Ta-Nehisi Coates Khalil Gibran Muhammad

Ta-Nehisi Coates | Khalil Gibran Muhammad

October 13, 2015

LIVE from the New York Public Library

Celeste Bartos Forum

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Good evening! Good evening.My name is Paul Holdengräber. I’m the Director of Public Programs here at the New York Public Library. As all of you know, my goal here at the Library is to make the lions roar, to make a heavy institution dance, and when successful to make it levitate.

It is wonderful to have Ta-Nehisi Coates be part of this fall LIVE from the New York Public Library season. Our tenth anniversary year, which started with Shaquille O’Neal and Patti Smith last week and continuesthis Friday with Elvis Costello, Orhan Pamuk andMona Eltahawy next Wednesday, and so on and so forth. Check us out online for the full schedule at

When Julie Grau of Spiegel Grau calls I know it will be good news and I know it will be serious. It’s always been a pleasure to work with her. Last it was to Bryan Stevenson, founder of Equal Justice Initiative and author of one of the most important books I have ever had the honor of presenting LIVE from the New York Public Library, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. I had an idea for Julie then, let’s bring Bryan Stevenson together with Sister Helen Prejean, the author of Dead Man Walking. It was one of the most remarkable evenings I’ve ever had here on the LIVE stage.

The first time Julie and I spoke I surprised her perhaps by insisting we launch Decoded LIVE from the New York Public Library, Jay Z’s extraordinary life story through three dozen songs. I was joined onstage that evening by Cornel West. I will never forget speaking that night with Jay Z and hope he comes back. I also did it because I have two sons who are fairly young, now ten and thirteen, and one way of keeping street—I said “street credentials” once to my son (laughter) and he said,“No, no, no, it’s street cred.” The one way I had of keeping street cred was by inviting Jay Z. I was pleased that Mr. Carter sent out this tweet on August 5: “America, please read Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates,” and I’m happy to say that America has been doing just that. Every day I see people in the subway reading Between the World and Me. Friends abroad are asking me to comment on its importance. Presigned copies of the book will be on sale after this conversation. Thanks again to our independent bookseller, 192 Books.

I am delighted tonight that Ta-Nehisi Coates is joined by my friend and colleagueKhalil Gibran Muhammad, the excellent director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and a visiting professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. I am also pleased that fifteen of his students were obliged—no, are here tonight(laughter) from the Graduate Center.

I would like to say a big thank-you to the Ford Foundationand particularly the president of thefoundation, Darren Walker,for their and his fantastic support of LIVE from the New York Public Library’s tenth anniversary. To celebrate ten years, the Ford Foundation will match your contribution to LIVE dollar for dollar. When you give you’ll make sure we can continue to engage New Yorkers in conversations that contribute to and enrich cultural discourse. So please consider giving with the pledge cards placed on your seats.Please drop them off filled out with your generous pledges by the door as you leave tonight or thereafter.

Additionally I want to thank the continuing generosity of Celeste Bartos and Mahnaz and Adam Bartos.

I’m delighted, as I said, to be welcoming to this stage tonight Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Of Between the World and Me Toni Morrison writes, “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates’s journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive, and its examination of the hazards and hopes of black life make life as profound as it is revelatory. This is required reading.”

Before I bring them onstage, many of you know that for the last seven or so years I’ve been asking my guests to give me a biography of themselves in seven words, seven words that will define them, perhaps, a haiku of sorts or if you’re very modern, a tweet. (laughter) Khalil Gibran Muhammad submitted these seven words to me: “Lover of the past, married to future.” Ta-Nehisi Coates submitted these seven words: “Atlantic writer, father, husband, reader, eater, drinker.” (laughter)

Please welcome to the LIVE from the New York Public Library stage Khalil Gibran Muhammad and the most recent recipient of the MacArthur so known the “Genius Award,” Ta-Nehisi Coates.

(applause)

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: With that opening I was feeling like it was either an Ali or Frazier fight about to jump off with this amazing crowd and this stage. I think it goes without saying how pleased we are to have you here at the New York Public Library and as a representative of the Library, I first just want to acknowledge how special it is to have a writer who is speaking to the urgency of now and who’s using his voice in the best of literary traditions to speak to conditions which we must confront. Now, whether we can fix them, that’s what we’re here to talk about. Now, I also want to take liberties because given that you’ve just won the MacArthur genius award, and I’m sure there are other awards in the making I’m thinking that on eBay this book might be worth something.

