On with Kara Swisher - Ta-Nehisi Coates On Trump, Palestine and Journalism as a “Contact Sport”

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

What role will writers play as we head into a second Trump term? Author, journalist and Howard University professor Ta-Nehisi Coates has some thoughts. The man who has been called “one of the most important writers on the subject of America today” came to the fore during the Obama era as one of the preeminent writers on race, among other things, for his 2014 essay “The Case for Reparations” and his book Between the World and Me, an open letter to his son about growing up as a Black man in America. Kara and Ta-Nehisi discuss how the Democrats lost the “rainbow coalition” in the 2024 election, why America’s “special relationship” with Israel compelled him to rally against Palestinian oppression in his latest book The Message, and why he thinks journalists will need to embrace a new and not-so-safe normal during Trump 2.0. Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on Instagram and TikTok @onwithkaraswisher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Kara, it's fine. Kara, okay. You can call me anything you want. Kara, I don't know. Having had gone through like mispronunciation and everything, I'm sensitive about it. Yeah. My wife last night was Tana Hasi. I was like, I got it. I got it. I can do it. Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is writer and the Sterling Brown endowed chair in the English department at Howard University, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Coates is considered to be one of the leading thinkers and writers of our time, especially on race. I've read Coates forever, obviously many of his books. He's just a beautiful writer just on its face of it. He's taught me a lot of things and has a unique voice in American literature and writing in general. During the Obama administration, he was a blogger and a major columnist at the Atlantic documenting the nation's first black president and the question of whether we were truly a post-racial society. Spoiler alert, we weren't. His writing is a combination of personal experience and detailed reporting through a historical lens. If you haven't read any of his work, you've probably heard about his 2014 essay, The Case for Reparations,

in which he makes the argument for paying back black Americans for the economic impact of slavery. Jim Crow laws and policies like redlining that have contributed to the black white wealth gap. It was one of the reasons he won a MacArthur fellowship, which is also known as the Genius Grant. So, you know, I have not gotten one of those yet, though I fully deserve it. That essay and Coates' memoir, a book long letter to his son about being black in America between the world and me, which I also made my white sons read and they love, have also put him in the political crosshairs. That book has been banned or attempted to be banned in a number of

states. And his latest work, The Message, has also fueled debate, even though it's not at least foremost about race. It's a travel log of trips to South Carolina, Senegal, and Israel, Palestine, and it's the last one that's put quotes in the spotlight, this time calling out the oppression of Palestinians in Israel and the role that the U.S. plays in the Middle East conflict. But more than anything, this is a book for his students at Howard about the impact and importance of writing, and it is beautiful writing once again. And we waited until after the election specifically, because we wanted to hear his thoughts as Trump 2.0 begins. Tana Hasee, thanks for being on on.

I appreciate you being here. As a listener, it is a pleasure to be here. Good. Well, we try to have substantive conversations. I know that's hard these days. We're going to talk about the new book, The Message, of course, but obviously I have to ask you about the election. So talk a little about your thoughts about the outcome of the election right now.

How do you feel it in the context of the things you're interested in? You know, I don't know. I don't know. I have, to be straight with you, kind of tuned out from the news. Oh, yeah, a lot of people did. I think we know what's going to happen. We might not know the details of what is going to happen, but I think, you know, Trump has never been a guy, at least in terms of this office, to say what he was going to happen, but I think, you know, Trump has never been a guy, at least

in terms of this office, to say what he was going to do and not do it, or at least not try to do it. So I think I'm pretty clear on what to expect. So I am processing my own thoughts about the campaign. I guess one of the reasons why I've tuned out is I am kind of in an internal debate about what information is good information and what is bad. And I'm not clear. And I thought this even before the election that up to the minute updates of whatever

machinations are happening or appointments might be or might not be. I wonder how much worth that has for me ultimately. Yeah, for you or many people. I mean, there's like 24 minutes of news and 24 hours of information. Right, exactly. There's a lot of information, but not a lot of facts, right? I just had that discussion with Yuval Harari about that, is the information

has overwhelmed us like a flood when before it was a desert and kept very closely by, you know, the elite, whatever you want to consider the elites, and now it's everywhere. I'm going to steal that, by the way. Please do. That's great. Please do. Please steal everything. I'm a shoplifter myself. But you went to Howard University, you've been teaching there. It's also Kamala Harris' alma mater. And the place where she was going to have a victory celebration on Tuesday, you sort

of started the book dedicated to the people you're teaching, the young people. How do you talk to them after this? I did actually. Weirdly enough, I'm teaching a virtual course right now. Because it's in the middle of book tours, I couldn, teach, but I really wanted to have my hands there. So I'm teaching. So I had to talk to them like Wednesday night. So the next day I had to talk to them.

And what I told them was, I know you're feeling not great right now. And there's depression and all of that. But this really is your moment. The message is steeped in a notion of black writing, and that is not merely writing by people with a certain chromosome count or a DNA. It really is about an experience. That experience has been one of unremitting oppression, repression, extremely challenging

circumstances. And out of that has come just this profound body of literature and writing and journalism, as it would with any other group of people and as it does with other groups of people who find themselves under such circumstances. And what I really wanted to emphasize to them is that this is their time, the time is now. This is the tradition that they're in. And this is not the worst moment in that tradition, even if it is a particularly challenging one. And so, you know, as depressed as they may be as people, you know, as writers, weirdly enough, they should be excited. Danielle Pletka Right, because it gives them a challenge.

