Ta-Nehisi Coates on complexity, clarity, and truth

I’ve always believed that the world is complicated and that our desire for simplicity is understandable but dangerous. 

But when does the impulse to embrace ambiguity become its own pathology? Sure, the world is complex, but sometimes we have to pass judgment. We have to be willing to say that something is true and something is false, that something is right and something is wrong.

So how do we know when things really are that clear? And how do we avoid the impulse to lie to ourselves when we know they’re not?

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an author, essayist, and one of our most celebrated living writers. He’s just published a new book called The Message that has stirred up quite a bit of controversy because the longest essay in it is about his trip to Palestine.

If you know almost nothing about the conflict between Israel and Palestine, the one thing you’d probably be comfortable saying is that it’s complicated. This is an assertion Coates challenges directly. For him, the moral arithmetic is simple and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian population is fundamentally wrong.

So I invited Coates on The Gray Area to explore where he’s coming from and why he felt it was important to write this book. But the point wasn’t to have a debate or an argument. I invited Coates because I think he’s smart and sincere and doesn’t write anything without seriously thinking about it. This conversation is really about the role of the writer and the intellectual and what it means to describe the world with moral clarity.

As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sean Illing

What’s been the most surprising thing to you about the reaction to this book so far? 

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I’m surprised at the surprise. So, the CBS interview was the first live interview. I was not surprised by the aggression, tenacity, whatever you want to call it. Or, I should say, I knew that was going to happen eventually. I didn’t know it was going to happen there. So I was surprised in the sense that, “Oh, it’s right now.” And it took me a minute to catch up with it and realize that it’s actually happening right now, but this is what it is. 

I’m surprised that people are like, “I can’t believe that happened.” I understand I am going to go into some arenas where you don’t usually say the state of Israel is practicing apartheid. That’s just not a thing that you usually hear people saying in places like that, and so I am going to say that. And what’s going to come out of that, I have no idea, but I hope people understand that this is what’s happening.

Sean Illing

You made a deliberate choice to write about Palestine, which, as you know, is an impossibly charged issue. Why wade into these waters? Why this conflict? Why now?

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I don’t think it’s impossibly charged. This is so clear. It was so clear. And when I saw that — and maybe this is naive, maybe you’re right, maybe it is impossibly charged — but I was just like, “Oh, this is easy.” Not easy like easy to do, easy to write, but the math is clear. You know what I mean? 

The word I used at the time when I saw it was Jim Crow, because it was so obviously Jim Crow. You tell me you got one set of roads for one group of people, another set of roads for another group of people, and the roads you have for the other group of people are impossibly longer. They take more to get from point A to point B. Those roads have checkpoints, and the checkpoints sometimes materialize out of nowhere. This is all fact. 

Whatever you think about it, maybe you think that’s the way it should be, but this is what it is. This is actually what it is. You’re telling me that one group of people has constant access to running water, and the other group of people don’t know when their water might be cut off? 

You’re telling me that that other group of people, depending on where they live, if they’re in a particular area on the West Bank, it might be illegal for them even to collect rainwater? You’re telling me one group of people has access to a civil system of criminal justice, so that when they get arrested, they know their rights, they’re told why they’re arrested, lawyer, etc. You’re telling me the other group has no access to that? That they can be arrested, that no one needs to tell them why they’re being arrested? No one needs to tell their families that if they are killed, you don’t even have to return their bodies? What is that?

Sean Illing

So when you compare Palestine to the Jim Crow South, my reaction is that these are both moral obscenities, but they’re different. And I do think it’s complicated —

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Tell me why you think it’s complicated.

Sean Illing

I think it matters that many Palestinians still support the attacks on October 7. I think it matters that Black people in the Jim Crow South wanted to be treated as equal citizens in a fully democratic America. 

I don’t think it’s generally true that Palestinians want equal rights in a fully democratic Israel. And if they had that they might vote to end its existence as a Jewish State. And you know what? If I was a Palestinian who was pulling my friends and my family out of the fucking rubble, I’d probably vote the same way. I understand that. 

