The Coates Chronicles: The White Period

On Ta-Nehisi Coates's self-education in the world of white letters.

Ta-Nehisi Coates in a sweet Marine Layer t-shirt.

In July of 2008, not too long before he was hired by The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates posted on his personal blog a short, light note, "Some Friday Fun: Race and the Electric Slide." It featured a video, now lost to the Adobe Flash-heap of history, which I’m guessing from context showed some white people doing a surprisingly solid performance of the electric slide, or possibly an inter-racial group of people doing the slide. Coates writes:

Man, I always tell folks that there’s nothing pure about being black. Turns out the Electric Slide was created by a white guy. But hey, there’s no Stax without Duck Dunn and Steve Cropper, no Run-DMC without Rick Rubin. Marvin Gaye didn’t write the national anthem, but he owns it all the same. All your anthems are belonging to us. Know what I’m saying? We don’t write the music that makes the country, we just make the music funky. Anyway, with that in mind it’s worth watching the video below, especially the middle to the end. So much beautiful to be said about race in all that. But I’ll leave that to my lovely commenters.

There’s a lot going on in this paragraph. It’s dominant note, I’d say, is Coates’s joy in the way that black folk have been able to take over and make new culture that not only wasn’t made by them but was often made in a context that specifically degraded them. “All your anthems are belonging to us.”

A subsidiary note is his appreciation of cultural miscegenation, whatever way the influence runs. It's Run DMC and Rick Rubin. A white guy creating the electric slide, black people making it funky, and then white people inhabiting the funky version of it that black folks created (and then a black writer documenting and theorizing the whole funky cycle).

This is important, what Coates thought and wrote in 2008, because he would go on to become arguably the seminal American intellectual of our time.¹ One of the interesting and I think under-theorized aspects of his rise is that in these early years, when he was making his bones, he had a fundamentally sunny, outward-reaching disposition toward his white readers.

There's no evidence he was pandering. In fact it wasn’t until he pretty decisively turned away from this mode, passing into what he would later describe as his "blue period," that he truly blew up as a national figure. His 2014 article “The Case for Reparations” and his 2015 book Between the World and Me are both blue or post-blue period works. Rather, he seemed to genuinely believe that there was political value in emphasizing the ways in which connections between black and white culture could be generative. That's putting too propositionally what was much more of a vibe or orientation than it was a theory. For a while he just seemed like he was enjoying inhabiting an intellectual and artistic space in which black and white sloshed against each other in surprising and stimulating ways.

Here he is, for instance, on the relationship between the Dragonlance series of fantasy novels, by the white writers Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, and how his childhood pleasure in reading them felt connected to his love of hip-hop. Here he is talking about the white writers who shaped his own understanding of the Black experience in America:

I don't believe in the "white people just don't get it" line of thinking. Half of what I know about black people I learned from white people. I'm talking about Peter Guralnick, Nicholas Lehmann, Kate Boo and Dan Baum. These are cats who treated black folks like actual human beings.

There are plenty of other examples I could cite without cherry picking. In 2008, Coates was very much in tune with the optimistic and broadly integrationist spirit of the early Obama era, in no small part because of Obama himself, who was midway through his exhilarating and ultimately successful run for the presidency when Coates launched his blog in January of 2008.

It can be hard now to remember how intoxicating that period was for so many of us, given everything that's happened since. For me, and clearly for Coates, it felt like we were the verge of something new in our politics, one of those occasional moments in American history when the country's promise renews itself, when a leader of uncommon charisma and vision is able to give generative shape to an upwelling of unusually potent historical and cultural forces. Obama was going to be another Lincoln, FDR, MLK. This desire for redemption was fueled not just by Obama's extraordinary charisma, but by the darkness from which we sought to be rescued: the open wound of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the devastations of the financial crisis, and the still smoldering memory of 9/11. Things sucked really hard. We were desperate for hope, and Obama was a great screen on to which to project our fantasies of redemption. 

