About that contentious Ta-Nehisi Coates/Tony Dokoupil interview
Coates argued he witnessed apartheid in Palestine. Dokoupil called him an extremist backpacker. So who emerged victorious?
Fine, I'll write about Ta-Nehisi Coates and that interview.
The whole thing has been weeklong catnip for social media freaks who love tribal warfare since Coates is a hero to #BLM progressives and thus a villain to the Bari Weiss-loving anti-woke crowd.
My .02 is he’s a great writer and a much more serious thinker than his Kendi/DiAngelo “systemic oppression” comrades. His Atlantic essay on reparations was an incredible piece of rhetoric that I shared with others. But also, his radical views seem intentionally outlandish, overly simplistic, and deserve to be challenged.
That essay and the book that followed turned him into a celeb spokesman for le wokisme (I’m tryna go with the French name for it instead of “woke” ‘cuz the latter always feels like an unfair “guilt by association” cudgel). But then he dropped outta sight. Now, after years in the darkness (something something comic books?), he’s returned with a mic drop book that is half-devoted to Israel/Gaza. It’s like the Antifa version of one of The Avengers showing up in the middle of a Die Hard flick.
Unsurprisingly, his view is that Israel is evil and Palestinians are the black people of the Middle East. My reductio ad absurdum summary of his book (which I admittedly haven’t read): "I went to Israel for 10 days and it was just like the book I wrote on American racism – it's all very simple and obvious."
The confrontation
He’s now on a book promo tour and CBS’ Morning News Tony Dokoupil decided he was gonna try to do a challenging confrontation on a network morning show, which is like showing up with boxing gloves to a massage.
Dokoupil asked some decent questions but also dumbly said Coates’ book "would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.” It’s a line that came off as childish, unobjective name-calling. Plus, it set up Coates for a perfect retort (that he missed): "If being against apartheid and Jim Crow laws makes me an extremist, then I question your sense of moderation." (Put me in coach! I got rhetorical zingers aplenty!)
But the rest of the interview seemed like fair game.
So why all the rage on social media? It’s because people don't understand what journalism looks like anymore.
I blame podcasting. Everyone thinks the famous are just supposed to go on-air with a friendly host who’s happy to have ‘em in studio for some mutal ego stroking. The interviewer gets a big name guest (cha ching on those ad reads), the interviewee gets softball questions (think early 2000s movie junkets), and the public gets hosed. We all mocked "access journalism" for years (remember that whole WMD kerfuffle?), yet it somehow became the dominant mode of media.
Because Coates should face challenging questions: Is a 10 day trip really enough to truly grasp what’s happening in this conflict? Is the Jim Crow south really an effective analogy for security checkpoints set up to prevent massacres after a multitude of terrorist attacks? What role does Iran play in all this considering it’s funding Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis while also lobbing rockets at Israel? What would happen to all the Israelis if Coates’ got his way? Let’s find out.
People don't understand what journalism looks like anymore.
After all, Coates wrote a book intended to rabble rouse. So journalists interacting with him should, y’know, rouse.
Softball interviews
The true disappointment is how much Coates has gone unchallenged on MSNBC, The Daily Show, Fresh Air, and other outlets on this tour. Dude spent 10 days on a curated tour of Palestine and then writes a book saying it's all uncomplicated (!) and his mission is to "save the world" (!!) because he "has a clear moral compass" (!!!). And we’re all just supposed to “yes and” that? C’mon, I thought MSNBC was a news channel, not an Improv 201 class at UCB.
Also, his main takeaway seems to be “pro-Palestinian voices aren’t getting platformed anywhere” which seems odd considering he’s saying it on CBS, MSNBC, NPR, Comedy Central, etc. (not to mention how much the rest of my timeline is an incessant stream of anti-Israel propaganda). If this is what being silenced looks like, sign me up!
Also, would platforming more voices like that in US media really move the needle in the Middle East at all? Or is that view just an inverted version of American ethnocentrism?
I’d love to see a convo where Coates has to answer for this list of “lies, misrepresentations, and omissions” from his book.
Dialogue is a good thing. In fact, Israeli historian and deep thinker Yuval Noah Harari has been on pretty much the same tour. How about a sitdown between those two to get at the reality here? I’d LOVE to see that.
Because yes, there’s a decent argument to be made that Israel is an apartheid state. But there’s also plenty of ammo on the other side. After all, Israel is a democracy and Arab Israelis vote, study, work, live, and serve in Parliament, the courts, the military, and the government. Where else has apartheid looked like that? Also, Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005. (Here’s a funny video that offers some context from an Israeli perspective.)