(laughter)

TA-NEHISI COATES: I gotta do this right now?

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Yeah, yeah, because only this book will be the one that was signed at LIVE at NYPL at this moment and you can all certify to it. Didn’t Scarlett Johansson spit in a napkin on Jay Leno or something and sell it for ninety thousand dollars? I’m thinking your signature is worth at least that much.

All jokes aside, so Ta-Nehisi, this might be the lightest—

TA-NEHISI COATES: You’re going to ask me questions while I do this?

(laughter)

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I just needed a signature. You know the book’s worth less now that you’re actually writing something.

TA-NEHISI COATES: I know, I’m sorry, man.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: I need another book.

TA-NEHISI COATES: I’m ready.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: So this might be the lightest moment that we have tonight, and in some ways I think that is the challenge that this book poses to us. This is heavy reading. It’s one of the literally lightest heaviest books that’s ever been written. You’ve written it to your son. We’ve talked a lot about Baldwin and we’ll talk some more about his role as Toni Morrison has claimed. But let’s just start with the motivation. What was the circumstance, either literary or in the world, that motivated you to put these words together?

TA-NEHISI COATES: I think with any book there’s a story. And because I’m here I’m going to take the opportunity to not give the press release story and to, you know, give like if I can the biography of the book. Howard University plays a strong role in this book. It is the light of this book. I was there as a nineteen-year-old young man trying to live up to the great ancestry, the great history, the great heritage of Howard University. So many great writers have come through there. I was aware of that. I spent quite a bit of time in the library at Howard University and one of the most important books I read while I was there was The Fire Next Time. And I sat up in Founders Library, the graduate library I found this, and I basically went through The Fire Next Time in one day, just in one sitting, just sat down and read it and it’s not that long of a book.

I finished it and this was true with a lot of the things I read at that time. I didn’t quite understand what I had read, but I knew I was powerfully affected by it and I was sort of amazed that somebody could like just produce something like that because to me it just looked like. I mean, I didn’t know anything about writing and to me it just looked like he had just sat down and a book had just spun out of nowhere. That stayed with me for many years.

The second thing that happened was a friend of mine at Howard University, shortly after I left, shortly after my son was born, was mistaken for a criminal. My friend was in Prince George’s County, Maryland, which at that period and perhaps even now but definitely at that period had I would argue probably the most brutal police department in the country. My friend was followed by a police officer from Prince George’s County in the suburbs of Maryland through Washington, D.C., into Virginia and was murdered, as far as I am concerned, mere yards from his fiancée’s home.

My friend was the child of a prominent radiologist who had worked her way up out of poverty from Louisiana. He is everything, or was everything that you could imagine when black folks say the word twice as good. That was his family, they were the poster child for it. He was murdered. Nothing was done about it, no charges were pressed, the police officer was put right back out on the street.

That made me so angry.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: How old were you at the time?

TA-NEHISI COATES: Let’s see, Samori was born—so I was born—twenty-four, twenty-four.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: And this is late nineties.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Late nineties, yeah, late nineties. 2000, he was murdered in 2000 and just, the fire for that burned in me so strong, and I could not believe that the world would not even really acknowledge his death, that life could just keep going. At that time you didn’t have iPhones, people weren’t recording things, it just wasn’t, you know, the same, and it’s just like, he’s dead, move on.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: And it was also a year when “racial profiling” entered the American lexicon because of the federal investigation on the New Jersey Turnpike. We had no shorthand for the kinds of everyday practices.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Right. Right. I carried that, it was my ambition to someday do something with that and then about I guess about two and a half years ago I went back and read The Fire Next Time, I can’t even remember why, but I just went back and reread the whole thing. Unlike the last time, I got everything, and I called my agent Gloria, who’s here somewhere, oh hi Gloria. And I said to Gloria, I said, “why don’t people write like this anymore?” I couldn’t believe somebody could be that and then getting it—I mean, getting, you talk about the heaviest lightest book you’ve ever, I mean that one right there, and I was so profoundly moved and so on fire, now I could not understand why literally in the book market, you didn’t have little books, single essay, I’m just going to go right at you and tell you what the deal is and I’m going to talk very very directly to you. And I said to Gloria, “Why don’t people do this anymore?” And Gloria said, as Gloria, I’m going to do a small Gloria imitation, (laughter) she said, “Well, Jimmy, I mean, Jimmy was one of a kind.” Gloria knew Jimmy, so she said, “Jimmy was just one of a kind, you know, Jimmy could do that.” And I said, “Do you think I could try it?” She said, “Yeah, yeah,” and I called, and I had the same conversation with my editor Chris Jackson and I just started writing. I mean, I didn’t have this, I didn’t have this in any sort of full way. I had a lot of emotion, I had my friend who was killed, and I had my ancestor, James Baldwin, you know, sitting right there.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Let’s back up the bigger context. Because you didn’t just start whole cloth you didn’t literally sit down and say to channel Jimmy and write this book. You had blogging for years.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Yeah, that’s true.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: And not just your ordinary blogger. You’ve had an obsession with history, so where did that obsession—when was the moment when you decided that your literary career, your career as a journalist would run through the past?