I mean, you talked about that a lot in the book. We're going to get to the book in a minute, but I was particularly touched by your father when he wasn't paid that day, or when he had a union job moving salt, is that correct? That's exactly right. And, you know, I thought that moment when he comes home and you said, Daddy reads all the time, Daddy reads to learn, was sort of what you might want to say to the students, right? That the unfairness or fairness isn't really the point, it's how you react to it. Yeah, yeah. It's the thing that's out of your control. We all wish that we had a just world in which people, regardless of race, sexual orientation or gender, class, et cetera,

were respected, where they were not made the targets and the butts of other people's cruelty and jokes, where they were not scapegoated for the problems of the world. We all wish we lived in that place, but we don't. And so part of our job, and I recognize everybody does not share this point of view, but it is my point of view and why I even became a journalist in the first place. does not share this point of view, but it is my point of view and why I even became a journalist in the first place. But part of our job is to bring that world into existence. And we don't do that by covering our heads and burying them in the sand. Or being an irritant.

Being an irritant. No. No. No. And I actually think that's a great point though. What you just said about being an irritant, because I think that there is a certain kind of person who has decided that somehow that's what the world needs. Tweeting out or unloading your particular thoughts at the moment of what you think as

opposed to maybe taking some quiet time. Right. No, absolutely. So one of the things I always say when I was talking, talk about tech people, which I deal with almost all the time, was that they confuse a mirror autocracy with a meritocracy. So they feel like they got there on their own two feet and when in fact it was through a series of special pushes up the ladder that they got all the way through. And they always seem confused when I say that.

Can I ask you a question about that? Yeah, sure. And I want to, and I'm sorry. Can I ask you a question about that? Yeah, sure. And I want to, and I'm sorry, I know I'm the one being interviewed. Please, go right ahead. You're a journalist. But you have so much expertise on this. And you know, one thing I've thought about a lot is why are they so opposed to the idea of any sort of moderation?

Like where does this theory come from that everybody should be able to say whatever they want in any place they want? Because the people who designed the systems never felt unsafe a day in their life. Jesus. Think about that, you know? I had an interesting experience when we were living in Shaw. One of my sons is 6'5", the other is big, you know, he's a big guy. And we were walking down the street and it was dark.

And so as a woman does, I looked around like, you know what I mean? Like, I'm always like, Oh, look at that alley. Look at women just do that naturally. You can ask any woman. And my sons were both like, what are you doing? And I'm like, Oh, does it occur to you? Does it, you know, as a man, as a white man, so it was a really interesting. I think that's what it is.

They, they never felt unsafe. And when they do, what they consider unsafe is the feedback of normal criticism. And then you're attacking them. And then everything changes. And ultimately, they don't really care. Ta-Nehisi, they don't care. Do they have a vision of a better world? Well, I think when their mottos are move fast and break things, that tells you a lot, doesn't

it? That tells you a lot. Yes, it does. It doesn't say move fast and change things or move fast and improve things or move fast and adapt. It says break. I think they like to break the world. Although I think a lot of some of them are very scared, especially who bought Kamala Harris. So let's talk just a tiny bit more about this. I know everyone is trying to figure out what happened. All the hot takes are exhausting me at this point. I certainly got it wrong. One of the things we heard a lot of the echoes of something you wrote in 2017 after Trump won the first time and you wrote the collective verdict holds that the Democratic Party lost its way when it

abandoned everyday economic issues like job creation for the softer fare of social justice. I think it's good to remember that that was the consensus and you push back against that. You basically said it was a racist backlash to Barack Obama. How do you look at this one? Is it still the economic issues versus, because Kamala Harris, as many have pointed out, really did talk like a Republican. She wasn't really leaning into social justice except for abortion. She certainly leaned in on abortion, but that's a different thing, I think.

I have heard that there's been this whole thing about, you know, she was too woke or, you know, trans folk or, you know, like maybe that's why. And I just think, like, well, first of all, she didn't run on any of that. That's the first thing. She was hanging out with Liz Cheney, but go ahead. She was. She was. She was.

I mean, the Biden administration was not really... I mean, they did all of the economic policy stuff that I think a lot of people have been clamoring for. They actually tried to do it and did quite a bit of it, and they still lost. I think this is a thing that people say for two reasons. I want to speak to a general, and then I want to speak to something very specific. I think in general, it is very uncomfortable to think that perhaps policy is not the thing that people are always responding to in our elections. That is disturbing. And it's especially disturbing when you think that maybe it's something like race or gender

or racism and sexism. I can remember the studies that the political scientist Michael Tesla did on Obama where race affected everything down to what people thought about this man's dog. And so taking that picture of the American people is disturbing. It's not what we like to think about ourselves. And then I think there's something very specific happening with trans people in this country. This is bothersome to me. I didn't see much talk about trans rights or anything like that.

I wouldn't say the Democratic Party has really distinguished itself in advance of that. She certainly didn't. She certainly didn't. And she certainly did. She certainly did. And so what you're left with is, do you want these people to disappear? Do you object to their presence on the planet Earth? Do you want them to die? Do you see them, as a friend of mine once said, as redundant?

As people who should have no public face whatsoever? Is that what we're talking about? You know, because I mean, I didn't see it in the campaign, which says to me, maybe you object to it being in the air. So maybe you object to them, which is dark and disturbing. Right. I would say that you're correct about that. I think go away or be quiet.

Be quiet, I think is more that, you know, which sort of, you know, feeds into protests that went the other way, which was silence equals death, essentially. But Cara, you know, the thing about that is even the be quiet part of it, it's like, okay, so they say nothing, but Trump is actually the one that's doing the highlighting. That's correct. That's correct. So then it becomes they're just existing. You know what I mean?

