Ta-Nehisi Coates says 'I don't give a fuck' about backlash for speaking on Palestine
African-American writer and public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates has said he doesn't "give a fuck" if he is sidelined in the media for calling Israel's war on Gaza a genocide.
In an exclusive and wide-ranging interview with Middle East Eye's Real Talk series, the award-winning author discussed his new book, The Message, his evolving views on Israel and Palestine and the 2024 US election, amongst other issues.
For several years, Coates - who established a wide readership at The Atlantic, where he wrote about racism against African Americans - considered himself a liberal Zionist. In 2008, he even published an essay praising Israel called "The Negro Sings of Zionism".
But after receiving criticism for his 2014 essay "The Case for Reparations", which called for America to pay reparations for slavery and racial discrimination, drawing an analogy with Germany paying Israel reparations for the Holocaust, Coates said that he started to read more about the issue and begun re-evaluating his views on Zionism.
"I was just dumbstruck," he told MEE when describing his May 2023 visit to the occupied West Bank. "I couldn’t believe what I was seeing."
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Coates said that he was shocked by seeing enforced segregation and hearing testimonies from Israeli soldiers about the violence they perpetrated against Palestinians.
He recalled that he was even stopped by a soldier who demanded to know if he was Muslim.
But the 49-year-old said that what shocked him the most was the tomb of Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli settler who gunned down between 30 and 54 Muslim worshippers in Hebron in 1994.
Coates said that he was stunned to see that Israelis visit the tomb "and they honour him for murdering Palestinians while they prayed."
"This is not somewhere out in the wilderness," he stressed. "This is in a settlement that enjoys subsidies from the Israeli state."
He quickly concluded that Israel is not a democracy. "That was just immediately obvious," he told MEE. "You tell me you've got one set of laws for one part of the population and everyone else abides by a varying set of laws?"
It was also, he thought, a deeply violent society. "The amount of guns - there was something about the air that felt like this situation doesn't go well," he said.
'The conclusions of colonialism'
In the interview, Coates also said that he had completely reevaluated his views on Zionism. "There are people who will tell you that the Zionist project at its core had a fundamental goodness to it, and it got corrupted when certain people got their hands on it, and now we're at this point.
"But to me, [the situation in Gaza] follows the conclusions of colonialism. It follows the notion that certain people's lives are worth less."
He said that after he visited the occupied territories, Coates felt ashamed of his previous position on Israel.
"I fucked up," he said. "I don't know how I fucked up.
"I'm a writer and so it's one of these things that can't really be corrected by going to a march, or releasing a statement or signing an open letter. It has to be corrected in writing."
This helps explain the content of the author's new book, The Message, which is about writing. Part of the book - the section which has garnered the most interest and criticism in the American press - details his 10 days spent in occupied Palestine.
A month ago, CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil suggested the book promoted "extremist" views in an interview that quickly went viral on social media, triggering widespread outrage.
CBS News executives found a week later that the interview did not meet the network's editorial standards.
'I wish Kamala did better'
Since Coates is one of America's most celebrated essayists, his book has attracted significant attention in the run-up to the election on 5 November.
Coates weighed in on the issue of people preferring to vote for third-party candidates instead of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, because of the Biden administration's unequivocal support for Israel's war on Gaza.
"I get it," he said. "I don't think it's gonna work but I get it. I get the feeling.
"I don’t think the pragmatics of it are good, but I get it. I'm not gonna be the one to go out there and say: 'Shut up and fall in line', as somebody who comes from a community that has been told repeatedly to shut up and fall in line."
He added: "I wish Kamala did better. I was there at the DNC [Democratic National Convention] when they wouldn't even allow a Palestinian speaker to get on the mic.
"I think that was not just a mistake - I think it was cold and inhumane."
Later, Coates said he doubted that a Harris administration would diverge significantly from Joe Biden's policies towards Israel.
What it means to be a writer
MEE put it to Coates, who calls Israel's war on Gaza genocidal, that genocide is a term many in the US media might avoid out of fear that they could be sidelined or ostracised - and that Coates himself could find himself no longer being interviewed by major networks in the future.
"I don't give a fuck," he said, adding that "I would rather be here [talking to MEE]."
Coates insisted that he refuses to allow his writing to be "guided by how many powerful people are gonna get angry at me.
"If we're going to write then we should say what we see, and people getting mad at you is part of the process.
"There are a great many things in America that are not said, but the reason those things are not said are not for any reason that any writer of integrity should respect."
'If we're going to write then we should say what we see'
- Ta-Nehisi Coates
He noted that he appreciates being invited onto major networks to make his case.
"But at the end of the day, I close up my computer, I kiss my beautiful wife, I call my lovely son, you know what I mean? I hang out with my beautiful friends.
"We model this notion that being a writer means people with power and people with platforms are supposed to like you, want to put you on or whatever. What I want is to be respected by my people."
In the interview, Coates also said that he had embarked on a moral mission.
"The fight to see Palestinians as human beings is at a different point in America than the fight to see African Americans as human beings," he told MEE.
"Jim Crow is not happening now" in America, he noted, referring to the laws that once enforced racial segregation in the US.
"You see it there [in Palestine]. This is about right now."
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