Personally, I hate the idea of a state based entirely on religious or ethnic identity. But I’m not Jewish and I don’t live in Israel and I understand why the people who do live there would have these concerns. And I also think it matters that Jews are indigenous to that land and have nowhere else to go. I just think that complicates the picture in other ways.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I am of the mind that discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion is never acceptable. There is nothing in this world that will make separate and unequal okay, and there’s nothing — and I’ll use this word — that makes apartheid okay. That’s not complex for me. It’s like the death penalty is not really complex for me, because you cannot guarantee to me that the state will not execute an innocent person. You just can’t. So I’m against it, period. There aren’t any exceptions to that. 

Sean Illing

I haven’t been to Palestine but I know it’s bad and I know what you saw there is wrong. And I don’t believe there is any such thing as a moral occupation, because whatever the reasons for it, you cannot occupy a people without visiting cruelties upon them. 

But for me, the main question isn’t necessarily the badness of the situation, which is incontestable. It’s how the hell do we end this? And all these complications that I was mentioning earlier, that’s the stuff that has to be accounted for if there’s any hope of a way forward. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates

We are sitting here asking ourselves why we don’t have a workable solution, while we exclude one of the two significant parties, and I guess my politics would say the most significant party, because that’s just where I come from in terms of the oppressed. 

How can you decide what is going to be the solution when every night when I watch reports from the region, I can name only one person who is of Palestinian heritage, who I regularly see articulate a solution or an idea? How do we get to a solution when our journals, our newspapers, our literature that dominate the conversation is not just devoid of Palestinian perspectives, but it’s devoid of Palestinians themselves? 

We are not having a conversation about solutions because we’ve basically prevented a whole group of people from entering into the frame. And so it’s like we’re putting the cart before the horse. We’re frustrated that we don’t have a solution, but we’re not actually talking to somebody. 

Sean Illing

I agree that our moral imagination needs to extend in both directions as far as possible. I understand writing this as a kind of corrective, feeling like there was a lack of empathy for the Palestinian experience because their story hasn’t been told enough, hasn’t been represented enough. I can understand that, I really can. And if I’m being honest, I think if I went there and saw the suffering firsthand, all of this would feel a whole lot less abstract to me and it would hit differently. And I don’t know how that would change how I think about it —

Ta-Nehisi Coates

So when are you going to go, Sean?

Sean Illing

It’s a fair question, and the only honest answer is I don’t know.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

You should go. I know it’s hard. And look, I’m putting you on the spot, but it was extremely hard. First of all, you are a journalist. That’s the first thing. That’s my first case for you going. The second case is this is being done in your name. And we’re going to pay for it. We’re going to pay for it one way or the other. We will pay for this. We will pay for this. 

God, now I think it’s your responsibility to go. I’m sorry, but I really do believe that. I really do believe that because you are someone who is obviously curious, obviously wants to know things. And the reason why I’m pushing you is because that vague sense of injustice is exactly what I had. That is exactly how I felt, man.

Sean Illing

But I’ll push you a little on that because it runs in both directions. If I went to Israel and toured the villages that were plundered on October 7, I’d feel this same kind of indignation and rage.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

You should, though. You should see that, too. I don’t think those feelings are contrary.

Sean Illing

No, I don’t mean to say they’re contrary. I’m just saying I would still be left feeling the sense of hopelessness at the tragedy of it all.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I think you would know more, though. I think you would know more. You sound like me. This is what I thought. Even on the eve of the trip, I was like, “Boy, this is going to be really complicated.” I thought the morality of it would be complicated. And there’s a reason why I began that chapter in [World Holocaust Remembrance Center] Yad Vashem, and it is because the fact of existential violence and industrial genocide brought to the Jewish people of this world is a very, very real thing. 

And it’s like, how do you confront that and reconcile that with Israel? Because you want that group of people to be okay. You feel like maybe that group of people is entitled to certain things. And I mean that in the best kind of way. They’re entitled to a kind of safety, given what happened to them. You feel deep, deep sympathy. And so before I went, I was like, “Wow, this is going to be morally dicey.”

I think you should go. I’m not even saying you’re going to agree with me. I’m not saying you’re going to end up where I ended up, but I think you should go.

