Do we like Ta-Nehisi Coates?
Our score: 7 out of 10. set against one contested remark on Gaza that drew heavy criticism.
Coates grew up in Baltimore, surrounded by violence and books. His father, a one-time Black Panther, ran a publishing operation out of a basement and worked as a research librarian at Howard University. Ta-Nehisi spent his time in the Howard library, and it made him. He went on to win the 2015 National Book Award for Between the World and Me and a MacArthur grant the same year.
The stoush that defines him now came in October 2024. On Trevor Noah's podcast he said he thought a lot about whether, born into Gaza at 20, he would have joined the October 7 attack. AP reported he compared it to Nat Turner's slave revolt. Critics were fierce: author Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote “When your moral clarity leads you to this, my god.” AP didn't report any walk-back from Coates.
The month before, a CBS Mornings interview about The Message turned into a brawl. Host Tony Dokoupil pressed him hard and likened parts of the book to extremist writing. CBS executives later said the interview fell short of network standards, and an unnamed source told CNN the problem was the host's tone. Coates replied that he was most concerned with those who don't have a voice. How you read that depends on whether you saw a fair grilling or an ambush.
On the recent front, there's the paperback launch of The Message. It's billed as a London Literature Festival conversation on Palestinian freedom, presented with the Palestine Festival of Literature. So he's still doubling down on the same cause. It was a one-night event and we found nothing else from him in the last few months.
He left The Atlantic in 2018 to take on a novel and teach at NYU. In 2023 he turned up to a South Carolina school board meeting where his book was being fought over, which is a fair way to back your own work. Those are the actual good deeds we could verify; the rest is a shelf of awards.
So: would we back him? Mostly yes. His record is a lifetime of writing about racism, and no court case or misconduct allegation against him turned up. The Gaza remark is the sticking point, and you'll land on one side or the other depending on whether you read it as a hard thought experiment or as a flirtation with violence. We'd read it as a real strike, but not enough to cancel the rest.