Coates wasn't over the top about it. He didn't think Obama heralded the arrival of a post-racial American utopia. What he seemed to believe was that Obama's success was evidence of significant social progress, and potentially an accelerant of it as well. "Perhaps," he later wrote, "we were just now awakening from some awful nightmare, and if Barack Obama was not the catalyst of that awakening, he was at least the sign. And just like that, I was swept away, because I wanted desperately to be swept away." So that was part of it; Coates was optimistic about white and black because he was in tune with the times. Much of the rest of it, I think we can say in retrospect, was that Coates was then in the full flush of what might be called the "white period" of his intellectual development. 

Born in 1975, he was raised on the west side of Baltimore in a home that oriented around the personality and intellectual intensity of his father, a former Black Panther and the founder of a small press that republished obscure and out-of-print black nationalist and Afrocentric texts. After that childhood, surrounded almost exclusively by black people and marinated in a thoroughly black intellectual milieu, he went to Howard University, the most eminent of America's HBCUs, where his education in black culture and history was expanded and deepened. When he dropped out of Howard and began trying to make it as a journalist, in 2000 or so, he entered the white world in a way that he simply never had before, in terms of both the quantity of white people he was encountering on a daily basis and the default premises and referents of the professional and intellectual ecosystem he'd elected to inhabit.
 
According to his own later accounts, this period from 2000-2008 wasn’t a particularly happy one. He was struggling and often failing to succeed as a writer.² What it was, though, was a time in which certain white people were personally important to him, in particular the late writer and editor David Carr, who mentored Coates at the Washington City Paper. It was also an artistically and intellectually fruitful period for Coates. It was when he learned to really write, and when he was forced to integrate the rich but idiosyncratic education he'd received growing up with the more traditional, more white canon of writers and ideas he would need to absorb if he wanted to make it as a writer at the highest level.

As he later wrote, in the foreword to a posthumous collection of Carr's writing:

David could be a terror when you got it wrong, but when you got it right—when you wrote something that made him smile—he’d make you feel like you’d hung the moon. I can remember coming to his office after closing a piece on day laborers and him looking at me and saying, “I was just talking about how fucking great your piece was this week.” I was a kid who had never felt like he’d done anything great for anyone. And it was only when working for David that I came to understand that I might actually be “good” (to say nothing of great) at anything. Part of that realization wasn’t just in what David said about my own work, but where he set the bar. David would bring in writers from Vanity Fair to hold workshops with the staff. He’d introduce me to journalists who were doing incredible work. He’d clip articles from the New Yorker or Esquire and leave them on my desk with a note attached: “This is the level of work I expect of you.”  

Every writer needs to get their education, of course, but in Coates's case the process takes on special significance because so much of his best writing has been precisely about, or an enactment of, his process of self-education.

One of the more evocative analyses of this quality of Coates's writing comes from a 2017 piece by the essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon, a black American writer of roughly the same age and similarly outsized talent. "Ta-Nehisi’s two writerly superpowers," Laymon writes, "had long been his desire to craft bombastic, but never too dense, political prose, and his ability to write through what he was currently learning within the pocket of the piece." [emphasis mine]

From Laymon's perspective this method of Coates, of writing while learning, cut both ways. It was brilliant to read; no one "more effectively models writing as learning and discovery than Ta-Nehisi Coates." But then there were all the things that Coates had yet to discover and learn, at any given time, and therefore all the mistakes he made, the most costly of which, in Laymon’s eyes, was his enduring credulity when it came to Barack Obama. “I wanted Ta-Nehisi Coates, our nation’s most influential writer, to actually hold the first black President accountable for what often appeared to be a lack of love of black folks. Instead, we watched the American President mesmerize and ultimately woo a brilliant writer.”

At some point I hope to devote more time to Laymon's essay, which will surely be included if ever someone puts together a "Best American Frenemies" anthology in which American writers deal ambivalently with their admired but resented rivals,³ but the key point for our purposes is that Laymon was right about what is so wonderful about Coates at his best, how exciting it is as a reader to follow along as his rather marvelous mind teaches itself. In 2008, and for a few years after, this process of discovery and curious engagement was happening more often than not with respect to the white world of his peers and mentors as well as the white world of blogging and journalism within which Coates was ascending. He never ceased reading and engaging with the black world, and one of the more interesting aspects of going back and reading his early blog posts is the glimpse it gives into the coalescing sub-blogosphere of young black journalists and writers who were coming up with Coates, many of whom would go on to make prominent names for themselves as well. But his main engagement was with white writers, particularly those in orbit around The Atlantic, and he seemed to be enjoying it immensely.

