At some point during his intimate discussion with a small group of about 10 students inside of a room within Dominican University’s Lewis Hall last Thursday, the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, 39, stopped acting like he didn’t want to leave and head to the nearest hotel.
Although he was always engaged when speaking to the students, he didn’t try very hard to fill the pregnant pauses with conversation during the few times his call for questions were met with silence.
And when the small dialogue was over, Coates seemed to have to pull his 6 foot, 4 inch suited and scarved frame up from his seat with special commitment before being escorted to a green room to mentally prepare himself to do this all over again.
In an hour, he would be lecturing on Dominican’s Lund Auditorium stage.
Coates’s personality is as brutally and straightforwardly honest as his writing. He puts on airs like sheer curtains block out the sun. He was exhausted and transparently so. He has good reason to be. The Philadelphia native has been on the ride of his career ever since his essay “The Case for Reparations” was published in the Atlantic last year.
Coates built his 16,000-word argument on the tightly wrought story of black homeowners in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood who had immigrated to the city after World War II in order to escape the lawlessness and economic impoverishment of the Jim Crow South. But once they got to Chicago, they discovered a lawlessness of a much more sophisticated sort up north.
African Americans on the city’s West Side, Coates writes, were routinely subject to predatory contract agreements that “combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting — while offering the benefits of neither.”
Coates argued in his essay that these predatory lending behaviors follow a pattern of systemic racism perpetrated by both the American government and by the American free enterprise system on African Americans, and that this pattern demands recompense — both material, in the form of money and resources, and in a moral grappling with this national sin. In his talks, Coates has a way of telling this story very bluntly and in a way that has no doubt bristled all kinds of audiences.
From his lecture:
“The model of plunder — taking things from other people in order to advantage yourself — continues. And it continues right here in Chicago. “
“I was at Cornell and a young lady stood up and said to me, ‘You know I’m very happy to be here at Cornell, I’m very proud of myself. But when I go out people say to me that I’m only here because of affirmative action.’
“I told the young lady, don’t you worry about that not even a little bit, because here’s the deal. The entire white middle class in this country was formed by massive, massive affirmative action. It’s so big that they don’t even call it that — it’s called government.”
In February, Coates accepted the prestigious George K. Polk award for his defense of this controversial concept. He was also tapped to take over the Boston University College of Communication journalism course taught by his late mentor, David Carr, the influential New York Times media critic who collapsed and died last month on the newsroom floor.
Lately, Coates has been in such demand that his body seems to be feeling the effects of the public’s relentless pulling. For various reasons he would explain in his lecture, though, it doesn’t take much pressure to get Coates to come to Chicago — a city he says he adores. The very city he rakes across the coals for its racist past.
One student wanted to know how the two could exist in the mind of one black man. Does it make him angry?
“How do you feel about being here,” the student asked during the Lewis Hall discussion session, “especially when this area is so segregated?”
“It is what it is,” Coates said, displaying the kind of insouciance that has won him such exhaustive and exhausting fanfare — even among whites, the people he takes to task the most.
“You can’t be mad at the manifestation of the thing. It’s very, very hard to be angry about that. The way neighborhoods in Chicago and outside of Chicago are constructed is about policy,” Coates said. “Policy upsets me very much, but I try not to spend too much anger on the individuals. It’s much more systemic.”
Due to a snow storm that had enveloped the Midwest, Coates’s flight to the city had been cancelled and so, according to various reports, the epic of his circuitous journey to this comfortable suburb might have involved riding a coach bus and/or a rental car from wherever in the country aviation had failed him. It most certainly did not involve much sleep.
Perhaps sensing his fatigue, Jessica Mackinnon, the university’s director of public information, asked Coates how he was coping with the constant travel and speaking engagements, which had to be taking him away from the thing that caused him to be so popular in the first place — his writing.
“I’m very happy that a lot of people appreciate what I do, but this will have to stop at some point, probably within the next year or so. And then I’ll have to buckle down,” he said, adding that he’s about to embark on the process of writing another book exploring reparations and his relationship with his son.
After the discussion, Coates lunged himself to a small reception area where he politely engaged for about 20 minutes with college faculty members, former students and Don Johnson, a retired foreign correspondent for Newsweek whose daughter, Laurel, is a Dominican alumna and Oak Park librarian.
“The topic has always interested me, because I think a great wrong was done, so reparations didn’t scandalize me one bit,” said Don Johnson. “My nephew had a copy of the article and he said, ‘Hey you gotta read this,’ and we talked about it. We talked all night about it.”
Laurel Johnson said she’s always had an interest in social justice, but that it was heightened after the events in Ferguson.
“I’ve been trying since then to educate myself and be aware and learn more about race and race relations,” she said. “I think about how kids these days learn about racism and oppression as if they’re things in the past. It’s very much a type of ‘not here, not now’ kind of thing and with everything that happened with Michael Brown and Eric Garner, people should know that oppression on the basis of race is happening here and everywhere.”
Since the publication of his Atlantic essay, Coates has become a kind of authority in explaining the intuitions of African Americans to people like the Johnsons in a way that isn’t racially boxed in. The audience of at least 600 listeners, many of whom gave Coates a standing ovation, was racially mixed. Perhaps that’s owing to the disarming way he presents his brutal honesty.
By the time he had gotten onstage, Coates had worked up a second wind. The exhaustion in his boyish, bespectacled face from just an hour before was nowhere to be found.
“It’s just a supreme pleasure and honor to come back to Chicago,” he said by way of an introduction. “I adore Chicago. I think every major story I’ve done for the Atlantic, I’ve invented some excuse to come to Chicago, and I think my editors have noticed that on my expense report. It’s the best food town I’ve ever been to, at least in the United States.
“I always tell [people] that if you want a city that reminds you of America, you should come to Chicago. That is for good reasons and for bad reasons. Tonight, I’m going to talk about the bad reasons. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
CONTACT: michael@oakpark.com