Let’s have a mindful debate about it all instead of sending anyone who wants to discuss it to a sensitivity training gulag.
Team Nuance
My side is Team Nuance. The thing about Coates’ take that most rings false to me is the idea that none of this is complicated. Seriously?
I get it, though. Binary thinking is easy. The appeal of simplistic frameworks is the laziness required to understand them. You turn complex situations into Yankees vs. Red Sox or Luke vs. Darth. Easy! Plus, you get to be the good guy and everyone who disagrees with you is morally inferior. Such a seductive worldview.
Coates told Dokoupil, "I have a very, very, very moral compass about this.” So many “very”s! Guess he must be a moral superhero! Or could that self-aggrandizement be the inevitable result of being praised for so long as the Deep Thinker Du Jour™️?
Here’s the reply guy line that Dokoupil coulda used as a retort: “So anyone who disagrees with your assessment is immoral? Do you really think a regional and religious conflict that's lasted for centuries is somehow uncomplicated?”
(Btw, if you want some more nuanced views on caste/race/Judaism/America, I recommend the book "Caste" by Isabel Wilkerson, which I discussed before here.)
The appeal of simplistic frameworks is the laziness required to understand them. You turn complex situations into Yankees vs. Red Sox or Luke vs. Darth. Easy! Plus, you get to be the good guy and everyone who disagrees with you is morally inferior.
Seeing the big picture
And if you’re looking for a winner in all this, check out this quote from CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford:
I thought our commitment was to truth. When someone comes on our air with a one-sided account of very complex situation — which Coates himself acknowledges that he has — it’s my understanding that as a journalist, we are obligated to challenge that worldview, so that our viewers can have access to the truth and can have a more balanced account.
Nailed it.
Jay Caspian Kang also wrote a smart analysis in The New Yorker: Why Ta-Nehisi Coates Writes. His beef is that Coates’ “save the world” approach leads to bad writing:
I do not think it is the job of writers to “save the world,” nor do I think they should set out to do so—not out of any objection about the sanctity of art for its own sake but, rather, because the pressure to always be political, significant, or weighty leads to leaden, predictable prose.
He also points out how “the war in the Middle East might not be about you“ seems to be a tough thing for Americans to clock.
The war in Gaza is not about Coates’s epiphanies or the guilt he feels about what he wrote in 2014. Writers, I believe, should be given the grace to change their minds and certainly shouldn’t be so obsessed with their signalled stances that they feel the need to atone for bad takes, especially when the act of repentance ends with an unsatisfying, American-centric call for more representation in U.S. media. Do the hiring practices of a handful of élite outlets really measure up to the stakes and moral seriousness of the decades of conflict that Coates describes? There are times when American journalists and prestige outlets are the least of our concerns, when our words do not matter, much less why we write them.
One thing I know for sure: All this is great for Coates’ book sales. So, y’know…
Related
All this lets us play our favorite game on social media: Who’s the bigger victim? See this bit from the never-not-hysterical The Free Press:
The never-ending victimhood Olympics where everyone claims they are the ones being oppressed is tiresome.
The political class and the mainstream media have power.
And so do academia and the burgeoning alternative media scene. That’s why Presidential candidates are choosing to go on podcasts instead of 60 Minutes. (Related: Did Kamala call her daddy or nah?).
It’s a bummer how much social media incentivizes these endless "woe is me" arguments.
Thanks to preach-to-the-choir algorithms, we all see our side, but not the other side…
Einat Wilf gets at the aformentioned ego thing in this thread about Israel as a "Disneyland of hate." He argues people project their own issues onto the conflict in a way that makes no sense. See this bit about why the Irish identify with the Palestinian struggle:
Eye-opening stuff.
And
wrote this interesting take about wokeness and anti-Zionism on Twitter:Ta-Nehisi Coates jumping into the Israeli-Palestinian fray reveals how anti-Zionism is the ultimate manifestation of wokeness and its self-contradictory bigotries and moral shortcomings.
In classic woke fashion, Israel’s own legitimate grievances are inverted, and the narrative of oppressor-oppressed is flipped: blatant genocidal declarations from its enemies are ignored while Israel’s military responses to massacres and indiscriminate bombing are misrepresented as genocide; Israel is singled out for apartheid by modern practitioners of apartheid, dhimmitude, and slavery — countries that have ethnically cleansed virtually every Jew from their midst; terrorist organizations that brutalize not only Israelis but their own people are called "freedom fighters"; Zionists are accused of settler-colonialism over a tiny piece of land by those defending a growing 1,400-year-old religious colonialist empire that is 600 times its size — the list goes on.
