The Charge to Be Fair: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay in Conversation

As 2015 draws to a close, we’re revisiting some of our favorite pieces from this year’s Barnes & Noble Reivew, including this revealing conversation from August between writers Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay, about Coates’s electrifying new book Between the World and Me. — The Editors

 

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been heralded by some as the heir to James Baldwin. Like Baldwin, he writes about race with a fierce passion, and the urgency that can only be captured by living within a black body in a place and time where the black body is endangered. Yet it may be fairer to say Ta-Nehisi Coates is unique. While he may be an heir to predecessors like Baldwin, he is also carving his own path and establishing his own voice.

Coates is the author of two memoirs — The Beautiful Struggle and the recently released Between the World and Me. He also serves as a national correspondent for The Atlantic, where he writes about race and culture while curating one of the most interesting, and dare I say, thoughtful comment sections online. His award-winning 2014 essay, “The Case for Reparations,” is a searing argument for reparations as a means of addressing the moral debts of slavery, segregation, and discriminatory housing practices.

Like all black intellectuals — like all intellectuals from underrepresented groups, really — Coates is forced into a difficult position in which he is expected to be many things to many people. He carries the expectations of a great many people who are not accustomed to having their experiences — or something akin to their appearances — voiced.

In Between the World and Me, Coates writes a letter to his son on living with a black body that faces too many dangers. He writes about the fear that black parents have, and the ways in which that fear shapes how they raise and discipline their children. From his childhood in Baltimore, to “The Mecca” of Howard University, to the early years of parenting his son, Coates examines the black man’s place in America, and how he grew into a father raising his son to be whole and confident when “The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are.”

Coates and I had a great conversation via email, where we discussed Between the World and Me, the rhetoric of the black body, and what it takes to discuss race in a culture that makes such discussions so contentious and, at times, seemingly impassable.  —Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay: How are you handling the book’s amazing reception so far?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: It’s a bit overwhelming. I mean, you know about this. When you write, you’re inside the project. You can’t really think about the reception. It has to be worth it even if no one reads it. So I’m shocked. I was not prepared.

RG: Has your son read this book yet? What does he think?

TC: Yup. In draft. And then in galley. He was very proud.

RG: How do you handle such lofty comparisons like those, for example, to James Baldwin?

TC: I think that bothers other people a lot more than it bothers me. It’s fairly clear there will not be another Baldwin. I take a great deal of inspiration from his work. I think Toni Morrison’s opinion is an opinion for one book. It is not a guarantee on the next book.

RG: In Between the World and Me, you center much of the discussion on the black body. What compelled you to make this rhetorical choice?

TC: There is tendency in academia and in (some) social justice circles to make that which is oppressive distant and abstract. We use a language, which at times obscures what’s going on -– racial discrimination, racial segregation, racial justice, etc. This sort of language eliminates the actual actions of actual people. It was deeply important to me to situate racism as a done thing: as a thing you actually feel. I should add that in my stripe of atheism, it’s very hard to see beyond the body. There is a tendency to adopt euphemism when confronted with the very real violence that comes with having a foot on your neck.

RG: One of the strongest critiques I’ve seen of Between the World and Me is that black women don’t figure as significantly as black men. At the same time, this is one of those critiques we often see toward writing about difference — that a given text needs to be everything to every one. Is it your responsibility to center black women in a work that is memoir and a letter to your son?

TC: I’d say that Between the World and Me is a personal essay in three parts. It can’t really be a history of pain and struggle. I don’t want to get into a citation war here, but there is the threat of rape and how my grandmother communicates that danger to my mother. There is the enslavement, personalized, and rendered through a black woman’s eyes. There is the incredible work of historian Thavolia Glymph on the specific violence done to black women, undergirding (and cited) my understanding of enslavement.

But even with that I’d accept that this a story told through a black man’s eyes, through his lens. That has some effects. I’ve been saying that what we need is more books by black women, but I don’t know that that quite gets it. The two endorsements I’m most proud of come from Isabel Wilkerson and Toni Morrison. The latter is the greatest American fiction writer of our time, and the former is on her way to being the greatest American nonfiction writer of our time. There is the work of Thavolia Glymph. There is the work of Kidada Williams. There is the work of Paula Giddings. There is the work of Natasha Tretheway. And of course there is you.