The fact of them existing is now a problem. Well, because they did stick their head above the parapet, right? They did for a moment. More than quiet, they want to take away trans kids' rights in schools and sports. They're obsessed with sports. They started with bathrooms and then that didn't work as well, but then sports was the ... There's always an entry point to this kind of stuff. You mentioned President Obama.

During the campaign, he called out black men and said they were coming up with excuses not to vote for a woman. You were super critical of that message. According to CNN exit polls, one in five black men voted for Trump. Listen, voter turnout for Dems was down compared to 2020. Do you think Obama was right? Was misogyny a part of it at all? White women certainly voted for Trump. I mean, people of color generally were very supportive of Harris in comparison.

And you were critical, by the way, of Obama's respectability politics during his tenure. I was, and I was critical of that statement too. politics during his tenure? I was, and I was critical of that statement too. There's just no way in the world that misogyny and sexism did not play a role for men and for black men. I don't think that that is really debatable. I will point out as the numbers stand right now, there really wasn't much change in terms of the support of black men for Biden and for her.

Having said that, I don't think it's ever wrong to challenge any privileged group about their attitudes or their status. I do think though, when you're in a campaign and what you're trying to do is get that group to go out and support a candidate, I'm not sure why that is the message. The lecture. Right. We really wouldn't accept that or expect that for anybody else. We would not say that Kamala Harris or whoever should go out and say lecture white working

class people on their racism when she's trying to get their vote. Right. You know what I mean? I wouldn't advise that. I wouldn't advise that at all. And so I don't know too many black men that support Trump, but it's hard for me to believe that they would hear that and say, oh yeah, okay, that's going to get me off of the chair and go vote for Kamala. Yeah, yeah, right.

It was such an unusual- You suck. Right, you suck. You suck, go vote. It's kind of an Obama trait. It is. But if it's not, if that's not like normal campaign, like what are you doing then? Right. Like what exactly are you doing now?

But one of the things that Trump did as a hustler supreme, or the greatest troll in history was using ads and social media campaigns to pit groups against each other, us versus them. Paul, this is not a new thing. Do you think that resonated more than the Democratic's always big umbrella or Rainbow Coalition message? I think Charles Breaux wrote in The Times that it was the end of the Rainbow Coalition. Was freedom too abstract? Do you think there is the end of the Rainbow Coalition? I mean, I don't know.

I mean, not for me. In terms of my politics, I mean, to me what that means is a belief in a world in which, you know, people from different, you know, backgrounds all are united on a similar idea. And that idea is that, you know, people should be equally respected, you know, and enjoy the benefits of a democracy and the bounty of this world equally. And so I do think that sometimes we assume that because people are suffering or are under some sort of condition of material deprivation or have experienced material deprivation, that they will therefore be sympathetic to other people who are experiencing deprivation or oppression or whatever.

That is not true. That is not true. And so I think that's a thing that has to be grappled with in left politics, period, across the board, and maybe is not always. I also think the dynamics, the political dynamics of the African-American community are not like other communities.

What I mean by that is we are a community that has been here, obviously, for over 400 years, but most of that time we were enslaved. When you are enslaved, it's not that you don't have politics, you do, but you're constantly choosing between awful choices. You know what I mean? Like it's, you know, I want to run away because my master is abusing me, but if I run away because my master is abusing me, he will then abuse my mother. So what do I do?

That dynamic was basically true for us even after we were emancipated, election after election. I mean, you're trapped between people who either outright despise you, or people who don't want to be seen in public with you. And so what that means is our way of voting and considering candidates is very different than people who have come to this country and really do believe in the American dream, as it's often proffered and are not, you know, into seeing presidential

elections as this is the best we can make of it. Right, right. And also not everybody's the same, of course. One of the things that you talked about, because Harris sort of tried to go around that in a lot of ways, and bad choices is what you said about Harris and Iowa right before the election because of the Biden administration's support of Israel. It seems like she lost a large percentage of Arab American voters in Dearborn. Some sat it out, a lot sat it out, and some went for Trump, but sitting it out seemed to be the trend more than anything. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is thrilled for Trump, which doesn't bode well for the Palestinians.

How much of a role do you think the war played in the election itself? I think quite a bit, but maybe not in the way people think. How so? From what I can tell, the vote count is not large enough to have made a material difference in that sort of way. I do think though, I was at the DNC and I watched them run on all of these sort of, you know, quote unquote rainbow coalition values. And you know, they had Fannie Lou Hamer up there, you know, who had been excluded, you know, from the Democratic Party, honored Shirley Chisholm, honored Jesse Jackson, who actually was the last person to push for an Arab American to address the DNC, honored the Central Park

Five, all of these people who had been left out while they were in the act of leaving people out. And I think that creates a kind of identity schism or a messaging problem, not even, no, not messaging, an incoherence in your actual beliefs. It's not just messaging. It's an incoherence in your actual beliefs. So here we are saying that we oppose American apartheid, but we are supporting the exporting

of bombs and planes to be dropped on a group of people in support of an apartheid regime. And I don't use that term lightly. I know it's a controversial term, but I don't use it lightly. I use it having seen it myself. I use it having done quite a bit of reading and reports from human rights organizations. And frankly, I use it because the former prime ministers from Ehud Omar to Ehud Barak use it in their description of the country and its possibilities or dark possibilities for it.

So we have to ask ourselves a question. If Ehud Omar says this country is headed towards apartheid and we're against American apartheid, what does it mean to say we will always support them? There's an incoherence in it. The incoherence is actually a better word. I mean, what you're talking about for people to understand is the Palestinians were not allowed on stage at the Democratic National Convention. Yes, I'm so sorry, forgive me.

