathetic to that literature politically don’t always understand the power of it in the way that those who want to suppress it do. There’s a sense that the book banners or book burners or whatever have lost their mind. But if you think about their entire political project, they haven’t, you know, it makes sense. It just really makes sense that they would be opposed to what we’re trying to do. Because if we’re honest, we are trying to transform the world and they don’t want to. You know what I mean? They say it, they like the world as it is.
Errin:
Just thinking about these last four, five years. I mean, you talked about the gift of clarity, but it feels to me like that is not a gift that enough of us, as citizens, or in our profession have really gotten, or if we have gotten it, it’s something that we’re not really fully appreciating. And I wonder if you agree with that. What is it gonna take for us to get to the gift of clarity as a country?
Ta-Nehisi:
What argument I make in the book is that we just don’t think about writing enough. I think we think about writing as the typing of our thoughts or like, we have an idea. This happened, this happened, but I don’t know that we pay enough attention, you know what I mean? To actually asking ourselves, is this truly what we mean to say? Is this the thing that makes the reader feel, you know, specifically what we’re talking about, and I think journalism, traditional journalism has a tension in it. And that tension is you want to be objective, which means, you don’t really wanna lean the way you write to one side or the other, but all sides are not equal.
Ta-Nehisi:
You know what I mean? Some sides have power. And so, for instance, and I’m not calling anybody specifically out, but if you are a journalist living in Washington, DC that means that you probably regularly have contact with the people making policy and the people moving events much more so than you have contact with people who are just affected by it. And certainly journalists are sent out to see that. But even in that, you’re being sent out, that’s not who your kids go to school with. That’s not who you see at the Starbucks regularly. That’s not who you see for lunch. That’s not who you see in your social circle.
Errin:
You’re going out into an America that you are not necessarily directly experiencing.
Ta-Nehisi:
That is exactly right. Automatically you’re compromised. And I know that we strive for objectivity, you know, even with that, but it’s just a difficult space to be in.
Errin:
Yeah. Well, we would have to have a whole other podcast on the myth of objectivity. We will not even go there. Maybe you’ve seen this, there have been a lot of recent questions kind of swirling around Black men and what they’re gonna do in this election, right. This narrative that there’s waning support from Black men for Democrats, it really seems to kind of scapegoat them while absolving the White voters, men and women who have overwhelmingly voted for Trump and who plan to do so. Again, if the polls are to be believed in November, I just wonder what you make of a narrative that is suggesting that Black men could be to blame, you know, if Trump is reelected, why are we seeing that narrative at this point in our election cycle?
Ta-Nehisi:
Well, I’ll just come out and say it. There is a way that we look at Black men, that we don’t look at other men in this country. And I mean that in a bad way, I don’t think I have ever heard in my life a politician address a group of people he was trying to convince to vote for a certain position or a certain candidate in the way Barack Obama addressed Black men. I can’t think of anybody who in trying to get somebody to do something, decides that they’re going to like hector and lecture them.
OBAMA CLIP:
And so now you are thinking about sitting out or even supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you because you think that’s a, a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is putting women down. That’s not acceptable. That’s not, this shouldn’t even be a question.
Ta-Nehisi:
You know? Now, whatever you think of what he was saying of his critique or anything, or its truth or not, why is that? And to the point that I was watching that, and I was like, how many brothers in the barbershop or wherever are convinced by that? And I don’t think men, like who is the man that was on the fence, who was like, “I don’t know what I’m gonna do.” Who heard that and was like, “oh, yeah, I’m now for Kamala.” Who is that? You know, it was such that you wonder who the audience actually was.
Errin:
Yes.
Ta-Nehisi:
So are they either the receiver for the message, or are they the object for somebody else?
Errin:
That’s not how you persuade someone. Shaming is not necessarily. And that was the critique by many people of his comments.
Ta-Nehisi:
It was really bad. I mean, of course, obviously I disagree in general, and I’ve said this before with his approach and his politics on this stuff. But I’m just talking about getting somebody to do something. Like even if you say, I agree with that, if you agree with his politics on morality, et cetera, how is that a campaign pitch?
Errin:
I don’t know. I mean, I talk to a lot of organizers and what they say is, shaming is not the argument to make to people that you’re trying to get to vote.
