Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has been in the news since the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. When New York Times columnist Ezra Klein eulogized Kirk in the Times’ pages, honoring him for practicing politics “the right way,” Coates responded critically in the pages of Vanity Fair. The two, who are friends, sat down for a one-on-one meeting of the minds that has been praised, panned, and picked apart across both legacy and social media. It was an interesting discussion, if not a terribly productive one. Throughout it, Coates bears the hallmarks of somebody who has mostly failed to do his homework on Charlie Kirk, preferring instead to repeat what have become predictable bromides about how violence is bad, but… No, of course, he doesn’t think Charlie Kirk deserved to be shot. He just also thinks that Kirk was hateful and awful, and used his hatefulness and awfulness as ways to promote himself and his cause. Aged Well is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. But the bones of the Klein/Coates showdown have already been picked dry, and I’m not especially interested in giving them another going-over. Instead, I wish to remind readers that Ta-Nehisi Coates, a man whose worldview and, as we’ll see, daily habits have been shaped by dynamics of race and violence, has built his career by being as unhelpful a contributor as possible to keeping this discourse focused on peace or resolution. Coates is a great writer. He crafts strong, if sometimes purply sentences, and he makes his arguments clearly and forcefully. He takes his time with his words, obviously choosing them very carefully, and I’ve always found charges that he is a ‘hatemonger’ or a despiser of white people difficult to accept, especially when evaluated next to writers (of whom there are many) whose racial animus bubbles much closer to the surface. The essay that catapulted him to prominence, ‘The Case For Reparations,’ is compelling, evenly argued, and one that I suspect far more critics have responded to than have actually read with any care. Still, Coates’s impact on America’s efforts to heal racial divides and reduce violence leaves much to be desired. If he is a deep thinker, he is not a wide one. He has essentially one point to make, and that one point acts as the lens and the filter through which all other points are run. Coates believes that years of racial subjugation and prejudice created conditions that have conspired, and that still conspire, to limit black performance in American life. ‘The Case for Reparations’ walks readers from slavery, through Jim Crow, and forward to red-lining and systemic wealth depression targeted at black Americans, but from which white Americans were spared. He doesn’t spend much time disputing performance gaps between America’s racial communities, opting instead to explain them. He does this by crediting for them forces which are, if not insurmountable, at least very difficult and complicated to surmount. And certainly, not ones we should expect to be surmounted anytime soon. He’s hardly alone in this. What I just articulated is more or less the view of every left-leaning American, and quite a few right-leaning ones also. Coates is neither wrong to point this out, nor off-base in his assessment of the scale of historical injustice. Where he errs is in his rigidity. Coates isn’t just committed to his preferred narrative, he’s committed to it to the exclusion of all other narratives, or even suggested narratives. He is a hammer for which everything is a nail. And nowhere is this tendency of his on better display than during a conversation in which he participated at the Aspen Ideas Festival in June, 2015. Coates sat for a moderated discussion with then New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, the subject of which was ‘Is Violence a Function of our Culture?’ I watched it at the time it was first broadcast and despite my having been a culturally very progressive person at the time, it rankled me. So much so that I remembered it often through the woke years and went to revisit it in the wake of Coates’s Ezra Klein sit-down. The whole thing is instructive, but if you’re short on time, just watch the last exchange, starting around the 54 minute mark. We’ll also be discussing it later. For context, Mitch Landrieu, a white Democrat, was a mostly successful post-Katrina mayor for New Orleans. He made a dent in crime, and built trust in the black community by cracking down on police corruption and removing confederate monuments. He was well into his mayoral tenure at the time he spoke with Coates, who was himself weeks away from publishing his best-selling memoir Between The World And Me. Landrieu wasn’t, and still isn’t, a major player in the Democratic Party. He served as Joe Biden’s “infrastructure czar,” wrote a book about confronting America’s racial history as a white southerner, spent