- Ta-Nehisi Coates!
(audience applauding and cheering)
(audience applauding)
Welcome back to the show.
- Thanks for having me back.
- It's good to have you, man, this is fun.
Before we get into the book,
there's a story that came out of the book
that I'd like a side of you that I didn't really know about,
a piece of you that I went back and read on
and that was Ta-Nehisi, the blogger.
You blogged a lot, you speak in the book about
how this is where you forged your writing.
- Yeah.
- It was your dojo in a way.
- Yeah.
- Do you sometimes miss that Ta-Nehisi
where you could say whatever you want?
There wasn't the scrutiny on you,
you were just spitting your ideas out there.
- All the time.(chuckles)
All the time, yeah, I mean...
You know what happened last year.
I was doing another interview show
and I got asked who I was voting for
and I said, I said I was voting for Bernie Sanders
and a New York Times reporter called me after that.
- [Trevor] Right.
- And it was clear,
I couldn't talk in the same way anymore,
I just didn't have the ability, I had to very much weigh.
'Cause in my mind, it's just me talking,
it's just the guy from West Baltimore talking.
He might know or he might not know, but then I realized
that people don't necessarily see it that way.
- Well yeah, it's funny you said that
because people see you as knowing.
Everything you put down on a page, they see as you knowing,
but in this book what you've done
is you've gone back and you've said,
"I didn't know and I should have known"
"and I wish I would have known"
which is an interesting way to go back and look at your life
and look at eight years in power.
The book is really looking at Obama's tenure.
- Right, right.
- Looking at that time.
- Right.
- Am I correct in saying that this is a pessimistic outlook
on what those eight years meant?
- I don't know, it's an odd thing.
I'm a journalist.
I know people don't see that anymore,
but my editors never say, "Well, Ta-Nehisi"
when I tell them I'm gonna write,
"Is this gonna be hopeful?"
- [Trevor] Right.
- Is this gonna be optimistic or pessimistic?
So it's hard for me to answer that as a practitioner.
It is what it was if that makes any sort of sense,
that's like from the aspect of actually creating the thing.
- [Trevor] Yes.
- I don't think,
"Wow! This is gonna be a really depressing story"
or "Wow! This is gonna make people feel great."
It's not really in my mind.
I'm trying to get answers.
- [Trevor] Right.
- And if those answers tend to be depressing,
then I think that's because of previous stories
that maybe we've told ourselves about the world.
- That's interesting because I've seen
a few white people who have said,
"Ta-Nehisi, how can you condemn this country?"
They go like, "Ta-Nehisi, I mean, I hear what you're saying"
"and I mean you write about the slavery"
"and you write about the Jim Crow"
"and you write about segregation"
"and you write about mass incarceration"
"but really, is it that bad?"
(audience laughing)
- I mean, in my mind,
I don't see myself as condemning the country,
right? - [Trevor] Right.
I think what it is is if you believe
in the American exceptionalist myth,
you say America is somehow higher than all other countries
that it's touched by God that it really is
as we talked about that city on the hill,
then yes, I'm condemning it, yes.
But if you believe as I believe
that it's a society, it's a country established by humans
with all the beautiful things and all the flaws that come
from being a human being, then no, it's just a story.
- [Trevor] Right. - It's just a story.
- What if I presented this to you?
What if I said, "It is exceptional"?
What if I went, "America is exceptional"
"in the same way Superman is exceptional",
but then there is the Clark Kent side of Superman,
the flaws, the cracks in the facade.
Can you be exceptional? - It's more like Superman
and the Lex Luther side like if they were the same person.
(Trevor laughs loudly)
It's much more like that.
- [Trevor] Right.
- I don't know, I think there's a heavy missionary impulse
that is buried in the American psyche
and maybe it's buried in the psyche of all people
where they want to believe their country
is somehow distinctly more moral
or more just than all other societies and countries before.
I don't see myself necessarily as saying anything that's...
- [Trevor] Right.
- Sort of out there, but I think it does attack that idea
that you're somehow particular,
special, different, exceptional.
- You take us through each year of the Obama presidency
and it's interesting how the book starts
from a place of hope, excitement.
You talk about how you went with your partner,
you bought food, you were cheersing,
it was like, "Oh, black times, baby", it was good things.
- We used a different phrase.
- Yeah, I mean I'm paraphrasing, paraphrasing.
That's what I felt, black times and--
- Black times!(laughs)
- Yeah, and then as the presidency unfolds,
we go through this journey with you.
That's really powerful because you take us to a place
where in many ways you argue that Obama's presidency
and black leadership in any way, shape or form
is in some way contributing to white supremacy
which is a very complicated argument.
What do you mean when you say that in the book?
