Ta-Nehisi Coates did not graduate with a college degree after studying for five years at Howard University. Instead, Coates left the historically Black university and worked as a reporter for The Washington City Paper under legendary editor David Carr. It’s ironic that Coates does not have a strong social media presence today after working under Carr, who had a Twitter following of more than 300,000 when he died in 2015.
Although Carr publicly criticized media moguls—even his own bosses—on Twitter, Coates feels differently about his relationship with social media. In a November interview with Today's Craig Melvin, Coates explained:
What I have to give are ideas and notions that take a lot of time to cook. They have to
marinate…Something like Twitter is death for me… I think it incentivizes immediate
reaction and it incentivizes argument.
Not only would Coates's complex ideas, the ones that need time to "marinate," not fit the 280 character limit on Twitter, but they may get lost between a thousand other push notifications from journalists at the New York Times and Washington Post who have more social media stardom.
Unlike Bill McKibben, an esteemed environmental journalist and public intellect who graduated from Harvard University, Coates broke into the industry without a traditional journalism education. He grew up living with his father and five siblings in Baltimore during the “crack epidemic.” Coates’s father was a librarian “driven by the desire to equip his children with the tools they would need to survive in America” and inspired Coates to look for the meaning of being human in stories like comics and novels:
Baltimore in the ’80s demanded a different education of him, one where he was
bored by teachers, fell asleep in class, walked through the streets assessing the
landscape and the people incessantly, wary and aware that at any moment, at any
time, he could be jumped and beaten for any number of imagined offenses by boys
who looked like him. That world trained Coates to navigate violence with his body
and his mind, pressured his inner self to become the man he is today, a man with a
baby face and easy bearing whose looks belie the weapon within, a self-honed to a
scythe’s sharpness (Ward).
This upbringing and search for the meaning of humanity ultimately led Coates to pursuing a career in journalism. His natural writing talent and obsession with America history allows Coates to break journalistic conventions and become the modern-day muckraker: someone who exposes the corruption of our past, present, and future society. Coates does this through his long-form nonfiction journalism, his fiction novels, and Afrofuturism comics.
Coates's nonfiction work forces American readers to remember the racist history of our country in order to see how we got to where we are today. Whether it’s the Civil War, housing discrimination, or white supremacy, Coates encourages his readers to "take ownership of our history" because if we don't, "we won't be looking at just another dark 4 years,” we will “be looking at another dark 10, 15, 25" (Coates).
He made this remark the day after Donald Trump won the 2016 Presidential Election. Coates planned to give a speech about his 2015 novel Between the World and Me, but instead warned his audience about the future of America. Coates started the speech by apologizing for "being a downer," describing the history of slavery in the United States and its relevance today given the rise of birthirism (Coates).
As a journalist, Coates's first loyalty is to the citizens. Whether that means puncturing "the myth-makers of any era, including his own, whether it's those who promise that utopia is just around the corner if we see the total victory of free markets worldwide, or communism worldwide or positive genetic enhancement worldwide, or mouse-maneuvering democracy worldwide, or any other run-amok enthusiasm," Coates is a modern-day muckraker and "party pooper" (Mack). He serves his audience all the ugly sides of America on a nice silver platter, without offering them wine pairings or dessert recommendations to complement the meal.
Historically speaking, muckrakers were journalists who sought reform by exposing social injustices and political corruption that existed in America during the Progressive Era. Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle'' exposed the grotesque work conditions in the meatpacking industry while Ida Tarbell’s “The History of the Standard Oil Company'' chronicled the Rockefeller’s violation of several antitrust laws to gain monopolies over several industries. Although Coates is not considered a traditional investigative journalist, his work continues to reveal the injustices that confront African-Americans in society today. It is particularly interesting how Coates’s work also reminds readers of how we got to where we are today. By confronting America’s history of white supremacy through a modern lens—most recently with the Trump Administration—Coates constantly keeps “the pot boiling” and pushes his audience to hear “things worth talking about” (Mack).
After the inauguration of our 46th President Joe Biden, Coates challenged the "promise that utopia is just around the corner" (Mack). Revisiting his piece from 2017 "The First White President," he claims that Donald Trump's presidency was "the negation of Barack Obama's legacy" (Coates). In January, Coates brought the story full circle:
But in this world, an army has been marshaled and barbed wire installed, and the FBI
is on guard against an inside job. Whatever this is—whatever we decide to call this—
it is not peaceful, and it is not, in many ways, a transition. It is something darker. Are
we now, at last, prepared to ask why?
But in these times of darkness, Coates has "always thought of [his] job as looking out on the complexity tangled mess of the world and trying to find some order and clarity” (Melvin). He explores this complexity that exists in all realms of American life, not just politics.
Coates’s nonfiction also allows him to investigate the corruption that characterizes his own life. In a 2018 article about Kanye West’s desire to achieve “white freedom,” Coates reflects on how his fame as a writer disconnected him from his previous life:
“What I felt, in all of this, was a profound sense of social isolation. I would walk into a room, knowing that some facsimile of me, some mix of interviews, book clubs, and private assessment, had preceded me. The loss of friends, of comrades, of community, was gut-wrenching. I grew skeptical and distant.”
This “social isolation” is the very thing that separates people like Michael Jackson and Kanye West from achieving Black freedom (Coates). For Coates, fame and popularity meant a disconnect from himself and humanity, the very thing he strives to portray in his complex pieces. These were the consequences of publishing a second book Between the World and Me, dedicated to his son. It follows the struggles of living—and dying—as a Black man in America.
But Coates' first fiction novel The Water Dancer proved his ability to detach himself from the fact-finding journalist and realist he is to explore a different kind of storytelling.