Ta-Nehisi:
Errin, I will say though, just so I’m clear on that, I am struck. I’ll just say this, I don’t know why this is, but I am struck in a difference in how he talks about Black men and how Kamala does. And I don’t think it’s explainable by the fact that he’s a Black man. I don’t think that’s the explanation.
Errin:
What do you see that’s different about how she talks?
Ta-Nehisi:
I mean, she came out the other day and said, look, Black men are no different than other voters. They expect you to earn their votes. And I appreciate that.Talk to these brothers, like you talk to anybody else, you are a politician, and they should hold you accountable. And they should have all the skepticism. Like they have a right to that. You know, treating them like, okay, so at one moment you want to be former president for everybody, but then you want the right to like have a private conversation with these brothers publicly. Which is it, bro? Like, which is it? And so, if she can say that and then go and say, listen, I have to be president for everybody, that’s fine with me. I got it. Like, that’s okay. If you wanna say, look, I gotta be president for the entire country, which I understand, and that is the role, then talk to these brothers like you trying to be president for the entire country.
Errin:
Which means including them. Right? And that means listening to them, and then that means rolling out, which is what she did. She rolls out a policy that says, this is what I’m gonna do for you. Which is what every voter wants to know. What are you gonna do for me? What does my life look like with you as president? Okay. I wanna ask you, I mean, you brought up Kamala Harris. I wanna ask you about her, because you were in Chicago at the DNC, I saw you for five minutes. Hi, and bye.
Ta-Nehisi:
I’m sorry, Errin.
Errin:
No, it’s okay. You were busy, obviously. You were busy. You wrote a piece focused on…
Ta-Nehisi:
Oh, it was crazy. I didn’t expected to be like that, .
Errin:
But I wanted to add, just given how you covered Barack Obama’s historic making presidency. I wonder if you also have thoughts about Kamala Harris’ historic campaign?
Ta-Nehisi:
I do. I think this is like really different for several reasons, I think a Black woman as head of state is not like the photo negative of a Black man as head of state. That’s the first thing. I think just like brothers are a particular thing in American history and American society, Black women are too. And it’s not just simply the flip side. Like it’s not just the opposite. Like we are people who, sexual violence runs through us, right? We literally were created by sexual violence. You know what I’m saying? Like literally as Black people and the site obviously of so much of that sexual violence was Black women, right? And we carry that. We carry that in our DNA, we carry it in our skin complexion. We carry it in our features. We carry it in the back of our mind. It is with us all the time. And so, in a moment where obviously a woman’s autonomy is so high, in terms of what the political agenda is going to be, and a person on the other side is, to speak conservatively, is somebody who has been found guilty in the civil courts of New York.
Ta-Nehisi:
You know what I mean, for assaulting a woman. To have Kamala Harris up there as the embodiment of the argument is such a profane… It’s different man, that’s some different energy that’s not just Barack Obama in a dress or whatever. It’s a different thing. It’s a very different thing. And I think that’s what explains a lot of the energy that we’re seeing, which I would say even the energy is a little different. You know? It’s not quite the same, for good and Ill, but it’s a different energy around Kamala and that’s some heavy stuff she’s carrying.
Errin:
Yeah. And it is very interesting to contemplate her candidacy in the same year. I mean, this is the first election post Roe.
Ta-Nehisi:
Yes.
Errin:
And for her to potentially be the first woman president and then you layer race on top of that, it is a lot. I wonder if you think America is ready one for a woman president, and two for a Black woman to run the country.
Ta-Nehisi:
I don’t know, I think like maybe we get this question backwards. I don’t know if it’s “ready.” I mean, it’s a fight. Certainly there are enough Americans who are ready, it would shock no one if she won a popular vote. I think we all expect her to win a popular vote, actually. So just on a base level, most Americans who are voting probably yes, but you gotta win, you gotta win the fight. It’s like saying, is the world ready for Mike Tyson to be the champion, you know what I mean? You gotta you gotta knock the motherfucker out. Excuse my language.
Errin:
That’s allowed here.
Ta-Nehisi:
You gotta do it. You know, I think that a question of readiness as will it actually succeed?
