Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates[1] (/ˌtɑːnəˈhɑːsi/TAH-nə-HAH-see;[2] born September 30, 1975)[3] is an American author, journalist, and activist. He gained a wide readership during his time as national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he wrote about cultural, social, and political issues, particularly regarding African Americans and white supremacy.[4][5]
Coates has worked for
O
, and other publications.
He has published three non-fiction books: The Beautiful Struggle,
Coates was born in Baltimore, Maryland. His father, William Paul Coates (known by his middle name),[12] was a Vietnam War veteran, former Black Panther, publisher, and librarian. His mother, Cheryl Lynn Coates (née Waters), was a teacher.[13] Coates's father founded and ran Black Classic Press, a publishing company specializing in African-American titles. The Press grew out of a grassroots organization, the George Jackson Prison Movement (GJPM), which initially operated a Black bookstore called the Black Book. Later, Black Classic Press was established with a table-top printing press in the basement of the Coates family home.[2][14]
Coates's father had seven children, five boys and two girls, by four women. Coates's father's first wife had three children, Coates's mother had two boys, and the other two women each had a child. The children were raised together in a close-knit family; most lived with their mothers and at times lived with their father. Coates has said that he lived with his father for the entirety of his upbringing,
Coates's interest in literature was instilled at an early age when his mother, in response to bad behavior, would require him to write essays.[16] His father's work with the Black Classic Press was a huge influence. Coates has said that he read many of the books his father published.[2]
Woodlawn High School.[17][18] He attended Howard University, leaving after five years to start a career in journalism. He is the only child in his family without a college degree.[15][19] In mid-2014, Coates attended an intensive program in French at Middlebury College to prepare for a writing fellowship in Paris, France.[20]
Career
Journalism
Coates's first journalism job was as a reporter at
The Atlantic, "This Is How We Lost to the White Man", about Bill Cosby and conservatism, started a new, more successful and stable phase of his career.[22] The article led to an appointment with a regular column for The Atlantic, a blog that was popular, influential, and had a high level of community engagement.[21]
Coates became a senior editor at The Atlantic, for which he wrote feature articles as well as maintaining his blog. Topics covered by the blog included politics, history, race, culture as well as sports, and music. His writings on race, such as his September 2012 The Atlantic cover piece "Fear of a Black President"
Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism from The Sidney Hillman Foundation.[21][27] His blog has been praised for its engaging comments section, which Coates curates and moderates heavily so that "the jerks are invited to leave [and] the grown-ups to stay and chime in."[28][29][30]
In discussing The Atlantic article on "The Case for Reparations", Coates said he had worked on it for almost two years. He had read Rutgers University professor Beryl Satter's book, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America,[31] a history of redlining that included a discussion of the grassroots organization the Contract Buyers League, of which Clyde Ross was one of the leaders.[32][33] The focus of the article was not so much on reparations for slavery, but was instead a focus on the institutional racism of housing discrimination.[32]
Coates has worked as a guest columnist for The New York Times, having turned down an offer from them to become a regular columnist.[21] He has written for The Washington Post, the Washington Monthly, and O magazine.[21]
Coates left his position as a national correspondent for The Atlantic in July 2018 after a decade with the magazine. In a memo to the staff, the editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, said: "The last few years for him have been years of significant changes. He's told me that he would like to take some time to reflect on these changes, and to figure out the best path forward, both as a person and as a writer."[4]
Author
The Beautiful Struggle
In 2008, Coates published The Beautiful Struggle, a memoir about coming of age in West Baltimore and its effect on him.
