A Conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coats (TNC)
Massachusetts College for Liberal Arts
November 8, 2018
The moderator, Professor Frances Jones-Sneed, did a great job. She was respectful, almost motherly and knowledgeable.
TNC was a brilliant, honest, articulate story teller. He came across as humble and spent the first few minutes thanking everyone for coming to the event. (There were ~ 2000 people in the Amsler Gymnasium.)
Here are some excerpts from his dialogue.
With politics, there are no rules anymore.
POTUS, and other politicians can get away with anything today.
He quoted a lot from his article on The Case for Reparations (The Atlantic 2014).
When you talk about people as statistics, you lose sight of their humanity.
With his book Between the World and Me he told us that his editor sent it back to him four or five times and he had to sit down and rewrite it each time. He said when you are writing you don’t appreicate what danger you are in. Every first draft is terrible. If you want to be a writer you have to accept that and just go back and do the rewrites.
Writing is about endurance. When you start you are really terrible and you have to accept that. If you can’t acknowledge this you won’t ever be a writer.
He was asked who his favorite black poet was and he said “Sonia Sanchez.”
He was asked by a student what he reads for hope and he said literature is not the place to go for hope - it is the place one goes for understanding. Just to understand is enough of an ambition.
Things to follow up on
- The name of Frederick Douglas came up a lot. (There is a new biography of Frederick Douglass)
- Get to see the movie The Black Panther and maybe read the comic Captain America
There is a web page called 25 Quotes from TNC. Here is # 11
Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing…