Ta-Nehisi Coates, acclaimed author, journalist, and activist, commenced the spring ’25 semester “Global Justice: Historical Present, Imagined Futures” series with a reading and conversation at Swarthmore College on Monday, Feb. 10, attracting an estimated 600 attendees to Pearson Hall Theater in the Lang Performing Arts Center. The event was made possible through funding from the Cooper Foundation in conjunction with Swarthmore’s President Fund for Racial Justice.
The evening began with an introduction from Assistant Professor of Black Studies Jamal Betts, who introduced the aims of the Global Justice series, thanking his colleagues for “providing a space to experiment with ideas, thoughts, and language in public in the service of our collective liberation,” a practice he said is reflected in Coate’s work.
Coates began with a brief reading from his latest book, “The Message,” which is written as a letter to his writing students and explores how the narratives we choose to share or avoid shape our understanding of reality. He prefaced the reading by describing the book’s latter half, which discusses the mistakes that writers and intellectuals often make.
“There is great strength in human beings, looking at where they have made a wrong turn,” he continued, “There is greater strength in writers and intellectuals, who, like me, have a great privilege of having an audience like this in front of them examining their wrong turns.” Coates noted that “The Message,” in fact, was inspired by a wrong turn.
The excerpt was pulled from the last of the three parts of his book, where he visits Palestine and confronts the clash between the narratives being told and the reality on the ground. In the reading, Coates reflected on his earliest days as a writer, his experience writing for The Atlantic, and his acclaimed essay “The Case for Reparations.” He connected the case of reparations for Black Americans in the U.S. and Germany’s reparations to the state of Israel, expressing his belief that “Israel was doing something deeply unfair to the Palestinian people.” He referenced the work of his colleagues, whom he said portrayed the Israel-Palestinian conflict as a matter of knowledge, not morality. Coates recalled feeling ignorant in the presence of journalists who had engaged with this issue firsthand but acknowledged that “As it happens, you can see the world and still never see the people in it.”
“I always imagined reparations as a rejection of plunder at large,” he said, describing the reality of reparations from a genocidal state to a Jewish state rather than directly addressing Jewish victims. “I was seeking a world beyond plunder – but my proof of concept was just more plunder.”
Following the reading, Associate Professor of History Ahmad Shokr joined Coates in conversation. Shokr began by asking Coates what he understood to be the main through lines in his work as “somebody who speaks in a powerful moral voice on the issues of the day,” particularly the Black experience.
Coates acknowledged the difficulty of stepping outside one’s own writing: “I don’t quite completely understand what I’m doing.” He paused and then expressed his dislike for bullies as a potential place to start, and connected this to his greater detest of structural powers of abuse. “You have the realization that abuse, often, maybe even usually, is not just madness or abuse, more often it’s robbery—it’s plunder.”
Coates contemplated how the story of the country had not been the story it had told to him in his youth. “Understanding why it didn’t make sense and what I was being lied about and how is probably the closest thing I can come to a through line,” he answered. He continued, comparing the experience of being Black in America to being in the Truman Show, “There is an observable reality that is telling you this is what’s happening and then there’s an entire architecture organized around you to tell you, no, in fact, that’s not what’s happening.” Coates extended this model beyond the Black struggle in America to all oppressed people.
“I probably am most engaged with the lies that oppressive powers tell the world to make it look like they are not oppressive powers,” he concluded.
Shokr’s next question asked Coates to expand on “The Message,” precisely what he saw in Palestine that changed his understanding of what Shokr referred to as the “deceptions that shape our world.” Coates recalled his visit and his expectations to see the complicated, subtle, and hidden version of Jim Crow that reigned in the northern cities that looked like democracy, but “if you peeled it back you could actually see where the oppression was.” Instead, he said he saw the Jim Crow of the South, “where you don’t have to peel anything back at all.”
Coates expressed his immense shock about how blatant the oppression was in Palestine and “how little effort was made to hide it.” He expressed his anger, too, that there were people who have read, traveled, and seen more than him, who proclaimed that the situation was “morally complicated.” Coates explained that “this notion of moral complication is not particular to Palestine,” extending this to attitudes justifying slavery and Jim Crow.
Coates contemplated his experience attending the Democratic National Committee (DNC), expressing his discontent that a Palestinian speaker was not permitted to address the committee. “If you can look away from genocide and service of apartheid, you will easily look away from the destruction of your high-level democracy,” he said.
Regarding Coates’s connection between Jim Crow and Palestine, Shokr prompted him to reflect more on translating experiences from one context to another. He asked Coates, “Are there limits to recognizing other people’s oppression through one’s own experience and one’s own preference?” to which he responded, “The story will always be better coming from a person that is directly under oppression.”
He described his latest book as a “stop-gap” for the elimination of Palestinian voices from the conversation. “I have to fight with the tools I have,” Coates said, “At the same time, I have to be understanding of people’s frustrations or feelings that we are still not getting what we’re supposed to get, which is the people speaking for themselves.”