That's okay. I was there myself. They, of course, had all kinds of ways to communicate, but this was a big deal. And the Harris people met with them off stage and things like that. But, but this is what you mean by leaving people out and not wanting to attract the controversy, I think is what they were doing. There was a lot of not risk taking when on Trump's side, there was a lot of risk taking.

I think Trump went to Dearborn. I think he went to Dearborn. Or Elon giving away a million dollars. It was a lot of risk taking and she is risk averse. That is, you know, having known her since he was a DA, she's a risk averse person. So they were always being, they were always modulating, I think, in a lot of ways. Let me just get to one thing. We're going to talk about that part in the book, by the way.

Every episode, we get a question from an outside expert. This week, the question comes from Wajahat Ali, author of The Left Hook Substack and cohost of the Democracy-ish podcast. Ta-Nehisi, in your book and in your recent speeches, you have said that as a black man, you cannot sit by and stay silent after witnessing the apartheid conditions and occupation of Palestinians. There is a need for intersection and solidarity. Many black and POC voters feel the same way. However, they also feel a sense of massive betrayal by some pro-Palestinian activists and groups, Muslims and Arabs, who decided not to vote for Harris, to punish her, and either sit out, vote for Stein or Trump.

And I'm sure you've seen the videos where they say, we're done. We gave it everything. We knew the assignment. You failed the assignment. What do you say to those black and POC Americans who are tapping out of the movement and how do you heal these rifts? I haven't seen those videos. I literally have not seen them. And again, this goes back to, I think, where honestly, Kara, where we started our conversation. I can't tell you how much of people yelling about this on social media really represents

a feeling among, for instance, the black electorate. I don't know. So I'm always hesitant to give it too much credence. It could be that this is five or 10 or 50 really, really loud people. And there were a number of black men, black male celebrities who came out and said they were gonna vote for Trump. But those of us who are familiar with those figures

know that those people probably don't vote anyway. And so there's a way in which people's volume can be confused with what's actually going on. Having said that, I can give you my perspective on this, which is pretty simple. Look, as I said earlier, we have always been lesser of two evil voters. That's just what it is. And I do think there is some wisdom in not overly fetishizing presidential elections.

And so voting for Kamala Harris, I don't think necessarily means that you think genocide is a great idea. You might vote for her and feel like that's the person who you feel you can best pressure and organize against. That was my feeling. Having said that, it is far, far beyond my capacity and my capability to talk to people, as I did, who say to me one sixth of my family is dead. Who say the bombs are being dropped on my family right now and say to them, you must support the person who has made no promises not to keep killing your family and may well keep killing your family. It's cruel.

It's cruel for me to say you have to support that person. I don't have that envy. I have my own political calculus that I make and I'm sure there are plenty of Palestinian American activists and Muslim and Arab American activists who would disagree with that and say that I am ultimately supporting genocide. I will carry that. I'll take that. But for my part, I get it. I get it.

I can't say that if I was in their shoes, what would I do? I don't know. I'd be really angry. I would be really, really, really angry. We'll be back in a minute. Support for On with Kara Swisher comes from Mint Mobile. Missing out on something great can stay in skipping Mint Mobile's latest deal might lead to some serious FOMO down the road.

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So I want to talk a little bit about the importance of journals, especially for the next four years, in just a bit. But The Message encompasses essays about trips you took to South Carolina, Senegal, and Palestine. John Stewart said you're grappling in this book. I would agree. You talk about these trips for people who haven't been there and read the book and what you felt you were grappling with specifically on your trip to the West Bank. Talk very quickly about these trips and why you structured it this way.

It's the journey of you as you try to figure it out, correct? I mean, which is what any journalist does. Yeah. I mean, so the first thing is they are addressed to the writing students. They are. Right. And so part of that was a lesson I was trying to impart on them. And that is that writing is not just sitting down at a desk or a table and receiving inspiration. You have to go places. You have to see things, you have to talk to people, you have to be willing to feel one way when you get one place and be surprised and feel another way and go through the whole full range

of emotions and you bring that back and you write it. And so these were three places that I ended up going and also three places where story is obviously very, very important, certainly in Dakar, Senegal, and in Africa as a whole, which is the origin point for the narratives that power racism and white supremacy. You were uncivilized, you didn't write or read, you were illiterate, you've never done anything, you didn't build anything. So therefore, you were fit for enslavement. That's like the rough version of that argument. And African Americans have themselves tried to push back. And certainly a tradition that I was raised in, how I got my name, was to prove to folks

that we had and to claim certain things. And one of the things I am trying to confront in that chapter is whether that story at all is important. In other words, whether human rights derive at all from the quote unquote accomplishments of a people. And obviously I conclude that they do not. The second portion of that is in South Carolina, which has since the Civil War just been a sight of how the American story is told. And in that case, it pulled me in

with Between the World and Me and the attempt to ban that and to push out this brave teacher who was teaching the book in a writing class, no less. And Ky, this is what I mean about needing to go places, because I went down there to a school board meeting to see what was gonna happen to this teacher in relation to my book. And I went down there to a school board meeting to see what was going to happen to this teacher in relation to my book. And I went down there ready for war expecting to see the worst possible things.