Errin:
We’ll be right back after a word from our sponsor.
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Errin:
On the topic of readiness, I also wonder, as a fellow Howard alum, how you think… No, seriously. She went to Howard, obviously that shaped her. You talk about how it shaped you. How do you think about how your shared alma mater may have prepared her for this moment too?
Ta-Nehisi:
Well, the real question is, is the world ready for the amount of arrogance?
Errin:
No. The answer to that is no.
Ta-Nehisi:
No, this would be ugly. I can’t, I can’t even.
Errin:
You all would be insufferable. It’s really bad.
Ta-Nehisi:
It would be rough. It would be really bad.
Errin:
I mean, I know a homecoming hate to see y’all coming after this.
Ta-Nehisi:
Oh my God.
Ta-Nehisi:
Listen, listen. She ain’t even won yet and homecoming is this weekend, and it’s gonna be a problem. Anyway, when you have four years of kind of just being ensconced in this Black world where all the geniuses are Black and all the dummies are Black, and all the good people are Black, and all them are Black. When you have that, I think it just gives you a degree of confidence, you know what I mean? And understanding of Black folks. I mean, that whole thing about, Trump saying is she Black or not? Like no actual Black people who vote – I just wanna be clear about that – are really confused on that question. Now I know there’s a lot of Negroes out there who are getting on podcasts or whatever, who I suspect don’t vote anyway.
Ta-Nehisi:
You know, talking crazy. But you know, they not part of this, You’re not really part of an electorate. I have deep skepticism about whether you actually could be, but I have deep skepticism on whether you were voting anyway or care anyway. So, I don’t know. I think an AKA is a little different. That tradition there, you know the way she comes to blackness is obviously different than Obama’s. I’m not saying he’s not Black – I just wanna be very clear about that – or that he’s less Black or anything like that. But certainly her route is very different.
Errin:
You know, the other thing I’m thinking about going into this election, should Kamala Harris become our next president. There was a racial backlash after Obama was elected president, right? I mean, we were anything but post-racial in that moment. So I’m wondering what you think about that should Harris win in November? Are you concerned that something similar will be unleashed in our democracy?
Ta-Nehisi:
No. I mean, we’re still in it I think. This might be the end of backlash, actually, because in some sense, it’s just a fight now. Like, usually what happens with backlash is, there’s this backlash and then we get overwhelmed and we retreat from the scene. But I saw this at the DNC, the Democratic Party is a Black ass party, you know what I mean? Like you go down South and it’s like the Republicans are the White party and the Democrats are not just the Black party, but it’s the Black party and everybody else who feels like they want a different vision.
Errin:
Partisan politics is definitely racialized in the South for sure.
Ta-Nehisi:
And I don’t think that’s gonna change. You’re right, there was a backlash to Obama, but it was not like, say the backlash after reconstruction or even the one after civil rights because – and this is a tricky position for us – we just have so much more power in terms of electoral politics now. I’m pretty confident, whether it’s Vice President Harris or not. I’m pretty confident I’ve not seen the last Black president in my lifetime and I thought that after Obama. It’s just the party structures are just so very different now.
Errin:
I do wanna get to the Donald Trump of it all, because I actually was just rereading your 2017 article in The Atlantic on the first White president for the country. This is a very close election. We could be reelecting Donald Trump. And I wonder, you know, we’re talking about clarity, what you think it means to look at a thing but not really see it, which feels like kind of the phenomenon of the last nine years and maybe the moment that we’re living through now, is part of a long tradition of us not seeing, or even looking away or gravitating to the narrative about who we are. That feels good. But that is not necessarily the most honest and accurate version of who we are.
Ta-Nehisi:
I think there is still a critical mass of Americans, not a majority, but a critical mass of Americans, and maybe a majority of White people who just think it’s all okay. Like, they just think it’s okay, you know? And then there’s some other minority of them who, and maybe this is even the majority, who don’t necessarily think it’s okay, but don’t think it’s disqualifying. Like they don’t think racism is a disqualifying feature. They don’t think all of the rape accusations are disqualifying. They don’t think like the coup, the attempted coup is disqualifying. And that’s just the fact of it. It’s sad. We probably would like to think we’re more further along than we actually are. But it is what it is.
