Ta-Nehisi Coates Allows His Writing to Stand For Itself

Making the case that the United States government owes black people for what it has done to them is an unlikely way to become a household name, but that’s what Ta-Nehisi Coates did two years ago.

- Jork Weismann

“The Case for Reparations” was the cover story of the June 2014 issue of The Atlantic, and the publication says the piece brought more unique visitors to its site in a single day than any other magazine story it had ever run. Coates’s thorough defense of a revolutionary idea became a star turn.

Then came Between the World and Me, a 176-page essay that doubles as a letter to his now 15-year-old son. In it, Coates covers police brutality, spirituality and coming-of-age in ways that capture how much has and hasn’t changed since his adolescence.

Focusing on all the things that threaten black bodies and the fear produced by that condition, he soberly reports on the struggles inextricably linked to blackness, trading the traditional tale of freedom and redemption for one supported by history instead of hope. The book was instantly hailed as a masterpiece, yielding its author a National Book Award and a MacArthur Fellowship and ending up as a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Coates went from simply being critically acclaimed to being compared to James Baldwin by no less an authority than Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison.

He’s as shocked by all this as anyone else. A Kanye-esque college dropout sharing stages with some of the world’s preeminent scholars just six years after losing three jobs in seven years? That would be enough to drive the average intellectual past the point of hubris. But not Coates, who seems unable to process his current success without keeping an intimate acquaintance with tougher times.