If you look at whom he's referencing, quoting, praising, and congenially arguing with in those first eight months of 2008, it's Andrew Sullivan, Christopher Hitchens, Matthew Yglesias, Megan McCardle, Ezra Klein, Caitlin Flanagan, Josh Marshall. Many of these writers, in turn, were linking to him, or bringing him on their blogs as a guest poster. His hiring by The Atlantic, which led to so much else, came at the recommendation of his old friend and mentor David Carr.

"The great David Carr recommended Ta-Nehisi to me," former Atlantic editor James Bennet wrote to me in an email. "They'd worked together at Washington City Paper. Ta-Nehisi had just left Time magazine, where he'd been working on that piece about Bill Cosby and respectability politics, which was probably never going to be quite the kind of thing that Time ran. I thought it was fantastic, and it became his first piece for us. I can't recall the precise sequence, but it was around then that Matt Yglesias broke my heart by decamping to Think Progress; that opened up a slot in our lineup of bloggers, which Ta-Nehisi brilliantly filled."

Coates wasn't just writing in reference to white writers, in this period, but with a generous awareness of his white audience, and with a tangible desire to connect with them. I look at a post like "The Logic Of "I Ain't No Punk," from May of 2008, and am reminded of why his was so striking a voice when he emerged. He writes:

The phrase “I ain’t no punk” has probably led to more renditions of “Blessed Assurance,” more grandmothers in big hats and dark dresses, and more black boys laid out in closed caskets than any other four words in the English language. “I ain’t no punk,” is of course corner-talk for “I am foolish enough to mortgage my life on even the pettiest act of perceived disrespect.” I grew up in West Baltimore during the late 80s, a time when being seen as a chump was basically the worst thing that could happen to you. So I’ll admit to throwing out that line once or twice in my younger days, though I can’t think of one instance where the "slight" was actually that bad.

Having seen the cost of living by the “I ain’t no punk” credo, I have an instant distaste for posturing. This runs the gamut from rappers who threaten each other with great bodily injury (often mere months before doing a press conference, and recording a song together) to Democrats attempting to show that they're tough on the various annoying phenomena of the day. (crime, defense, obscure black people etc.) So I’m going to whole-heartedly back John Dickerson’s call for Obama and McCain to kill the “I’m more macho than you act.” I like seeing Obama get after McCain as much as the next vino-sipping, Claritin-popping, trust-fund dipping lefty. (It’s been told to me that you can put virtually any string of adjective in front of “lefty” now.) But I’m now seeing how much more I enjoyed watching Obama mix it up with Hillary. I think maybe because he was running against a woman, or a fellow Democrat, Obama basically didn’t get into a competition of brass balls. Instead he responded with the jujitsu of humor, which repeatedly exposed the stiff, stilted nature of Hillary’s whole campaign.

Much has been made of gender’s role in this race. To me, its most insidious effect was that Hillary always had to show she “wasn’t no punk.”

If I said that Coates was the first person to write nonfiction prose like this, mixing "corner talk" and hip-hop references and working class black experience with American electoral politics in such a fluid and intimately conversational style, no doubt someone could find an exception. But I’m confident it would be an exception that would prove the point. Black political and cultural writing, before Coates, just didn't sound like this. It sounded like the high Jamesian-low church cadences of James Baldwin, or the elegant New Yorker-ese of Henry Louis Gates, or the bland op-ed-ese of Brent Staples. Who Coates sounded most like, if anyone, was David Foster Wallace, who also had that capacity in his nonfiction writing to take sub-culturally specific knowledge and make it accessible and exciting to laypeople in prose that was baroque, idiomatic and somehow down-to-earth at the same time.

That Coates was offering this prose to his white readers with affection and a presumption of good faith would be a more banal point, I think, were it not for the ways that he subsequently changed. So Between the World and Me, for instance, does not at all seem written for white readers. And though much of his blue- and post-blue writing certainly takes the white reader into account, it tends to do so from the perspective of testimony or witness rather than desired communion.

