Ta-Nehisi Coates

• Born: September 30, 1975

• Ta-Nehisi Coates

Is an African American writer, essayist, and national correspondent for The Atlantic who writes about race, history, and U.S. politics. He is the author of three books and many essays. Coates has won various prestigious awards including a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. In selecting him for the award, the organization said of Coates: “He subtly embeds the present—in the form of anecdotes about himself or others—into historical analysis in order to illustrate how the implications of the past are still experienced by people today.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and was the second youngest in a family of seven children from four different mothers. Their father, William Paul, was a Vietnam veteran and a former Black Panther. He was strict, demanding discipline and often doling out punishment to the point of, and sometimes past the point of, abuse. William Paul managed a publishing company in the basement of the family home called Black Classic Press, which specialized in African history and black nationalism. When Coates was a child, the “crack epidemic” of the late 1980s and early 1990s impacted his neighborhood in west Baltimore. He watched as the community struggled while the epidemic took the lives of friends and neighbors. This would leave a lasting impact on Coates’s writing.

After graduating from high school, Coates attended Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C., in 1993. He attended Howard intermittently for six years and finally left without a degree in 1999. After his time at university, Coates worked as a freelance writer for the Philadelphia Weekly, the Village Voice, and eventuallyTime before he was hired as a blogger for the Atlantic. His 2008 memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, received some attention and positive reviews but was not a commercial success. It was not until the election of President Barack Obama that Coates found his voice in a moment when the nation was reflecting on race in its past, present, and future.

In 2012, Coates was the Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That same year, he was awarded the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism. One of the judges remarked on his writing, “Coates is one of the most elegant and sharp observers of race in America. He is an upholder of universal values, a brave and compassionate writer who challenges his readers to transcend narrow self-definitions and focus on shared humanity.” In 2014, Coates was the journalist in residence at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism.

It was also in 2014 that Coates wrote one of his most widely read essays for the Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations.” The essay holds the record for most visits in one day for an Atlantic article and it crashed the website due to the traffic it was generating. As the title suggests, Coates makes the case that the United States owes the black community financial restitution not only for slavery but for a history of policies that intended to deny African Americans the ability to accumulate wealth while creating a system that used African Americans to accumulate wealth for others. According to Coates, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the government, in the interests of white Americans, deliberately impoverished African Americans. While Coates’s essay offered no new archival research and was largely based on the work of other scholars, his prose sparked a new conversation about race in America.

In 2015, Coates published his second book, Between the World and Me. Harkening back to James Baldwin’s 1963 essay “My Dungeon Shook,” a letter to his fourteen-year-old nephew, Between the World and Me was a letter from Coates to his fifteen-year-old son about what it means to live and be black in the United States. Coates is not as optimistic as Baldwin was. Instead, he writes “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” For him, a history of white supremacy in the nation had created policies and institutions which ordered and sanctioned violence on black bodies, regardless of class or reason. The book ends with the story of Coates’s classmate at Howard University, Prince Carmen Jones, Jr., as an example for his son. Jones, who came from a wealthy family and had the privilege of private prestigious educations, was shot by a police officer who confused him for a suspect. The officer received no punishment.

Acclaim followed the publication of Between the World and Me. Coates won the National Book Award (2015), the MacArthur “Genius” Grant (2015), the Pen/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Arts (2016), and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work (2016).

In 2017, Coates wrote a story for the Atlantic assessing the meaning of the eight-year term of President Barack Obama and the election of Donald Trump, titled “My President was Black.” In the essay, Coates explains how the nation responded to the first black president with the election of a president who ran on an explicitly xenophobic and misogynistic platform. He began his essay with a description of one of the last parties the Obamas hosted at the White House. It was an affair co-sponsored by BET (Black Entertainment Television) and the guests were nearly all black and shared a common language of hip-hop. Obama’s election was a veritable win for the black community, but also “the victory belonged to hip-hop—an art form birthed in the burning Bronx and now standing full grown, at the White House, unbroken and unedited,” Coates wrote. It was, for Coates, the first and most the last time this would happen because in order for the next black president to succeed, a sequence of unlikely scenarios, like Obama experienced, had to unfold. A boy had to be born black but not grow up black. This would lead him to trust white people’s best intentions, but not acknowledge their own distrust of him. Coates explained how this would play out politically: “Only Obama, a black man who emerged from the best of white America, and thus could sincerely trust white America, could be so certain that he could achieve broad national appeal. And yet only a black man with that same biography could underestimate his opposition’s resolve to destroy him.”

Coates was the narrator of the Obama era, a point in time when the U.S. had seemingly overcome its ugly past and was on a path to make amends. Political analysts, commentators, and journalists began to say that America was post-racial, and for eight years there was a remarkable amount of optimism about race relations. Yet, for many, it crumbled in 2016 with the election of President Donald Trump. Coates joined a tradition of black authors who wrote about black America and white America. But, opposed to many who came before him, Coates does not believe that the nation will be integrated. Coates believes that white supremacy created the nation, a machine that was meant to function a certain way. Based on these foundations, the nation has worked a certain way since. For Coates, to address the mechanics will never fix the machine.

In 2017, Coates published We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, a collection of Atlantic essays published during the Obama administration along with the author's personal reflections on each. The book was a Time magazine top nonfiction title for that year. At around this same time, Coates was writing comic book copy for the Marvel franchise, including multiple titles in the Black Panther and Captain America series, all published between 2016 and 2021. One of the 2021 comics for the Captain America series sparked controversy when some thought Coates was putting the words of Canadian psychologist and conservative Jordan Peterson into the mouth of Red Skull, the storyline's Nazi villain. Peterson viewed what he saw as a parody of his views as an attack.

In addition to the comics, Coates published a number of other works during this time. They included his first fiction novel, The Water Dancer, about a man with superhuman powers set in pre-Civil War America, and a number of multimedia productions. In 2024, his fourth nonfiction title, The Message, was published. The book contains Coates' reflections on racism after travels to Africa and the Middle East.

For more information on Coates see his memoir The Beautiful Struggle (2008) and his letter to his son, Between the World and Me (2015). For a profile of Coates, see Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “The Hard Truths of Ta-Nehisi Coates,” New York Magazine (July 13, 2015).

Quinn, Annalisa. "In 'The Water Dancer,' Ta-Nehisi Coates Creates Magical Alternate History." National Public Radio, 26 Sept. 2019, www.npr.org/2019/09/26/764373265/in-the-water-dancer-memory-is-the-path-to-freedom. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Spaeth, Ryu. "The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates." Intelligencer, 23 Sept. 2024, nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ta-nehisi-coates-new-book-message-israel-palestine-complicated.html. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, ta-nehisicoates.com/. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.