W. Paul Coates, a former Black Panther;[35] the prevailing street crime of the era and its effects on his older brother;[6] his own troubled experience attending Baltimore-area schools;[36] and his eventual graduation and enrollment in Howard University.[17] The lack of interpersonal skills and the complexity of Coates's father figure in the book sheds light on a world of absentee fathers. As Rich Benjamin states in a September 2016 article in The Guardian, "Fatherhood is a vexed topic, particularly so for an author such as Coates" and continues with "The Beautiful Struggle makes an enduring genre cliche—the father-son relationship—unexpected and new, as well as offering a vital insight into Coates's coming of age as a man and thinker."[37]
Coates's first novel and work of fiction, The Water Dancer, was published in 2019. It is a surrealist story set in the time of slavery and centers around a superhuman protagonist named Hiram Walker who possesses photographic memory but who cannot remember his mother. Walker is also able to transport people over far distances by using a power known as "conduction," which involves folding the Earth like fabric and allows him to travel across large areas via waterways.[54] The novel is also an Oprah's Book Club selection.[55]
Teaching
Coates was the 2012–2014 MLK visiting scholar for writing at the
CUNY Graduate School of Journalism as its journalist-in-residence in late 2014.[57] In 2017, Coates joined the faculty of New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute as a Distinguished Writer in Residence.[58] In 2021, Coates joined the Howard University faculty as writer-in-residence in the College of Arts and Sciences and holds the Sterling Brown chair in the English Department.[59]
Projects
In 2015–16, Coates was awarded a visiting fellowship at the American Library in Paris during which he worked on an unpublished novel about an African American from Chicago who moves to Paris.[60]
As of 2019, Coates was working on America in the King Years, which is a television project with
Civil Rights Movement, based on one of the volumes of the books America in the King Years written by Branch, specifically At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–1968.[63] The project will be produced by Oprah Winfrey and air on HBO.[64]
Coates is set to adapt Rachel Aviv's 2014 The New Yorker article "Wrong Answer" into a full-length feature film of the same title, starring Michael B. Jordan with direction by Ryan Coogler.[65]
In February 2021, it was reported that Coates had been hired to write the script of a new
In an interview with Ezra Klein, Coates outlined his analysis that the extent of white identity expression in the United States serves as a critical factor in threat perceptions of certain European Americans and their response to political paradigm shifts related to African Americans, such as the presidency of Barack Obama.[68]
Coates's first name, Ta-Nehisi, is derived from an Ancient Egyptian language name for Nubia.[42] Nubia is a region along the Nile river in present-day northern Sudan and southern Egypt.[15][70]
feminist.[75][76][77] With his family, Coates moved to Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn, New York, in 2001.[78] The family purchased a brownstone in Prospect Lefferts Gardens in 2016, although they did not move into the brownstone due to media attention that accompanied the purchase.[79] In 2016, he was made a member of Phi Beta Kappa at Oregon State University.[80]
Controversy
In December 2017, Coates, who had more than 1.25 million Twitter followers,[81] deactivated his Twitter account after a disagreement with philosopher and activist Cornel West over West's editorial in The Guardian, titled "Ta-Nehisi Coates is the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle".[82][83]
Coates caused some controversy in 2021 for his writing of Captain America, volume 9 #28, in which he depicted the Nazi super-villain Red Skull espousing the writings of the Canadian conservative clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson. Peterson stated that his work was used out of context in order to portray him negatively, describing it as an "attack" on himself.[84][85]
Awards
2012:
Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism[18]
2013:
National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism for "Fear of a Black President"[86]
2014:
George Polk Award for Commentary for "The Case for Reparations"[87]
^Ezra Klein (February 18, 2020). "Ta-Nehisi Coates on why political power isn't enough for the right". Vox Media. I think those who perceive a threat symbolically from Barack Obama are kind of correct because kids are going to grow up and they're going to remember as a great authority figure this guy who was African American. And if it matters that all the other presidents before him were white, then it has to matter that he is black. So if white identity is important to you, then that might be threatening to you.
^"Ta-Nehisi Coates on Twitter". Twitter.com. December 29, 2014. Retrieved July 13, 2015. 3. Contemporary feminist critiques (40s–60s) would be awesome, but basically taking what I can get now. #twitterstorians