And I'm not saying the worst possible things aren't happening down there, but instead what I found was a community that believed that part of having a worldly and educated child was having them exposed to different works of literature and writing and understanding it. It wasn't necessarily a group of people that shared all of my politics or all the things that I believed, nor should that be the case. But people that believed you should read different things and know things, that you shouldn't go out in the world and say, I didn't read that because my school banned it. That that was a bad idea. Well, one of the questions how writing create allyship is a central takeaway from your essay

on your trip to South Carolina. And in a lot of ways, when I was reading it, it reminded me of a thing I say all the time, which is believe what you see, don't see what you believe. It's really hard. As a reporter, it's really hard. And when they accuse us of that, I'm like, you're right, it's very hard to believe what you see over the other one. But you compare Israel to the Jim Crow South and lay out a number of ways you saw that Palestinians are being treated like second-class citizens. It reminded me of an interview I did with Isabel Wilkerson about her wonderful ball cast. You talk about the settlements encroaching on the land. You talk about domination by resources like water, the domination by time with bureaucracy. Talk

about what you experienced there and how these issues played a role. Oh, man. I wonder when I'm going to get asked about this and I won't be emotional about it. I wonder when that's going to happen. Never. That's good. This was one of the most important trips I took in my life, if not the most important. In some ways, even more important than going to Senegal, or going to Africa for the first time. And it was important because you hear all these stories when you're growing up of what

segregation was and what Jim Crow was, and then you see it, and you see it in this place that could not practice it without the dollars coming from the country that you are a citizen of. And so to make this absolutely explicit, I spent time on the West Bank where there are license plates for Israeli citizens and then there are license plates for quote unquote stateless Palestinians. I drove on or I rode on roads that were demarcated for two. I just remembered something. Actually, the other day I was talking to somebody that was on a trip with me and I had totally forgotten about this and it didn't even make it into the book.

A really poignant part of the book is in the old city of Hebron where I went, which was probably the most explicitly segregated, as in people who were born there, whose grandparents had lived there, are not allowed to walk down certain streets. That was the place where, for instance, I was stopped from walking down the street and asked to profess about my religion and only allowed if I gave the right answer. So this was clearly a segregated place as I understood the word to be. This was on top of talking to people who laid out the bureaucracy of what it means, for instance, to build, to expand on the land because the land is so regulated.

And the fact that one group of people can get permits to build another group cannot. So we leave there at the end of the day and we're on this road and we drove at this part of the trip, we drove along the quote unquote Palestinian roads and I had to pee. I was like, I don't know if we can stop. I don't know if we actually are allowed. Where is the rest stop that we can actually go?

And I had that long conversation with my friend, Eve Ewing, like, I really had to go to the bathroom. Can this bus actually stop? Or we won't want our way to Haifa? Or do I have to hold this all the way to Haifa? You know? And fortunately, bus drop and navigated it. And we could, but this was a constant thing if

you were black in the South. The bathrooms were a constant thing you had to negotiate. And so, I mean, just in so many ways, it just reminded me of a past that- Yeah. It echoes. Yeah. Yeah. They all have echoes of each other.

Now, to be clear, you took the trip before the October 7th Hamas attack for the war in Gaza. I did. I did. Did that change your perception of what you saw and what's happening there? No. No, not in the least bit. Why is that? It did for a lot of people, as you know. Yeah, no, not even a little bit. So the first thing is, I don't know how to describe this, but in the 10 days I was there, it felt like there was this low hum of violence, always.

Even when I didn't see too much direct violence, but it just felt like... I literally said to somebody at one point, this does not look like it has a nonviolent solution. I'm just being frank. I'm not wishing for that, but I'm saying like this does not feel like it's headed anywhere good. The second part is something that I've said repeatedly, and I will continue to say. I have core beliefs, and those core beliefs

are not dependent on what other people do. I do not believe in apartheid, I'm against it. It offends something core in me that goes through my ancestry. There is nothing that any group of people can do that would make me say that they're worthy of apartheid. I'm against it. It offends something, you know, core in me that goes through my ancestry. There is nothing that any group of people can do that would make me say that they're worthy of apartheid. Nothing. Nothing. The example I've often used is the death penalty. I'm against the death penalty. It's just a core belief. I'm just against it, you know? And there is nothing any human being will ever do. If they said to you, oh, they killed my daughter and...

Yeah, no. Even terrorism. No, no, no, no. Do you get why people are disturbed, how it shifts people? I do. I mean, I understand the emotional response. I do. I do.

And I understand even more. So listen, I was with a group of people who were Israeli vets who had turned against the occupation and campaigned very loudly against the occupation. And members of that group were killed on October 7th. And so I watched them grapple with that and return to their principles, even as members of their own organization were killed. And so if they can do that, they who are on the ground, surely I can. But yes, I do.

I mean, I don't want to sound cold. I don't want to sound like I don't get it. But like we, and I mean, when I say we, I mean, we as Americans, right? Because we are supplying all of the planes. We're supplying the bombs. We are underwriting this. We are the ones who claim to have a special relationship with Israel. I don't want to hear from people who want to speak out about the massacres Hamas perpetrated, but have nothing to say about the blockade, on the enclosure, on turning Gaza into an

open-air prison, because I think you don't value human life equally then. Not consistent. You're not, like you're not consistent. So one of the things that you got, we got a lot of pushback for that and critics have said you don't have foreign policy experience to write on this subject. You've said in response, and I'm paraphrasing here, I don't need a PhD to call out apartheid when I see it. Do you see their point a bit that these issues should be called out by Israelis or Palestinians?

And why do you think so many critics go to foreign policy expertise when they criticize your essay? I mean, no one's criticizing Elon Musk for being in a Ukraine call, though he has zero expertise, less than zero. But you know, he's rich, so he must know. How do you push back on that? Because it's such a fraught thing when you're saying, I'm going to stick with my principles, even though I know you're hurting and I know you think this is anti-Semitism or whatever. How do you do that and how do you push back against the idea? You said that essentially, you know what you're seeing. Well, I would say three things.

