34 newyork| november25–december8, 2019this interest and audience for your work.
If that’s the case, why do you think people
gravitated toward your fairly downbeat
analysis of Obama?
I really don’t know. I’ve always thought
of my job as to try to arrive to some sort of
truth, render that truth in a way that is as
convincing and as powerful as possible to
myself, and then present it to the world.
But why people are moved by the things
they are moved by, I don’t know. I will say
this: I think I am one who has always
been attracted to the power of storytell-
ing, whereas if I were, say, a columnist at
the New York Times, I don’t know that
that effect would’ve held in the same way.
Do you think what Obama made pos-
sible in political conversation extends to
this resurgent interest in black cultural
products? I’m thinking of stuff like Black
Panther, Barry Jenkins’s work.^5
I really do, because I think there are two
ways of analyzing Obama. There’s a poli-
tics of him, and there’s Obama as a mythi-
cal figure, the symbolic aspect of what he
is. I think symbols are really, really impor-
tant. There’s a reason people fight over the
Confederate flag. There’s a reason that
Charlottesville starts with wantinga statue
of Robert E. Lee to remain. Symbols open
people’s minds to what’s possible.It actu-
ally was quietly really important that while
Barack Obama never disguised the fact
that he was biracial, he identified as a black
man. He was really clear about that. He
managed to assert himself as a black per-
son without any sort of denialism about
what his actual ancestry was. That was
really inspiring to a lot of black people and
a lot of white people. I don’t think it was
enough, but I think one should not under-
estimate the power of Obama as a symbol
of the first black president.
Because I’ll tell you one thing, if
Obama, let’s say, had been Bill Clinton,
right? Like if Obama had been credited to
all these rumors of him womanizing or
fraternizing with all these white women,
and if he had been found to have, God for-
bid, actual rape allegations on top of that,
and if he had been found to, I don’t know,
carry on an affair with some 22-year-old
white intern, the effect would have been1FOOTNOTES
2 Atea-partyrallyin 2010. 3 Thewhite-
nationalist
rallyin
Charlottesville,
Virginia, in
2017.Overthecourseof his
presidency,Obamaand
Coatesseemedto be
engagedin a running
debateaboutthepaceof
Americanprogresson
race.At times,the
co n waLet’s talk about race and politics in the
2010s.
It’s Obama’s^1 decade, unquestionably,
which is not to say he was always the prime
actor, but I think the force of a black presi-
dent was such a seismic event that every-
thing, including my conversation with you
right now, just was touched by it. It’s really
like if I had to pick a singular thing that
defined the decade, it would probably be
the thing that happened before the 2010s,
and that was his election.
The actual start of the decade did mark
the beginning of an ill-defined something
in politics with the rise of the tea party.^2
How did 2010 affect your understanding
of political partisanship? Is partisanship
even a useful frame through which to un-
derstand racism?
I would probably say it the other way
and say racism is a useful frame to under-
stand partisanship since the 1960s. The
Republican Party is effectively a white
party in this country. It’s the party of a
white majority that greatly fears becoming
a white minority. As much as the tea-party
movement in 2010 is just a line of demar-
cation, you have the current president’s
invocation of birtherism, and birtherism is
little more than telling the first black presi-
dent, “Go back to Africa.” It’s not a mistake
that throughout Obama’s presidency, you
could poll the Republican Party and find
anywhere from half to a solid majority of
people who actually were birtherists.
That’s not accidental. Racism is and wascore to what the Republican Party is,
which is not to say it has no manifestation
and no effect in the Democratic Party.
Birtherism strikes me as one of the
few things Trump has done that Repub-
licans haven’t been explicitly willing to
defend, even as they do stuff like ratio-
nalize his defense of white supremacists
in Charlottesville.^3 But there’s also been
no broader reckoning with its effect or
with how successful it was in getting a
number of current Republican represen-
tatives into office, either.
Totally. Some of them know better, but
that’s always been true. George Wallace—
you know his story. Wallace^4 was liked by
the NAACP and was liked by black people,
and his earliest campaign for governor did
not want to make segregation and racism
central to his campaign. Then he lost to a
guy who did that. He said, “I will never be
out-n-----ed again.” He said, “I tried to talk
about good roads and good schools and all
these things that have been part of my
career, and nobody listened. And then
I began talking about ‘n-----s,’ and they
stomped the floor.” It’s a guy that probably
knew better. Some of these folks, if they
are not racist themselves—and I’m willing
to grant that—they don’t find racism so
odious and so offensive that they either
(a) would not stoop to using it themselves
or (b) don’t mind the occupant of the White
House using it or being a racist himself.
You’ve said that Obama’s presidency
made your work possible in that it createdf the racial politics of the 2010s has a definitive chronicler, it is
Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose magisterial 2014 Atlantic essay “The Case for
Reparations” forced Americans to reckon with slavery, Jim Crow, and
redlining. Since the essay’s publication—which eventually prompted
a congressional hearing on the subject this year, at which Coates
testified—the 44-year-old has won a National Book Award for his 2015
book, Between the World and Me, and was awarded a MacArthur “ge-
nius” grant. More recently, he’s been writing fiction: He scripted a run of
Marvel’s Black Panther comic and published his celebrated first novel,
The Water Dancer, which concerns an enslaved man gifted with super-
natural powers in antebellum Virginia. Coates’s expansive imagination
and incisive, historically grounded writing about Barack Obama, Donald
Trump, and cultural figures like Kanye West has cemented his status as
a writer through whose eyes many Americans have come to understand
the modern era—including me.