During an earlier classroom conversation with students, Coates called “The Message” an unfinished book, saying, “It’s not a mistake that half of this book is about Palestine … it’s an unfinished book, demanded to be in existence because of politics that were happening around me.”
Also, during this talk, Coates grappled with the debate over how to write about experiences that are not your own. He expanded on what it meant to write responsibly, the importance of a writer’s relationship, and their engagement with the community they are writing about. Referring to to young writers specifically, Coates said, “‘The Message’ makes the argument that writers have a responsibility as citizens of this world to help save the world,”.
Shokr’s next question focused on the word genocide “as a word of prophecy,” asking Coates to speak to young writers who seek to resist this progression of normalizing the unthinkable. Coates answered, contextualizing his perspective as a college dropout: “People will over-intellectualize what is not intellectual at all.” He advised, “Do not engage in debates that are not debates.”
He warned young writers about the dangers of engaging in distraction on social media platforms, which he described as one of the great weapons of oppressive power, applying this to the debate of genocide in Palestine.
Shokr brought the conversation to campus, highlighting the college’s actions against students who have participated in pro-Palestine protests and activities. He asked Coates for advice for Swarthmore students and students nationwide who’ve spoken out about injustice. Coates prefaced his answer by saying, “I want to tell you to choose your battles, but I don’t want that to be conflated with [the message of] ‘don’t choose any battles.’” He emphasized matching righteous outrage with a coherent, long-term strategy. He recognized the difficulty in that it forces us to face our own powerlessness: “I am old enough now to understand that this is probably a very, very long fight and that this itself is part of a longer fight.”
Shokr’s last question concluded the conversation, asking Coates to speak to the power of writing to contend with violence and injustice. “As a writer, and as a human being, what do you do when moral persuasion no longer seems to be a tool at your disposal?”
Coates responded that he had never considered his work a tool of persuasion. I probably have a base belief that human beings have an innate, almost evolutionary sense of morality.” He concluded that a lot of intellectual work involves crafting stories that justify inhumane actions. “I’ve come to the conclusion that human beings have great difficulty being immoral to other human beings without telling some sort of story that makes those human beings not human beings.”
The Q&A portion began with a comment about the moral arguments used to justify immoral behaviors, specifically referencing President Trump’s statement that the U.S. “owns” Gaza. The audience member expressed concern, saying, “It’s hard to get people to think about the moral impact of destroying an entire population of people when [Trump] has taken the humanity out of the situation and just boiled it down to a real estate development,” pointing out that it seems no one is addressing the issue. Coates responded briefly, saying he disagreed that no one was speaking about this comment.
The next question posed to Coates concerned a recent interview he did on CBS Mornings with Tony Dokoupil, in which Dokoupil remarked that if Coates’s name and prestige were removed from the book, “the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.” The audience member asked, “I’m just curious if you’ve made sense of that now and how you’re sitting with the press tour after trying to speak on Palestine.”
Regarding the devastation he described in his book, Coates responded, “I am not my awards. I’m not whatever accolades I have,” he continued, “I saw what I saw, and nobody disputed what I saw. To me, that’s the end of the conversation.”
The following question was from a Palestinian student who asked Coates how the same narrative he spoke to enabling Israel’s actions against Palestine applied to the suppression of student activism on campus, specifically the dehumanization of student activists by calling them “aggressive and threatening.” She asked, “I’m sort of wondering if I even have the choice of picking and choosing my battles when an institution [Swarthmore] constructs and engages in the same campaign of erasure and narratives that a genocidal entity like Israel engages with.”
Coates said he could not speak to Swarthmore’s specific situation, but he could as a writer. He acknowledged the battle of narratives, positioning universities as the “loci of power” in perpetuating systems of oppression. He urged us to reflect on our model of moral outrage, and to think creatively about how we conduct ourselves in activism.
The next question was from a Bryn Mawr student, who asked Coates how he was navigating the current state of journalism. “I think we’re in trouble,” he responded, and referenced Shokr’s earlier comment about “anticipatory obedience,” noting that many newspapers are participating in this behavior.
Another Swarthmore student asked for advice on navigating what Coates calls “institutional gaslighting,” as a student and writer. Coates responded that he did not know enough about Swarthmore’s campus to answer honorably. He tied this back to his book and the importance of recognizing the limitations of your knowledge as a writer.
The last question asked Coates about the compromises faced by Black culture, and how he navigated his identity as a Black writer in environments that compromise cultural integrity. Coates acknowledged the challenges of finding spaces outside these institutions, emphasizing the importance of independent thinking along the way: “Whatever it is that you love, whatever that thing is you feel like you want to do with your life: find a way into that and figure out how you can make it the most just practice as possible,” he advised.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is the Bernie Madoff of academia and you’re all victims of the Ponzi scheme that has become liberal arts miseducation.