Sean Illing

Do you think both sides of this conflict can tell a story about it that makes them right and the other side wrong? Because there are so many victims and perpetrators on both sides, because the cycle of violence and retaliation stretches back so far.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I don’t think it stretches back that far. It’s 1948. It’s not even 100 years. I mean, I interviewed people that were very much alive in 1948, so I don’t even think it’s back that far. I think that when we say things like that, no disrespect, but I think we say things like that to make it harder than it actually is. It’s a lifetime that is not even over yet. And what I would say is my opposition to apartheid, to segregation, to oppression, does not emanate from a belief in the hypermorality of the oppressed or even the morality of the oppressed.

The civil rights movement kind of fooled us with this because it was kind of a morality play and it was a very successful strategy. But whether Martin Luther King was nonviolent or not, segregation was wrong. Even when Malcolm X was yelling “by any means necessary,” segregation was still wrong. It was still wrong. So for me, it’s not even a matter of sides being right. The system that governs both sides is wrong.

Sean Illing

I remember once hearing you talk about the vulgarities of punditry. Pundits are not in the truth-seeking business. Pundits make pronouncements. That’s the whole stupid, mindless game. But you’re not like that. You have never been like that. 

One reason I retreated into podcasting is that I don’t feel that pressure to pronounce in that way, and even doing it in a serious way for me felt futile. But I don’t have your stature and I don’t have your reach, so it’s different for you, I imagine. Do you think you can make a real difference here? Or is that not even part of the calculus? 

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I needed to write what I saw. This is uncomfortable to say, but I think this moment matters. I was talking to a good friend yesterday, a colleague, a very intelligent and sharp young writer. And we were actually sitting around a table. It was a Muslim woman and another writer there, and we were all in sympathy in terms of our politics. And she’s making the point that this thing that’s happening right now, it actually matters, it’s making a difference. And I was saying, I want out. 

I’m doing this book tour and then I’m out of here, man. I’m going back to my French studies. I’m out. And I’m not out because I’m scared to say what I want to say. I’m not out because of the heat. I am out because it just feels unnatural. And part of it feels unnatural because I’m not Palestinian, but it also feels contrary to writing, which is always seeking, always trying to learn, always trying to figure it out, always asking questions.

So when you’re making these pronouncements, as I admit I am now, you wonder, am I actually betraying the craft? Should I have just written a book, put it out, and be done with it? There’s always that voice in the back of your mind. But when I was over there, man, what they said to me over and over again was, “Tell them what you saw.”

Sean Illing

I come on this show every week and I praise the virtues of doubt and uncertainty and I believe in that. But refusing to describe things simply and clearly can become a kind of moral and intellectual crime. You’re right about that. And I still think sometimes things really are complicated and not so neat and maybe the challenge of being a writer and or just a human being is being honest and wise enough to know the difference. But it is hard sometimes, and I do think this situation is complicated, and it’s also true that sometimes withholding moral judgment can be its own kind of cowardice. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Yeah. And again, I just want to take it back. When that day comes, when the Palestinians are back in the frame, when they’re invited to tell their own stories, when they’re invited to take their place at the table, I have no doubt that what will come out of that will be quite complicated. 

South Africa’s complicated. They defeated apartheid, but did they change the basic economic arrangements? My understanding is not as much as a lot of people would’ve wished. Better than apartheid, but it’s not done. It is indeed quite complicated. The victory is indeed quite complicated, but the morality of apartheid is not.

What is hard for me is I’ve been on a couple of shows now where I’ve had some debate about this with people, and they never challenge the fact of what’s going on. So when I say half the population is enshrined at the highest level of citizenship and everyone else is something less, they don’t say, “Ta-Nehisi, that’s not true.” But perhaps this is just where I sit. It’s like when your parents grew up in Jim Crow, when they were born in the Jim Crow, that is an immediate no-go. I feel like I don’t know what comes after this, but that is wrong. That’s wrong. You know what I mean? What is after that might be quite complicated and quite hard, but that is not the answer at all. 

I’m sitting in a cave in the South Hebron Hills [in the West Bank] with a group of people, and they’re telling me about their fears of being evicted out of a cave, man. When I look at — “Hey, that’s complicated” — when I know full well it’s not. What to do about it is probably complicated. But you begin from the basis that this is wrong and the very difficult work of figuring it out can proceed after that.

Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.