TA-NEHISI COATES: Well, you know, I grew up in a household that was obsessed with history. And I was always extremely, extremely frustrated—I can remember being at Howard and reading the Africa coverage in the Washington Post and being just pissed off about how ahistorical it was, and one of my great frustrations even today is how our conversations around racism, and conversations around our color line, and conversations around white supremacy for whatever reason tend to begin roughly around the time of the Moynihan Report. It is as if everything before, nothing before 1965 really, really matters and if you want to understand the black community, begin somewhere around the War on Poverty and then proceed forward, which is lunacy to me. I mean, it’s just absolutely, absolutely crazy to me and so I thought as a journalist that was what I could bring, some sense of the deep past. That was the other thing that led to this book I had written this article “The Case for Reparations,” and I was somewhat displeased with the article.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Could we give it up for “The Case for Reparations?”

(applause)

TA-NEHISI COATES: Thank you. Thank you.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Before you tell that story, that article was so influential and Ta-Nehisi was so in demand and someone asked me, they were, “We can’t get Ta-Nehisi, maybe you could explain this to a group of people?” and I said, “Sure.”

TA-NEHISI COATES: No, that’s real though. Because it wasn’t like I invented the concept. You know what I mean? You’re more than capable of explaining it. There’s no reason why, you don’t need my article to call you to do that, I mean, what, that shouldn’t have been necessary to begin with. I finished the article, and I was actually somewhat displeased with it.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Give people who haven’t read it, which is probably five people in the room, but a slight sketch.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Sure, it’s an argument for reparations and it is rooted in the housing policy of this country in the mid to mid-late twentieth century and it just takes that as a particular example. And there’s some other stuff in there, but that’s really the root of that article. I feel like you could have written that article from any number of dimensions. I’m saying you could have written it from the perspective of mass incarceration. I chose housing and I wrote it that way. Basically we made an investment in this country in building a middle class. The suburbs do not, did not appear by magic. They appeared because of government policy and the second half of that government policy was cutting black folks out.

And as I do this, because Khalil and I had a great conversation about making sure we credit historians. I have to say Ira Katznelson, who’s in the audience right here was influential to that argument and that’s not just blowing smoke, he really, really was, and I felt like a number of historians had done the work of outlining the racism implicit in New Deal policies and twentieth-century policies because the weakness with reparations is always people look at you and say, “Well, the slaves are long dead,” but there are plenty of people who are around right now, you know, who were certainly affected by New Deal policies, so I pulled that history and made that argument, but when I was done I was somewhat displeased because I felt like the article did not explain how it felt to live your daily life under a system of plunder, under a system of theft, how does it individually feel to live that way, and that was like I guess the main challenge for Between the World and Me.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: So let’s give more credit to the article because it seems that you were building a case that began—let’s talk a little bit more about those blogs, because for fans of the blog you’re taking microhistories, often wrestling with thick quotes, often primary quotes or responding to what you describe as the lunacy of thinking everything begins and ends in the 1960s which obviously is a period fraught with all sorts of racial ideologies that are deeply rooted. So the article is an attempt to do something more than just tell this narrative, this contemporary narrative of housing discrimination. You’re responding to something. I want you to talk a little bit more. You’re in the world of highbrow journalism, so you’ve got people who think they know this stuff better than most, you among them, but you all don’t just agree. Unpack that a little bit and how the blog relates to those battles over how to interpret the past.