Errin:
I hear you saying that, and I’m also reading this book where you’re talking about how we meet this moment as writers, is this a moment that you feel – especially here at home in our politics – Is this a moment that you feel like is pulling you back into the arena?
Ta-Nehisi:
Yes, but in unexpected ways. Earlier I said that thing about like how Kamala Harris really was different. And I’m kind of sorry about this, and I’m still thinking this through, and I think it’s a lot of people who will probably not think this is fair. But I think it is, I guess my expectations for a Black woman president, by which I’m not just speaking of race and biology or gender, you know, I’m speaking of history. I’m speaking of ancestry. I’m speaking of legacy. My expectations are different. I do expect more. And I actually, I’m gonna argue that I have a right to expect more. Here’s why. When I was at the DNC, there was a clear choice made to employ the history of Black struggle in this country, and Black political struggle in this country.
Ta-Nehisi:
It’s a very, very clear choice made, one that I don’t think they actually made in ‘08, which was interesting, and maybe there’s more space for it now. But, when I was there the first night, I sat there and I watched the tributes to Shirley Chisholm. I watched the tributes to Fannie Lou Hamer. I watched the tributes to Jesse for his runs in ‘84 and ‘88. I saw a great, great diversity of speakers, you know what I mean, from Indigenous Americans to Latinos and Latinas. It was great to see, but I think that legacy comes with responsibilities. And I think if you’re gonna embrace all of that, you have to ask yourself what the meaning of all of those struggles are. And are you living up to the lessons of that meaning in your domestic policy and in your foreign policy too. And right now, we are not as a country, I wrote for Vanity Fair about the uncommitted movement, right? And about how they were not even allowed a speaker. And like I couldn’t help thinking about what had actually happened to Fannie Lou Hamer.
Errin:
Well I mean, it was the 60th anniversary of her speech that week.
Ta-Nehisi:
It was the 60th anniversary of her speech that week. And they couldn’t even get somebody in there to say, this is who I am, and this is why I’m supporting Kamala Harris. Like, what is that? They can’t speak. Like, I get that you would wanna vet their speech. I get that you would want certain things set. I think all of that is within the parameters of what a convention would do. Like expectations, you know what I mean? I understand that, certainly, I get it. You don’t want nobody saying, to stand up there and say, “from the river to the sea.” You’re the Democratic party. That’s not what you want.
Ta-Nehisi:
I think all of that is fair game and understandable, but you can’t speak at all. I think that was a mistake. And I think that betrayed all of that heritage and all of that legacy, I understand why it was difficult, but I just, that hurt my heart. That hurt my heart. And maybe that’s not about campaign tactics or whatever, but that really, really hurt my heart, given what those folks were representing and what they wanted. And I think, should she become president – even right now, there are very serious questions about whether we are standing in the tradition of the people that we hold up as our heroes while we ship bombs to be dropped on one of the most densely populated quarters in the world. I think we got deep questions that we have to answer, man, that are uncomfortable.
Errin:
Well, I feel like you were trying to get at a a lot of that in The Message. Obviously, you know, you have this section on Israel-Palestine towards the end of the book. But I wonder if you feel like the focus, as you’ve been on book tour, what has this book tour, what have these interviews, kind of missed about what you have been trying to say?
Ta-Nehisi:
You know, it’s tough. It’s a lot, you know, but it’s tough for me to critique because I’ll be honest with you, that section is half the book. I knew I was stepping into the minefield. I was very, very clear on that. So to the extent that the interviews have focused on that and not focused on Dakar and not focused necessarily on South Carolina, I understand. There is a war going on right now. You know, there are people that are activated right now. So I get it. And I guess, like, you know, you asked this question about whether I felt like I was being pulled back in. I mean, I guess at the same time as I, you know, just put these, you know, maybe, um, extra expectations on Kamala Harris, Errin, if I’m honest with you, I feel extra expectations.
Ta-Nehisi:
Like I don’t feel like I get to go back and write whatever I would want to be writing right now. This is not a comfortable position. This is not something I would necessarily seek out. This is not a place I want to be. And let me be clear about what I’m saying: We have a group of people in this country who for centuries suffered the most horrific violence — exclusion, racialization, pogroms, you know, ethnic cleansing, et cetera, you know — at the hands of the West. Alll of that culminates in industrialized genocide during the Holocaust. Just the worst stuff in the world.