The first thing is that that chapter of the message is not just based on what I saw. It's based on all of the reading that I did. It's based on the reporting. It's based on all of the reading that I did. It's based on the reporting. It's based on talking to Palestinians themselves. It's based on, as I mentioned before, talking to IDF veterans who had turned against the occupation. So there's a lot going on in that chapter that undergirds my belief.

But even if I had done none of that, we are in a dangerous place where we need foreign policy expertise to say apartheid is wrong. There's a kind of academicizing, if that's a word, that goes on, where people think you need college degrees to determine whether you should slap a kid or not. It's absurd. It's absolutely, absolutely absurd.

And I think what happens is people who know they have lost the moral case try to retreat behind a false knowledge or a patina of intellectualism that is not real. And the third thing I would say is, okay, I don't have expertise. I'm not a foreign policy person, but I can name you off the top of my head, numerous Palestinians who could be in my chair, who you could be talking to. Not you, you literally care.

But people who think that, fine, don't talk to me. Don't talk to me, go talk to them. You know? If you don't believe me. But putting aside every critique, what should people there and Jews do and which they have done to make sure they were safe after the Holocaust? Obviously, Zionism predates the Holocaust. And what should they do now?

Do you have any solutions for that? I do. I do. I do. I have one and people don't like to hit us, but it doesn't matter. They should go to war against the knowledge blockade that prevents Palestinians from narrating their own history and their own experience in popular spaces. It's just completely unacceptable to say, we are looking for a solution to this problem,

unacceptable to say, we are looking for a solution to this problem, but we're not going to hear from a broad swath of people who are experiencing the brunt of the problem. That to me is like a big, big missing piece. It's a huge, gigantic missing piece. And I think people want to leap past that to get to two state, one state, my national state. But like, I mean, there are just so many smart and intelligent people that I know I talk to that could really, really hold forth on what this world should be. And so I don't know how you get to a solution to apartheid without talking to the people

living under apartheid, without giving them the same... I did that interview on CBS, all kinds of... I mean, God. What interview was that? I didn't hear about it. Right, right, right, right. All kinds of people saw that. I would just ask, when was the last time a Palestinian writer, journalist, thinker, intellectual got an interview like that, that that many people would see.

I just think without that, this conversation about solutions, we'll start by talking to people. Start by letting the people talk. We'll be back in a minute. Support for On with Kara Swisher comes from Anthropic. You can probably benefit from incorporating AI into your daily workflow. It doesn't matter if you're an entrepreneur trying to get a new idea off the ground or the CFO of a multinational corporation. AI is a powerful tool worth harnessing. But exactly

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That's grammarly.com slash enterprise to learn more. That's grammarly.com slash enterprise. Support for this episode comes from AWS. AWS Generative AI gives you the tools to power your business forward with the security and speed of the world's most experienced cloud. The first chapter of the message is called journalism is not a luxury. I want to finish up on that idea.

Between the world and me is a letter to your son. As you said in this book, you're writing to your students at Howard. The introduction you tell them, it's never enough for the reader of your words to be convinced. The goal is to haunt. I love that. I thought that was fantastic. I was thinking about a movie I saw recently and I said to my wife,

the movie's haunting me. It was weird before I read your book. I can't stop thinking about it. It is, it's like over there, oh look, it's sitting there in that chair and looking at me. Talk to me about what you mean by haunting. I think it's a perfect way to describe what is effective, but what does that mean for you as a journalist? So one of my favorite writers is Jennifer Egan.

No, I love Jennifer Egan. Oh, she's incredible. I interviewed her. She's amazing. Oh, man, she's incredible. That last book was even better than the first one. Yeah. Oof.

Boy, oh boy. Would you download your mind? No, I would not download my mind. I don't want to remember that. No, no, I would not. I would not. That book was so, I mean, but it was, I loved what she was doing. That fucked me up.

That book fucked me up. But when you're saying journalism is not a luxury, is that what you're trying to do, haunt people? Yes, yes, yes. And because I think if you can do that, like you just asked this question, you asked what I download my mind. So there's all sorts of things going on in the candy house, right? But there are core political questions that are being raised in there.

You know what I mean? It's not just a treatise on the singularity or AI or these sorts of things. But the reason why we're having this conversation about it now is not just because of the politics or the politics in point, it's because she's a beautiful writer. It's because the writing is haunting. And so one of the things I, when I, you know, this idea of journalism not being a luxury, which I borrowed from Audre Lorde,

is the notion that your ability to haunt is directly tied to the fate of the world. That the power of your writing, it is not enough to just write in such a way so that people finish it and put it down and say, oh, that seems correct. You need them to do what you just did, which is to say, would you download your mind? You know what I mean? That means it's sticking with you. Somewhere in the back here, this idea, this notion that she was trying to raise has stuck with you. And I try to get my writers that I'm teaching to write

in that way. You know what I mean? That's the goal.'m teaching to write in that way. You know what I mean? Like that's the goal. I know that's always my goal. No, it's true. And you say your, quote, task is nothing less than doing their part to save the world. We've been witnessing the splintering of the media landscape for a while. I've been part of that, honestly.

We've talked about its impact on the election. How do you think young journalists should best go about saving the world? And do you think, you know, traditional media companies are still reaching people? I, of course, went a different way 20 years ago, but should writers become, in order to haunt people, become, you know, social media influencers or whoever it is? How do you look at the act of journalism right now as you're teaching people to be writers? And there's difference between writers and journalists too, by the way. Yeah, no, it's true.

