On Saturday at Faneuil Hall, Embrace President and CEO Imari Paris Jeffries, Ph.D., sat down with Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me, The Message, and Black Panther, for an honest accounting of America’s first 250 years and a critical discussion about its next 250.
Here’s the complete conversation, lightly edited for clarity.
Imari Paris Jeffries: When Marvel handed you the keys to Black Panther—the first thing you did was put the throne on trial. You wrote that his own people rose up and asked, “Why should any one man rule the throne?” On the day that America celebrates literally overthrowing a king, what were you trying to work out on these themes of self-governance through that comic?
Ta-Nehisi Coates:
You know, I have a sentence—actually in my second book, Between the World and Me—that I took forever to articulate. What I mean is I drafted the sentence over and over and over again, over the course of months actually, to get it right. And the sentence is: “Race is the child of racism, not the father.”
The point is, races don’t exist. They are not inherent qualities of people. There are systems that assign qualities to people and then distribute power accordingly. And if you accept that, it does not just mean that any group of people could end up enslaved, genocided, colonized—pick whatever malady you wish. It also means that any group of people can also do it.
So when I had the opportunity to write Black Panther, I think a lot of us comic book fans took great pride in this all-Black nation—[it’s] never been colonized, [it’s] advanced. But the history of human civilizations that achieve that type of power is not a great one. And I thought it would be a betrayal of my politics, my own perspective on the world, and my deep belief in the common humanity of all people — and thus the common vices of all people—to write it as though it were a fairy tale, and not write it out of the same spirit with which I write anything else when I’m critiquing this country.
IPJ: And I want to stay on this theme of comic books, because another run that people might not know you had an opportunity to frame was Captain America. Sticking on this 4th of July independence theme—Captain America is a character that’s literally draped in the American flag, his origin story rooted in World War II. The run is a story of a man trying to win back a country that stopped believing in him.
And here’s why this framing matters. In 1958, there was a survey that asked Americans if they trusted their government, and 73% said yes. Today, Pew asked that same question—and only 17% of Americans said they trusted their government.
So on our country’s 250th birthday, on the semiquincentennial, thinking about this theme of Steve Rogers trying to win back trust—once trust is broken between America and its people, what does a country need to do to win that trust back? What does that road look like?
TC: Yeah, I mean, I’m interested in that, and again it’s just a crossover between my love of politics and my love of literature. The numbers you cite there—they did not happen by magic. There are people who profit off of disunion. There are people who become billionaires not just by attacking folks’ trust in the government they elect in a democracy, but also by attacking folks’ basic trust in each other.
And I say that as somebody who has certainly made my bones as one of the biggest and loudest critics of some of the romanticism about what America is, what Americans are, exceptionalism, and so forth. But I never do that out of a deep belief in innate evil in people, or an inability for people to reconcile themselves to each other.
I was listening to the Pledge of Allegiance earlier, which quite frankly I was not raised to participate in. But I did feel it was important to participate in it here. And the reason why is because even as we have our particular individual beliefs, you can’t make a new home. This is my home. I’m here. I’m a part of this. I may not like how it happened. It may make me really, really angry. I may not like how politics are being conducted, but I am American.
And that, fundamentally—even as y’all clap for that, I have a much more mixed reaction. But it’s the truth. You understand what I’m saying? Like, it’s a basic, basic truth, and once you accept that truth, you go from there.
No person destroyed that basic trust more than—in destroying the very idea of mutual recognition, which I expect as I’ve traveled across this country—no one has undermined that value of mutual recognition more profoundly.
You know, I think this is so important. We talk about ourselves more than we talk about the rest. One thing I like to think about—and I’ll say it here—is the challenge of both sides. So much of our public debate now happens between people who aren’t actually talking to each other. And so I think that you are in a mutual place where you have the honor of being a class that can achieve the same life you are trying to build. We are all talking about life. We are all talking about happiness.
But you are not in a place where you can just sit back. You actually have to do something. And I think we are, unfortunately, under enormous pressure not to.
IPJ: And thinking about that, I want to talk about public memory specifically. You know, we’ve had this explosion of monuments and memorials across the country—some being put up, some being torn down—and there’s a debate about what public memory looks like. When you think about spaces that actually do the work of public memory well, what makes them work? What makes them resonate?
