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Wortham:
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But, you know, there is this kind of Zen-ness to the collection and the book [We Were Eight Years in Power and Between the World and Me] and this almost Buddhist radical acceptance of just, “This is the way things are,” and I think that’s a really hard…like people look to you for answers, they want solutions. We’re Americans, we like solutions, we want an app for that, you know. We want there to be a really easy illumination to the exit door, whatever, something better. But you say over and over again, you know, “I’m not really here to offer that.” There’s a part where you’re like, “I don’t believe that White supremacy will be resolved in my life, or my son’s life, or his children’s lives.”
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Wortham:
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Yes! And you’re like, “What’ll you do when we’ll never achieve racial equality or justice in our lifetimes,” and you go, “Oddly, this doesn’t depress me.” And I’m like, “What?” Like, reading this, like…how? I think there is something really beautiful in that acceptance, but you’re not saying, “Don’t fight.”
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Wortham:
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You’re saying the resistance—and, I mean, this is from the book, I’m paraphrasing it—but the resistance is the reward, and we can’t forget that.
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Coates:
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What I’m saying is that what’s in between actually matters. America’s young, you understand what I’m saying? And so if America struggles with this, you know, for another three hundred years, what is that, you know, according to the long scale of time? African Americans in this country were enslaved for two hundred and fifty years, they’ve only been free for one hundred and fifty. It’s not been that long. When you think about the other sort of existential problems that this country faces, can somebody really—and I mean this—look me in the face and say, “You know what? We are on the path to getting global warming and the problems with the environment figured out. I think we’re gonna win.”
Seriously! Look at the actual record. Human beings fail to figure out big existential problems all the time. In general, people with power don’t just hand over that power out of a moral conviction. That’s not actually the history. It took seven hundred thousand people dying for African Americans to not labor under enslavement anymore in this country. It’s not moral conviction that moves. So that’s the question— How are you gonna live? Who are you? Who do you want to be? And for me, that’s easy, man! Listen, I take great pride in coming here from this long tradition of people. From the moment we got here in 1619—if only because of the position we were in—who among that number [did] not want the world to tip over the ledge. I like that. It makes me feel good about myself; it makes me sunny, as you say.
That’s why I want to live! It fills my life with meaning. It’s hard, it’s brutal, but it makes you feel like you’re worth something, like you’re doing something. The road should not be dismissed in favor of, “Yes, but are we gonna win?” You know what I mean? What if you’re not gonna win? You [need to have] the courage, then, to confront how you’re going to live.
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TA-NEHISI COATES AND JENNA WORTHAM