The world of journalism is hard on writers who report a story to be factually true, when it is—in fact—completely false. Political reporters like Stephen Glass, broadcast superstars like Brian Williams, and Rolling Stones magazine writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely all suffered the consequences of buckling under the pressure of upholding the principles of journalism: seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently, be accountable and transparent.
However, Coates is aware of the differences between nonfiction and fiction, journalism and art. In an interview with Vanity Fair’s Jesmyn Ward about the release of his novel in 2019, Coates explains that “in the world of nonfiction, journalists and columnists think if you line up enough facts, you can convince somebody of something” (Ward). Coates struggled to finish his thoughts but made it clear that you’ve failed as an artist if people don’t “feel for the people you are writing about, then they’re still unconvinced” (Coates). When Coates wrote The Water Dancer, he had “to resist the American legacy of myths:'' the adventure story, the cowboy, the savior (Ward). For him, it was hard “to resist the great stories of your youth in an effort to discover new myths, new heroes, new legends that reveal a wider reality (Ward). Coates's deep emotional connection to the protagonist in the book, Hiram—an enslaved man with teleportation powers to help slaves find liberation—reveals how differently he treats writing fiction and nonfiction. According to Coates, nonfiction “is not up to the task of humanizing. That’s not what it’s for” (Ward).
I disagree with this statement. Coates’s work—fiction and nonfiction—does exactly that: it humanizes. On the surface, Coates’s 2014 nonfiction piece in The Atlantic "The Case for Reparations" demands new reparations for Black Americans due lasting repercussions of slavery and discrimination that still exist in this country. But Coates’s narration of the history of redlining does much more than reveal the corrupt and racist housing institution. It changed the minds of conservative writers like David Brooks.
On Juneteenth in 2019, Coates was called to the House to testify in support of H.R. 40, a bill aimed towards studying reparations. In response to this proposed legislation, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell claimed that the government should not be held responsible for something that happened over 150 years ago. To Coates, and many other Black citizens, this “something” of the past is present today. “The question really is not whether we’ll be tied to the somethings of our past, but whether we are courageous enough to be tied to the whole of them,” said Coates (Paschal). Being “courageous enough” to confront our history is something I do not think about on a daily basis. True to Coates’s role as a public intellectual, he revisits “the quintessential thing about America,” slavery and reminds his reader that “this is the violent, secret heart of this country” (Ward). But Coates's genius is not limited to remembering our past.
His Black Panther comic series, published by Marvel, is a primary example of Afrofuturism, a genre focused on African-American science fiction that seeks to reclaim Black identity in future worlds. For Coates, “comic books provided something beyond escapism,” giving him the opportunity to critique society in an African-American dominated future by using examples from history: pre-colonial Africa, the Civil War, Arab Spring (Guillaume). As a modern muckraker, Coates has the ability to reach an audience beyond that of traditional journalists. Instead of pigeon-holing himself and his readers into one form of writing, Coates surprises the audience with his work and leaves them with re-defined expectations of storytelling. By avoiding expectations, the material Coates produces is not comparable to a fleeting thought on Twitter, it lingers with them and “haunts them” as they fall asleep (Melvin).
When asked about the impact of his work on American society and whether or not it has changed the way we think as Americans, Coates argued that he cannot objectively say whether or not he thinks his work is impacting society because it is his own work, it is personal. True to the function of a public intellectual, Coates does not judge his work on “whether the people are listening” but “whether they’re hearing things worth talking about” (Mack).
In the same interview with Craig Melvin mentioned above, Coates talks about the goal of his writing:
What I think about most when I’m writing is not so much what I want people to take
from my writing. It’s more how I want them to feel….I want it to live with people and sit.
All the great art and literature and journalism that I love, it sits with me. You know
what I mean? Like, I can't stop thinking about it. And so, that's what I aim for.
In a world where other journalists are embracing social media stardom, Ta-Nehisi Coates is doing just the opposite. The power of his writing does not come with the instant gratification of seeing a new Tweet when users hit the refresh button. Instead, he forces his audience to wait a moment and reflect on how and why we are living in this kind of America: the job of a modern muckraker.
Works Cited
Coates, Story by Ta-Nehisi. “I'm Not Black, I'm Kanye.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media
Company, 22 May 2018, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/05/im-
not-black-im-kanye/559763/.
Coates, Story by Ta-Nehisi. “The First White President.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media
Company, 22 May 2018, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-
white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/.
Guillaume, Kristine. “The Books Briefing: Imagining Black Futures.” The Atlantic, Atlantic
Media Company, 4 Sept. 2020,
www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2020/09/octavia-butler-tomi-adeyemi-ta
nehisi-coates-and-afrofuturism-books-briefing/616033/.
Mack, Stephen. “Are Public Intellecuals a Thing of the Past? .” The New Democratic Review,
14 Aug. 2012, www.stephenmack.com/blog/archives/2012/08/are_public_inte.html.
Melvin, Craig. “Craig Melvin's Extended Interview With Ta-Nehisi Coates.” TODAY , 25 Nov.
2020.
Olivia Paschal, Madeleine Carlisle. “Read Ta-Nehisi Coates's Testimony on Reparations.”
The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 19 June 2019,
www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/06/ta-nehisi-coates-testimony-house-
reparations-hr-40/592042/.
Ward, Jesmyn. “The Beautiful Power of Ta-Nehisi Coates.” Vanity Fair, 6 Aug. 2019,
www.vanityfair.com/style/2019/08/ta-nehisi-coates-jesmyn-ward-interview.
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