TC: I think the first thing is that those spaces have to be honest. When I think about spaces in my childhood in Baltimore, they may have been earnest, but they were places I did not necessarily want to return to. They may have said the right thing, but they were not necessarily captivating as works of art themselves.
And I think the second thing is—it’s always good when those spaces are actually spaces. In other words, when they’re actually public spaces. One of the things I might think about—and you guys are probably way ahead of me on this, and I really try not to talk about things I haven’t written and researched — but I do think having spaces that are actually functional is really, really important. In other words, spaces that don’t just honor, say, Douglass, but somehow embody what his vision of the world actually was.
IPJ: You and I are both fathers, right? And thinking about a lot of your work—one of the things people appreciate about your writing is that you don’t write about hope for hope’s sake. It’s pragmatic. It’s not cynical. It’s honest. And when we think about young people, you’ve given them—and all of us—an opportunity to have a clear-eyed view of this nation, and also a clear-eyed claim to something.
But thinking about when you first started writing versus now—what was not present then was AI and the emergence of social media in the way it exists today. What’s the message we can give young people in the face of AI, in the face of social media, that wasn’t available to us 10 or 15 years ago?
TC: Well, I think the first thing you can do is not be a billionaire executive and go before a graduation ceremony and tell young people their degree is worthless because you’re erasing their jobs. I don’t know why people think that’s a good idea. And then get mad when they get booed. “Why are you booing me?”
Look, I think we owe young people an apology. I’m not a Luddite. I believe in technology. I think technology is fine. But when you find yourself having to pass mandates to get people to use it, I have questions about that technology—or rather, I have questions about the intentions behind that technology. That’s probably what I should say.
When the greatest thing you can tell me about your technology is that it will erase jobs—I mean, I’m all for efficiency, but I have real questions about that.
This hits me very personally because I teach writing, and I’ve taught writing. I taught writing at MIT not too far from here—God, it’s been almost 15 years ago. And those kids were so smart, so sharp. I thought I was coming to a science school and didn’t know what to expect in terms of writing, but it was really proof to me that writing comes from here—and it can be found in anyone.
As somebody who has loved the process, not just of publishing books but of actually writing itself—which is to say, having a notion or a question in my head that I cannot work out, and using writing to figure that out—teaching young people to do that, watching them do that, watching them be rewarded by the process of it. The idea that people have decided they are going to profit from robbing young people of that—I think that’s a problem. I think that’s a huge problem.
And in some cases they’re bragging about it. But in other cases doing this kind of theatrical approach where they act like they’re not in control, where they say things like, “Oh, the technology is just going to happen—there’s nothing that can be done about it.” No. There is something that can be done.
This goes back to your question about trust, right? Because there’s this baseline belief that these things happen by magic. And what I’m trying to get across—what I’m most concerned about—is that there are people making ungodly sums of money by pretending as though this is a natural process. They are robbing you. They are robbing your children. They are hacking into the brains of your children as we speak, and making it seem like they’re Darwin on the Galapagos Islands just observing something that’s happening.
And it deeply, deeply upsets me—to say nothing about what this is doing to the environment. To say nothing about why you’re asking about air conditioning in here right now.
IPJ: Which is also not a natural process.
TC: That’s a whole other conversation. My point is—and I guess this really strikes me at this moment—here we are, everybody proud and excited to be here on the 250th anniversary. And I just have to say: the fact that we have convinced ourselves that our future and our children’s future is no longer in our own hands is an abomination.
I’m here for the speeches. I’m here for the conversation. I’m here for the poetry. I think all of that’s important. But if people walk out of these celebrations and just go on with their lives, I question how much they believe in the pageantry they just witnessed.
And I know I’ve gone on a long time, but this has particular importance here in Boston. Because Boston is a revolutionary city. And not just one time. When the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, this was the place where they said—I’m going to try not to curse—where they said, “We’re not doing that.” This is the city of Shadrach Minkins. This is the city of Anthony Burns. This is the city where people aggressively—violently even—fought to make all of those really, really beautiful words we just heard true.
And so in this moment where I feel like we’re just pouring ourselves into our phones while these people rob us and rob our children, I just don’t know how we celebrate these words and not walk out and act.
IPJ: My last question—if we get this right, what does America look like by 2275?
TC: America gets to still be here. That’s it. And that’s not promised to anyone. That’s not promised to any country, not promised to any society. It gets to still be here.