Ta-Nehisi Coates's TV Tour De Force

He's using the vast power he's amassed to say things others are afraid to say

Ta-Nehisi Coates set fire to TV news sets all over New York this week. It was a tour de force of a media tour. He went onto TV shows and said things you’re not supposed to say in American political discourse.

He said crazy things like it’s imperative to speak up for the Palestinian people and it’s crucial to accurately report on them. Also: apartheid is wrong. On CBS he said, “I’m against a state that discriminates against people on the basis of ethnicity.” It’s amazing that that comment is controversial but in American public discourse, showing even basic empathy for the Palestinian situation can be judged as anti-semitic. Coates went to war with that whole notion.

When Coates was on Joy Reid’s show she said, “There’s a prohibition from sympathizing with the Palestinian people. You’re not supposed to see these people as having any reason to sympathize with them. It’s not good for us as a profession because we have to be able to interrogate things that are happening in the world… And I feel like your book is almost a permission structure. Like, we can examine these things.”

Coates, with his new book and his recent media, is mainstreaming the discussion of Palestinian oppression. That’s why I think, yes, what he said was important but, also, the fact of him saying it is important. It’s difficult, in the American political community, to talk about Palestinian people and their oppression. We should be able to criticize the government of Israel without it being received as a judgement on the character of Jewish people. It’s absolutely not that. One can believe in Israel’s right to exist and also be critical of its recent attack on Lebanon. But many people in media respond by just not talking about Palestine and not considering its perspective. Coates burst through all of that, publicly critiquing Israel’s government, and America’s too, in a way we almost never see on American TV.

Coates, who has already established himself as one of the most respected writers and public intellectuals of his generation, has stepped into the American collective mind and said wait, why can’t we talk about Palestinian oppression? There’s many, many people who could’ve said that and gotten smacked down. But Coates is a beloved public intellectual with a reputation for being brilliant, fair, and reasonable. You can’t dismiss him. So what he’s doing is this: he’s using the social capital he’s amassed as a trusted elite public intellectual to speak about an issue that’s difficult to speak about. That takes intellectual courage. I admire Coates for using the power he’s built up to speak up on behalf of the most oppressed people he could find and saying things that others are afraid to say.