Wake of Words

On Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ezra Klein, and the Tradition of Truth-Telling

The Message

Recently I picked up Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest book The Message. It had sat on my desk for months, a gift from my mother. I don’t know why I neglected it. I love his writing, and I followed his book tour last year, where he was repeatedly challenged—often in accusatory tones—on his views of Israel, the subject of the book’s longest essay. For Coates, it must have felt surreal yet all too familiar. The book is primarily a meditation on the power of writing, addressed to his students at Howard. Yet there he was, accused of “sympathizing with terrorists” on a network morning show.

This is the power of the written word taken up honestly: it evokes and provokes. It can be intimate, unsparing, a solitary endeavor addressed to a beloved. It outpaces us. In these interviews, I see something familiar in Coates, who is almost exactly the same age as me. He is a man clinging to the mane of his talent as it flies.

I picked up the book after hearing Coates’s conversation with Ezra Klein. In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, Klein wrote an op-ed calling for calm and mourning—and praising Kirk for “practicing politics in exactly the right way.” For many on the left, this was a bridge too far. Mourn the man. Condemn political violence. But to claim that someone who repeatedly trafficked in bigotry—who called transgender people an “abomination,” urged students to report left-leaning professors, and insisted Democrats hate their country—was “practicing politics the right way” felt like intolerable whitewashing. A few days later in Vanity Fair, Coates wrote a corrective, describing Kirk’s views in Kirk’s own words and assailing the idea that we must look away from hate to preserve unity.

Two Sides of Me

Klein invited Coates onto his podcast—part of what I’ve come to think of as his non-apology tour. I’ve followed Klein closely since his Wonkblog days, so hearing him argue with Coates felt like watching two parts of myself made manifest, articulate, and thrown into confrontation. There is Ezra—the analyst, the pragmatist, the strategist. And there is Coates—the writer, the truth-teller, the historian, the prophet. The confrontation itself was underwhelming: many punches missed, just as many pulled. Their sharper differences were sublimated into mutual respect, civility, friendship. And there was something else I recognized in Coates: for all his unsparing prose, in person he radiates a kind of merciful sadness—what you might call compassion.

Yet reading the transcript, the fault lines grow clearer. Klein is searching for hope—for order, for peace, for a way to fix things. Coates, looking back at the long tragic sweep of history, insists we must face what we are up against. Klein searches for solutions; Coates reminds us it could be worse. More pointedly, Coates seems to be saying to his friend, “Hope that blinds itself to tragedy is naïveté, even if it comes dressed in the guise of noble sacrifice and strategy.”

What I hear in Klein—and what I saw in that ill-advised op-ed after Kirk’s murder—is fear. Fear for the country, fear for his project, fear for himself. The fear of defeat. The beast of history emerges from its cave. And our words outpace us.

On Tradition

If Klein guides me, Coates inspires me. Reading his words, I realize that for all my aspirations, my writing has not been honest enough. Not personal enough. As a teacher Coates knows that what matters is specific. When Coates writes in “On Pharaohs” of his pilgrimage to Dakar and the “Door of No Return”, it is not the sadness that he feels looking out onto the Atlantic that makes me cry. It is when he thinks of his father in Baltimore “trying to read his way out.” Such is the power of writing: to strike the chords of existence so that I can fly across the Atlantic and across the years to sit beside Coates on the rocks of Gorée—and across the oceans of a separate ancestry to feel a kindred sorrow.

There is a way that Coates speaks, a view of the world, that has long inspired me, even though I grew up a privileged white kid in an Irish-Italian suburb just west of Boston. My parents were good liberals, too professional, perhaps, to be hippies. As I’ve found out for myself, it’s hard to be a hippy once you have kids and all the responsibilities they impose. They raised me on NPR and public television, and I remember watching Eyes on the Prize as a third grader and watching the march on Selma, the beatings, the sit-ins, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr (whom Kirk would later call “awful” and “not a good person”).

These feelings crystallized when I read Malcolm X’s autobiography in 1992, the year Spike Lee’s film hit theaters. I was a senior at my third high school in three years, restless and defiant, entering a half-decade of lost years when no institution could hold me and no authority could reach me. There was something about Malcolm that spoke to me, something I was only beginning to feel viscerally. Despite the real and imagined victories of the civil rights movement, something was still rotten in America. There was still a stench.

Malcolm spoke to this. King was the peacemaker; Malcolm, the fighter. King stood inside; Malcolm stood outside. One sought integration, the other separation. But Malcolm gave me more: rage, depth, honesty, tragedy. It was in the words. I felt it too. I wanted to write like that.

I felt it again when I first read Soul on Ice, another of my mother’s recommendations. There I found piercing honesty, an arc of rage and redemption, and—ultimately, undeniably—the gift, the talent, the salvation of words.

And then there was James Baldwin, whom I came to late. He carried this tradition to unmatched heights—bringing intelligence, vulnerability, and sexuality into the figure of the man standing in history’s shadow, defying it by describing it.

For Coates, his tradition is his rock, his root. When Klein in the interview accuses Coates of fatalism, this is what he falls back on.

“I am part of something larger, and I’ve always felt myself as part of something larger. I have a tradition, I have ancestry, I have heritage. What that means is that I do whatever I do within the time that I have in my life, whatever time I’m gifted with, and much of what I do is built on what other people did before them.

Then, after that, I leave the struggle where I leave it, and hopefully, it’s in a better place. Oftentimes it’s not. That’s the history in fact. And then my progeny, they pick it up, and they keep it going.”

I can’t claim this tradition in the way Coates can. However much they inspire me, I am not descended from people who lived under chattel slavery in this country. But we share the same struggle and we can each pick up the pickaxe and hammer away at the dehumanizing ideology that holds one race superior and another inferior. We do it with the tools at hand.

Poor tools these are—these words. They give us hope, they remind us of defeat. They accuse, they carry, they haunt, they outpace. We live in their wake. Yet still we reach for them. Like those before us, we dive into the ocean, reaching for the stone at the bottom of all things.