some time as a CNN analyst, and advised on both the Biden reelection campaign and later the Kamala Harris campaign. He was a successful man at the time of his Aspen Ideas Festival appearance, but it was Coates’s star that was truly on the rise. Landrieu had a lot to gain from this appearance. He would serve another three years as NOLA mayor, and had he been able to enlist to his cause the man who was a few weeks off becoming America’s preeminent black public intellectual, he could have reasonably expected great things. This was a big opportunity for Landrieu, not just for his personal profile, but for his project. Coates had the ear of the nation, and Landrieu had a good story to tell. If they could find common ground, it wouldn’t have been hyperbolic to describe the discussion in which it was reached as a turning point. For the speakers, for New Orleans, and possibly for the nation. It didn’t quite go that way. Everything was perfectly amicable. No real sparks flew until the end, and at few points did Coates and Landrieu openly disagree. But despite careful, persistent attempts, Landrieu was never able to knock Coates off his narrative, or force him to step outside his ideology. He was never able to get Coates to accept the invitation he was extending to the world of a real mayor, overseeing a real police force, protecting real streets, plagued by real violence. Coates was in the clouds. Landrieu, stuck firmly on the ground, tried repeatedly to tug at Coates’s balloon string and pull the writer back to earth. The whole talk is a dance of Landrieu trying to yank Coates in a direction that might actually be actionable or productive, and Coates flitting out of his grasp again and again. Landrieu is having a conversation with Coates. Coates seems to be more in conversation with himself. Again you should watch the whole talk, as both men have interesting things to say. We’ll zero in on just a few segments. It begins with Landrieu making an impassioned case for the urgency of the problem. Almost every night in his city, young black men were killing one another. And no, it was not a case of, “well, isn’t everyone killing one another?” It wasn’t. Most violent crime in the Big Easy was confined to a handful of neighborhoods, and the victims were overwhelmingly young, black males (95%), most of whom knew each other (88%). Landrieu called this a “culture of violence.” Coates responded with an extended anecdote about his childhood, in which he describes the choices he had to make daily in service of avoiding violence being done to his person. How he dressed, who we traveled with to school, what route they took, where he sat in the lunchroom - all of these choices reflected a need to simply stay intact. It’s a somewhat strange story, in that what Coates thinks Landrieu and the audience should take away from it, or how it represents any kind of rebuttal to what Landrieu just said, is somewhat mysterious. It might sound profound…to someone only just learning that violence, and the threat thereof, is a problem particularly in black communities. But since Landrieu had just finished making the very same point himself, it isn’t clear why he needed to be instructed on this. Still, Coates was impacted deeply by this part of his upbringing - an upbringing made all the more stark by the dichotomy between it and the images of peaceful, white families he saw broadcast on television shows like All In The Family and Leave It To Beaver: “And I was struck by the gulf between the world in which I live and the world that America projected out to the rest of the world. And so I knew, you know, as an African American, as a member of a minority population, that these sort of rituals that we went through, that I think the mayor could call a culture of violence, but I would call a culture of self preservation.” How is a culture of violence different from a culture of preservation [against, one presumes, violence]? Isn’t this a bit like complaining that a boxing ring doesn’t harbor a culture of punching, but rather one of trying not to be punched? The audience, it should be noted, is eating out of Coates’s hand as he tells this story. It’s quite a frustrating exchange, and one that mostly sets the tone for the rest of the event. Landrieu has just invited Coates to join him in building meaningful consensus. When Coates ignores the invite, Landrieu is undeterred. He doesn’t care what we call this - what words we use - he just cares what it is, and what can be done about it. Coates is unmoved. To Coates, hundreds of years of oppression isn’t something you can merely undo. He actually says this directly at one point, making clear that however long Landrieu has left on his term as mayor, it can’t be enough to move past the past. Black Americans already have done, and are doing, everything realistically within their power to stem the tide of violence plaguing their communities. W