Ta-Nehisi:
It’s difficult to be cognizant of that and be sensitive to that and then at the same time say to that group of people, ‘in your name” — or maybe not “in your name,” but certainly “in the legacy of the history,” in the name of the history that I just cited — apartheid is being implemented by the state that claims that heritage. That’s, like, hard to write. That’s hard to say. I think it must be said, I think, as the child of people born into American apartheid, as a child of people who were born into a democracy that was a democracy in name only. When I see that with my own eyes, I have a responsibility to speak to that, whether it is what I would want to be doing or not. And I think if more of my peers — and now I’m speaking, you know, about Black journalists and Black writers — I think if more of my peers saw it, they would be as fired up as I am. I know I sound crazy. Like I’m changing the subject like, “Ta-Nehisi” — you know what I mean? — “Why you talking about all these Palestinians all the time now?” You know, and I just think, “Brother, sister, if you saw what I saw, you would be on fire because you would feel like you were transported back into Mississippi again, man.”
Errin:
That is interesting to think about. And also thinking about journalists — Black journalists in particular — who have been trying to write the first draft of history here, right? Who are still trying to confront the injustice, the inequality that they’re seeing in this country. You definitely talked about, you know, kind of your experience over there and how that even informed how you are thinking differently about this country.
Ta-Nehisi:
Yeah, yeah. No, it did. And I’m, you know, I’m still formulating that. Look, what I know is this: Black people in this country, what victims of various groups that came here fleeing a oppression themselves, like very, very real oppression. And those people then joined in to the broader, you know, sort of concept or notion or identity of whiteness and became oppressors themselves. That’s not ’cause those people are particularly evil or particularly bad. You know, I believe in systems, you know, more than I believe in, you know, evil, or, you know, overly courageous people. We ourselves have done that, you know, in other power systems and in other situations. I don’t want us, I don’t want our name on, what I saw. I guess that’s how I feel. I don’t want our name. And it’s kind of why I’m so loud about this right now.
Ta-Nehisi:
Not to the extent we can, you know, do anything about it. Not in our name, not in our name, not in our name shall America ship bombs to enforce separate and unequal. It pains me, man. It pains me for, like, the legacy of Martin Luther King, legacy of James Baldwin legacy of Frederick Douglas, legacy of Ida B. Wells. You know what I’m saying? Coretta Scott King. For all of us to be attached to that, it hurts. It hurts. And so, I know that the forces that govern a writer and a journalist are very different than the forces that govern, you know, a politician or presidency, you know? And, nonetheless, you know, I just feel like I have a responsibility to say these things. I feel like I have a responsibility to raise a level of expectation, because if I don’t, I don’t know. With all of those stories that you and I were raised on, that you and I work in the spirit of as Black journalists, I don’t know what they were worth. I mean, were they just for our own freedom or were they to make the world safe from, you know, certain systems that we object to?
Errin:
Well then it looks like we look forward to your return to the arena, friend, because it sounds like you’ve got a lot more to say. Thank you for coming by here to unpack some of it with me at The Amendment. I really appreciate you.
Ta-Nehisi:
Thank you, Errin. Thank you so much.
Errin:
So that’s all for this week’s episode of The Amendment, which is also a newsletter that I write with regular columns addressing the asterisk of the news cycle. Who’s being left out? What do they have to say? And look, y’all know I don’t like to brag about myself. Shut up, mom. But it’s really peak me getting into the 2024 of it all. Subscribe for free at 19th news.org/amendment. I hope to be in your inboxes real soon.
The Amendment is a co-production of the 19th News and Wonder Media Network. Our executive producers are Jenny Kaplan, Terri Rupar, Faith Smith and Emily Rudder. The show is edited by Grace Lynch and Julia B. Chan, produced by Brittany Martinez, Grace Lynch and Luci Jones, and post-production support from Julie Bogen, Lance Dixon and Wynton Wong. Artwork by Aria Goodman. Our theme music is composed by Jlin.