I think that social media is probably not good. And I think that maybe there are people in this world that need it and have no other tool for getting their words out and their voices out. So I don't want to be an absolutist about this. Yeah, you don't want to be like Old Man on the lawn yelling at the kids. No, no, no. I don't.

But I do think you need to understand the tool you're engaging with. And Kara, you can correct me if I'm wrong here, but my understanding of this is something as follows, that these tools are tuned towards outrage because outrage produces the highest level of engagement. I always say enragement equals engagement. So if enragement equals engagement, you have to ask yourself what your project is. Is your project to enrage people? Mine is not.

I tell you what, mine is not. Even if people do get enraged, I am not trying to enrage. I am definitely not trying to enrage people with my writing at all. Now, it might be enraging in certain places, but that is not a goal. Well, what are you trying to do then? Trying to haunt them. Haunt them. I'm a ghost, for fuck's sake.

Right. I'm trying to haunt them. Not a zombie. I'm a ghost. I'm a ghost, not a zombie. Yes. Yes, I'm trying to make it stick with them. And to haunt them for what, I think, is the deeper part of your question.

What I am seeking is the thing that I find in great writing, and that is enlightenment. That to understand the world in a way that I did not understand it before, to see things differently. I have deep questions over whether our social media tools, as they are currently constructed, particularly Twitter, are capable of doing that. So people who care about making a better world, you really have to ask yourself, do you think you're going to enrage yourself? Into a better world.

Into a better world, yes. So does the medium mean to find, there's a famous quote, the medium is the message. Does the message need to find a new medium to meet new audiences? Honestly, I think some of our oldest ones are great. I think books are incredible. I think paper magazines are like, I have this whole thing about paper magazines. You do, you do.

I love them. I love them. And I know that they aren't, maybe we need to find a way to keep them in business, but I don't know that our media particularly are bad. Like literally the tools are bad. Now they might not make a profit and that could be like, we might have a business problem. But I don't think we actually have a technology problem actually. You said that there are not enough Palestinian American journalists reporting on the Middle

East conflict. There were some efforts to increase diversity in newsrooms during the Obama years, not just the Palestinian Americans, but others and again in 2020. But it's unclear if there were actually more people of color hired, more different people. And then they've been, you know, a lot of the efforts, the DEI efforts have been rolled back. The term has been weaponized. Where does this go?

How do you think we're gonna see that change again? And what will be the impact of any kind of critical reporting you're calling for? I don't know. I don't know. And frankly, one of the things I have to do is I am not satisfied with me accusing other people of not doing right. So I have to find some way, once this book tour is done, once everything is done, I have to find some way to help alleviate the problem that I am so moved by. It's not enough for me to go and wag my finger at big media organizations and say, where are the Palestinians? I have to ask myself, is there any role for me to play in terms of making that true? Something behind it?

Because I don't want to be a Palestine guy. I have no desire to speak for another group Palestine guy. You know what I mean? I have no desire to speak for another group of people. Palestine guy. Like that's not, you know what I mean? That's not what I want. What I want is Palestine guys and Palestine girls, you know what I mean, to speak for themselves. And so I have to ask the question of what I can do to make that possible.

At the same time, Donald Trump has said he's going to seek retribution, which is an unusual word. I didn't know he knew such an interesting word. And he's not been shy about targeting journals in the past. We've talked here about newspaper owners like Jeff Bezos obeying in advance. I know, right? I'm not surprised in any way, but everyone else is. I always am like, you assume these people are good people? I don't know why you would assume that. Some of them are, some of them aren't. So are you concerned about those threats of retribution? Yes, I'm very concerned about it.

I'm really concerned about it. Tell me why. Well, I think, again, there are people who think or thought maybe they don't anymore that Donald Trump was ridiculous, that it's bluster and you shouldn't really pay attention to anything he's saying. And I'm not one of those people. I never was one of those people. I think you should pay attention.

And I think you should be afraid and I think you should plan how you're going to continue to do your work under threat. I will say one of the things that gives me comfort is again, we started here. Out of the tradition that I come out of, journalism was never supposed to be safe. It only became at some point this kind of Ivy League profession. You go to the right schools and you end up at the New York Times and you live a relatively comfortable life.

It wasn't supposed to be that. And I guess I should be fair, there are plenty of journalists at the New York Times who that is not true of. I don't want to slight folks on foreign desks, et cetera. I don't want to do that. But I get your point. It's not supposed to be safe. It's not supposed to be safe.

You're supposed to be challenging people. It's supposed to be a contact sport. And I'm sorry it's that way. I'm sorry it looks like it's going to be more that way. But it is. That's what it is. I agree with you So I always I was joking with someone that I'm gonna share a cell with Mark Cuban because Elon Musk hates me Anyway, I don't care. Whatever. Good luck. Come and get me. I shouldn't say that

He probably will you talked about your trip to South Carolina, which is not the only place You're seeing book bands you write in the essay much of the current hoopla about book bands and censorship get it wrong This is not about me or any writer of the moment. It's about writers to come. Explain what you mean by that. What's next on this front? I owe my love of literature to the public library system. Not just to it, but to my parents, but very much in the sense that things outside of my home to the public library system. Baltimore has a wonderful public library system, the Enoch Pratt Public Library, which I spent

a lot of time with and a lot of time in. And libraries, be they in schools or outside of schools, are just under assault right now. And so more than I fear retribution from the state, I fear for the librarians and I fear for the libraries and I fear for like the young children who would have found libraries as retreats. You know, it's kind of assault on libraries and on books. That concerns me much more than my individual book being bad. That worries me a lot more.