- Well, I wouldn't quite put it,
I would say it's not, I don't think Obama did anything
but be a human being and go into the office
and just happened to be somebody
checked black on the census form.
It's the reaction to that.
- [Trevor] Right.
- It's always the reaction to the ordinariness,
to the bourgeois-ness, to the middle-class-ness
of normal everyday black people and how well that accords
with what this country claims to value.
That's always a threat because it automatically undermines
the suppositions of white supremacy,
which says that black people don't take care of their kids,
black people are always killing each other,
ending up in jail like there's a kind of moral judgment
that can always be made on black people.
This goes back to justifications to slavery
and black folks who present themselves
in a particular way as undermining that,
it's always a threat to the thinking about white supremacy.
I think that's why folks were so offended by Obama.
Like they couldn't grasp that he was actually black
and so they became this whole other mythology
that sprung up around him,
most specifically in his birtherism thing,
somehow he's not legitimate.
- He could not be from here
because he's not the black that we believe black to be.
- Exactly and there's another word that I cannot use up here
but I think that they actually want,
that's the archetype of what that is.
But that he would be black and be human and all the, again,
not exceptional, all the normal ways of a human being.
Kiss your wife, love your wife, got a dog,
two kids, just normal human every day was too much.
You know what I mean?
And I think that contributed to the birtherism,
all the sort of weird conspiracy theories
that sprung up around him.
- When you talk about the backlash
that many people have tried to dissect
looking at the election, one of your arguments is
in many ways Trump was a backlash to Obama.
- Right.
- Now, I understand the argument but I go,
"Was this a backlash to Obama?"
"Or was it a backlash to the establishment"
"to Hillary Clinton to more of the same?"
Because Mitt Romney and Donald Trump
had the same amount of votes.
Hillary Clinton is the person who had fewer votes
and so it feels like it was less
the people rallying around Trump in the national election,
more people rallying around him
in the Republican nomination.
Do you feel that? Does it have to be a backlash?
Do you think it was a backlash?
- Yeah, yeah, it definitely was, it definitely was.
You're right, it was a reaction,
I think it was to some extent a reaction to Hillary Clinton,
I think it was a reaction
to the fact of having the possibility of woman president.
- [Trevor] Right.
- I think that was definitely there.
But I've heard, people who make this argument
about Mitt Romney and Trump all the time
as though Mitt Romney and Trump are equal.
Mitt Romney had been governor,
he had run for president before,
he was a very, very practiced politician.
The fact that Trump who had no experience at all
in politics who said all sorts of outrageous things
who was caught on tape bragging about sexual harassment
was even in spitting distance of Mitt Romney
shows you how much the bar was lowered.
So the fact that they somehow,
that doesn't prove much to me.
If him and Obama were being judged by the same standards,
he wouldn't even have been in the race.
It's the lowered bar that I think
attests to the fact of back lash.
- When you look at the complicated relationship
between white supremacy and misogyny,
that's like a very complicated space to be in,
where you go, white supremacy
and the oppression of women have been tied together
in ways that I even struggle to comprehend.
How does that play?
Have you even taken the time to read through that?
'Cause I know you're not a journalist of everything.
- There are better people than me that can address that.
But I think, one of the notions that is always there
is the fact that having a black president,
like that was a fundamental shift.
You had had a line of white dudes before him
and then you were gonna immediately follow that up
with a woman.
I think it was almost unfortunate that Hillary Clinton
had to run after there had been a black president.
You're talking about two big, big moments
of just huge, huge change I think.
- Before I let you go, one last question.
Talking to the idea "We Were Eight Years In Power",
you draw in the book many parallels
between a time when black people were ruling,
the backlash that came afterwards
and Obama's rule in the backlash that came afterwards.
One thing you also do in the book
and I don't know if it's coincidental or not
is you also draw parallels in the response to that backlash.
You have the civil rights movement that comes afterwards.
Do you think that
in some ways Donald Trump's presidency will be the slingshot
that propels America even further forward?
Is there a possibility that now
you will have more people engaged in politics,
you will have more women who are running for office,
you will have more men
who are a accountable for sexual harassment?
Do you think there's a possibility?
- Yeah, there's a possibility,
it also could be the trap-door
that plummets us into the abyss, so...
(audience laughs)
One or the other, one or the other,
I'm not saying, I'm not saying...
One or the other though.
(audience laughs)
- I hope when I'm on my deathbed.
- I'm just having fun now.
Now I'm just having fun.
(Trevor laughs loudly)
- No man, thank you so much for being here.
Always man, always a pleasure.
(audience cheering)
"We Were Eight Years In Power"
is available now, it's fascinating,
you wanna read this book, Ta-Nehisi Coates, everybody.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music continues)