Perhaps the best description of Coates vis a vis his white audience, in his white period, comes from Coates himself in his 2017 book We Were Eight Years in Power, though the object of description is Barack Obama rather than himself. The book is a kind of dialogue between the Coates of years past, represented by previously published essays and magazine features, and Coates present, who reflects in short interstitial essays on where he was and what he got right and wrong back then. Of Obama, whom he credits for his own success as well as the broader success of the "crop of black writers and journalists who achieved prominence during his two terms," Coates writes:

I had never seen a black man like Barack Obama. He talked to white people in a new language--as though he actually trusted them and believed in them. It was not my language. It was not even a language I was much interested in, save to understand how he had come to speak it and its effect on those who heard it. More interesting to me was that he had somehow balanced that language with the language of the South Side. ... Barack Obama found a third way--a means of communication his affection for white America without fawning over it. White people were enchanted by him--and those who worked in newsrooms seemed most enchanted of all. This fact changed my life.

This is brilliant, of course. It's also, when it comes to Coates assessment of his own state of mind, profoundly wrong. An indisputably black language that trusts and believes in white people without fawning over them was what most interested him at that time, and was most consistently and compellingly produced by him. It was the language that launched his own ascent, and it was, for my (admittedly white) money, also the best writing he ever did, far more surprising and distinctive and alive than his later work, not because the white audience is intrinsically better or worse than any other kind of audience, but because for Coates specifically, over those years, the encounter clicked. The comparison to Obama here is useful. Obama was raised by and around white people; he had to learn the South Side as an adult, and it was the synthesis of the two worlds -- the white world he already knew with the black world he had to work to assimilate-- that gave him the "new language" that was so essential to his success. For Coates on the other hand, raised on the West Side, it was in creative tension with the white reader, white colleague, and white canon that he was able to evolve a new and distinctive language.

How and why he turned against that language is the topic for another post, probably a whole series of posts. My crude Freudian hypothesis is that a lot of it had to do with Paul Coates, Ta-Nehisi's giant of a father, and the son's eventual refusal, when pushed to it, to intellectually individuate from him. But where I find myself landing here, rather than with Coates or his father, is with the white reader whom Coates has over many years and many phases so successfully wooed, and with the irony that while Coates in his white period certainly enchanted white people--which makes sense, given our deep and agonized desire for affection from black people--it wasn't until he ceased showing such generous interest in white people, turning his focus instead to the structures of white supremacy and the wreckage left in the wake of the false Dream of white innocence, that he became the colossus among white people he did. We loved him when he loved us. But we made an idol of him only when he stopped.

1. I said this to someone recently, and their response was that it was Coates or Judith Butler, or Coates and Butler. Coates on race and Butler on gender and sexuality. That may be the case; I don't go deep enough (yet) on Butler to feel comfortable assessing her influence.

2. Here he is in We Were Eight Years in Power, reflecting on that early period: "I derived great meaning from the work of writing. But I could not pay rent with 'great meaning.' I could not buy groceries with 'great meaning.' With 'great meaning' I overdrew accounts. With 'great meaning' I burned through credit cards and summoned the IRS. Wild and unlikely schemes often appeared before me. Maybe I should go to culinary school. Maybe I should be a bartender. I'd considered driving a cab. I took the agony of that era like a collection notice and hid it away in the upper dresser of my mind, resolved to return to it when I had means to pay. I think now, today, I have settled almost all of those old accounts. But the ache and aftershock of failure remain long after the drawer is bare."

3. From Laymon’s essay: “When writing about his relationships with his father and brother in The Beautiful Struggle, it became clear that Coates hadn’t read or remembered James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son or The Fire Next Time. In many ways, Ta-Nehisi was writing up a storm without a firm foundation in Baldwin, the greatest essayist and storm-chaser in our nation’s history. Though I’ve learned a lot about how to synthesize heavy political claims into satisfying prose from Ta-Nehisi, I have never been drawn to his takes on American politics, his lack of faith in black folks, the breezy attention paid to what black men bodies do to the bodies of black women, or his inclination to engage with woeful wack white writers not anywhere near as talented or evocative as he is.”