Right. About where it's going, where people have access to. Yes, exactly. So in that regard, how do you, when you think about your own writing, you start off with a blog at The Atlantic. You wrote long political essays, then these memoirs, and the first Trump frenzy shifted gears. You republished your essays in, we were eight years in power.

You wrote comics for Marvel's Black Panther and Captain America. You wrote a novel, Water Dancer. There seemed to be like a conscious shift away from politics. When you're saying, I've got to think about this after this book tour, what are you working on right now? A lot of other cultural critics like historians Heather Cockridge and Timothy Snyder are going followings

on mediums like Substack. Where do you see your next thing? Well, I signed a two book deal after Watergate, so I got another book I gotta write relatively soon at some point. I would say that it's not so much that I shifted out of politics, it's that as a writer,

the Trump administration was so obvious that it almost felt like the kind of writing I was doing was not, like I was just going to be yelling what everybody already knew. That's what it felt like. Well, you're a better yeller than others, though. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Some writers are better than others.

That's the fact. But you know, with Obama, even though I disagree with him over a lot of things, I didn't feel like that. I felt like there was a very complicated thing going on. I was actually trying to understand myself. And that's where journalism is just most powerful for me, when I'm trying to actually... I really do have a question that I'm trying to understand. And I just didn't feel that same pull with the Trump administration.

So I took the politics way in other directions. It's in the comic books, believe me. It's in the novel. So what do you imagine you're interested in right now? What's your next book about? Wow, that is a great question. I'll tell you what I'm interested in. I'm interested in how it feels like sports is becoming a casino.

Oh, it is? Yeah. Yeah. Are you it is? Yeah, yeah. Are you into sports at all? No, I'm the only lesbian in America who doesn't care about sports. People are always getting carried away with the game. I'm like, what game? I don't know what you're talking about. But I'm aware of, I do know a lot about the gaming that's going on, and all the internet

betting and things like that. I find it fascinating, but also troubling, obviously. I think it's long-term destructive. Because it creates... Well, I just think if there's this much money sloshing around, and you are creating incentives for all kinds of people... First of all, let me begin in my world. To cut on shows that used to be, maybe they aren't anymore, by outlets for journalists and to hear them talking about gambling and gambling lines and bets and obscure bets that they're taking

on whether somebody is going to rush for X number of yards or this person is going to do this is, I think, dangerous. I think it's dangerous because gambling is obviously a public health problem. I just think this can't be good. Well, the presidential election was a betting. They made them into bet. Yes. And down to like, what group in Dearborn will vote this?

Yes. Yes. I just don't. And so I have deeper questions about what that says about capitalism itself. Like what it says about the worth of making things. Yeah. What we think about as the worth of making things or what we think about as the worth of making things versus

trying to find some sort of shortcut or randomizing stuff to get the result that you want. I think the players themselves, I think it's probably bad for them long-term to have that much money sloshing around in what is public health. There is a retreat, not just at a state, but of institutions from their values. I remember ESPN being an actual sports journalism network. It's really what they did. Not that it wasn't complicated or that they didn't have conflicts or anything, but that seems to have gone away. And many of the podcasts, I mean, podcasts that I listen to are basically underwritten

by gambling money. This just feels like not good long-term, and I don't completely understand it. That's a great topic for a book. It does say a lot about our... We're not making things, we're betting on things that are made, I guess. And Cara, the point you just made about the elections, which is to say that it's beyond sports, that sports might be a mycosm of it, but it actually is beyond that. Oh, they can bet on anything.

So last question, in your Daily Show interview with Jon Stewart, you said something that a lot of people picked up on, including me. We have to guard against the temptation to accept that history is necessarily the limit of who we are as human beings. What does that mean for you right now in this political moment? I've been thinking about that for a bit when you said that. It means that just because certain things have never appeared in the world, that the world you want, like you don't really have historical precedent for it, I don't think that that's evidence that that world can't be. really have historical precedent for it. I don't think that that's evidence that that world can't be.

That's kind of like, we should become the change we see in the world, because some people are sort of, there's nothing new under the sun. Yeah, I know. That's not true. At some points, there was something new. At some point, it was new. At some point, somebody had to come up with feminism. Somebody had to say, this is a good idea.

You know what I mean? And it changed the world. It changed the world. It didn't deliver utopia know what I mean? And it changed the world. It changed the world. It didn't make deliver utopia, no idea does, but it changed the world. And so I think that sometimes, not to take this back here, but people look at what's going on in Israel and Palestine, say, oh, these people have been fighting for thousands years. Ah, not quite.

Not quite. That's actually not true. You know what I mean? And this notion that, oh, they're going to keep fighting. That's actually not true. You know what I mean? And you know, this notion that, oh, you know, they're gonna keep fighting. There's nothing that, like, it's a way in which people who don't want to do hard work and don't want to think about hard things and don't wanna do organizing, get around it by saying,

oh, there's nothing new just because there's no precedent for this, I don't know, I don't know. Well, what you're basically doing is imagining a better world. Yes, and I think that's a writer's job. I think that's a huge part of it actually. It doesn't have to be like this. It doesn't, and I don't accept that it does.

All right, let's end on that. Ta-nah-hah-see-coats. Thank you, Amanda, I did it. I didn't have a problem with it. Anyway, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. What a wonderful conversation. Kar, thank you. This was excellent. On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Missel, Kateri Yocum, Jolie Myers, Megan Burney and Kailin Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio.

Special thanks to Claire Hyman and Sheena Ozaki. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Arruda. And our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you thanks to Claire Hyman and Sheena Ozaki. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruta and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you now know how to pronounce Ta-Nehisi Coates. He actually talks about it in the book. If not, remember journalism is not a luxury. It's a contact sport. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.

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