But what really stands out is the woke rejection of incrementalism — they don’t advocate for compromise or reform but for the dismantling of entire "systems of oppression", and in this case, the system they want dismantled is Israel itself. It's why they only call for "ceasefire" as soon as Israel responds to attacks instead of "peace". It’s all or nothing, and in their view, nothing less than the erasure of a Jewish state will satisfy their vision of "justice".
Harsh words. Not saying that version is 100% true, just saying WE SHOULD BE ASKING QUESTIONS about it the same way we should be examining Gazan children getting shot in the head, all the seemingly illegal stuff Israeli settlers are doing in the West Bank, the right wing kooks running the Israeli government, and Netanyahu punking the US President (again). Grim stuff. The lesson: The side that’s dumb here is one that can’t see there are two sides.
The entire conflict has thrown my liberationist worldview for a loop. What I've settled on is this: until we recognize the role of religion, and religious motives, we can't make morally or logically consistent assessments of either the conflict or the history.
For example, what was the incipient cause of the initial Palestinian violence against Jewish settlers among them from 1850-1920? I don't believe the view that they interpreted it through a settler-colonial framework holds water. Looking at how Jews were treated in other Arab lands (bc Palestine was part of an empire, not a sovereign country), I conclude it was likely motivated principally by anger at Jews living on "holy lands". The direct association of early Palestinian leaders with the Nazis is especially troubling.
This tracks with the total abandonment of their homes in the rest of middle east (not only Arab countries. Iran isn't Arab) by Mizrahi Jews after the establishment of Israel. Why would 100% of a country's Jewish population leave their friends, family and ancestral homes, if not under severe threat?
So how do we characterize that threat? The case of Iran is most telling. As a non-Arab country, Iran and its people have no incentive for pan-Arab solidarity. And yet animus toward Israel is/has been the chief foreign policy position of Iran.
What about defense of imperiled Muslims more generally? Iran cooperated with Serbia (Yugoslavia) as part of the Non-Aligned Movement despite Serbian genocide against Muslim Bosniaks and Albanians. With Russia despite the first and second Chechen war and leveling of Grozny. And with China despite the Uighur genocide. Ditto for a host of other Arab and Muslim nations. Even Edward Said was against NATO intervention against Serbia to prevent genocide.
The only consistent position all these governments seem to hold is "defense" of Palestinians, or put another way, hostility to Israel. Especially damning is the behavior of Hamas itself. They want us to believe theirs is an anti-colonial struggle in behalf of the civil rights of their people. This is the narrative packaged for secular western audiences. And yet I can't square that with their total lack of concern for Palestinian people during their 20 year rule. And Palestinian support for this government leads me to believe that a majority are willing to sacrifice their own well-being for the same goals.
So what are those goals, really? If we look at ethnic-political minorities in the United States, every single movement with any popular backing recognized the need to build political power, find leadership, and push for a democratic process. If your goal is to eventually gain equality and then share a country with your current oppressors, this is the only logicall path.
I don't believe Hamas or Palestinians generally are illogical. So I conclude that the goal has never been, at least for leadership and a significant portion of Palestinians, peaceful cohabitation. Active sabotage against a two-state solution is evidence of this. So what's left to conclude? To me, the only explanation consistent with everything above is that Jews living in the "holy land" is intolerable to enough Muslims and Palestinians that they're willing to make enormous sacrifices to stop it. And from a humanist perspective this position is intolerable. The message-makers know this, and so they package the cause as a secular human rights struggle like the US civil rights movement. The confusion comes when we try to square that explanation with what we see on the ground.
All of the above is my personal attempt to cut through to the truth. As for Israel's motivation, there's a lot less obfuscation. Legitimate defense goals are clearly being polluted by fundamentalist ones who likewise seek to claim "holy land" for themselves. However, in a country with a mostly-free press and a mostly-democratic government, this ugly and indefensible motivation is clear for the world to see, and they're right to hate the current government for it's cooperation with fundamentalists and the violence that comes from it.
In short, in a religious war there are no good guys, despite Mr. Coates' assertions.
Thanks for reading. Definitely a thought dump, but I guess it's a reflection of how difficult it's been to get at anything resembling a nuanced and honest look at the whole thing.
And thanks for the link. I'll check it out.