Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has been in the news since the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. When New York Times columnist Ezra Klein eulogized Kirk in the Times’ pages, honoring him for practicing politics “the right way,” Coates responded critically in the pages of Vanity Fair. The two, who are friends, sat down for a one-on-one meeting of the minds that has been praised, panned, and picked apart across both legacy and social media.

It was an interesting discussion, if not a terribly productive one. Throughout it, Coates bears the hallmarks of somebody who has mostly failed to do his homework on Charlie Kirk, preferring instead to repeat what have become predictable bromides about how violence is bad, but…

No, of course, he doesn’t think Charlie Kirk deserved to be shot. He just also thinks that Kirk was hateful and awful, and used his hatefulness and awfulness as ways to promote himself and his cause.

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But the bones of the Klein/Coates showdown have already been picked dry, and I’m not especially interested in giving them another going-over. Instead, I wish to remind readers that Ta-Nehisi Coates, a man whose worldview and, as we’ll see, daily habits have been shaped by dynamics of race and violence, has built his career by being as unhelpful a contributor as possible to keeping this discourse focused on peace or resolution.

Coates is a great writer. He crafts strong, if sometimes purply sentences, and he makes his arguments clearly and forcefully. He takes his time with his words, obviously choosing them very carefully, and I’ve always found charges that he is a ‘hatemonger’ or a despiser of white people difficult to accept, especially when evaluated next to writers (of whom there are many) whose racial animus bubbles much closer to the surface.

The essay that catapulted him to prominence, ‘The Case For Reparations,’ is compelling, evenly argued, and one that I suspect far more critics have responded to than have actually read with any care.

Still, Coates’s impact on America’s efforts to heal racial divides and reduce violence leaves much to be desired. If he is a deep thinker, he is not a wide one. He has essentially one point to make, and that one point acts as the lens and the filter through which all other points are run.

Coates believes that years of racial subjugation and prejudice created conditions that have conspired, and that still conspire, to limit black performance in American life. ‘The Case for Reparations’ walks readers from slavery, through Jim Crow, and forward to red-lining and systemic wealth depression targeted at black Americans, but from which white Americans were spared. He doesn’t spend much time disputing performance gaps between America’s racial communities, opting instead to explain them. He does this by crediting for them forces which are, if not insurmountable, at least very difficult and complicated to surmount. And certainly, not ones we should expect to be surmounted anytime soon.

He’s hardly alone in this. What I just articulated is more or less the view of every left-leaning American, and quite a few right-leaning ones also. Coates is neither wrong to point this out, nor off-base in his assessment of the scale of historical injustice.

Where he errs is in his rigidity. Coates isn’t just committed to his preferred narrative, he’s committed to it to the exclusion of all other narratives, or even suggested narratives. He is a hammer for which everything is a nail. And nowhere is this tendency of his on better display than during a conversation in which he participated at the Aspen Ideas Festival in June, 2015.

Coates sat for a moderated discussion with then New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, the subject of which was ‘Is Violence a Function of our Culture?’ I watched it at the time it was first broadcast and despite my having been a culturally very progressive person at the time, it rankled me. So much so that I remembered it often through the woke years and went to revisit it in the wake of Coates’s Ezra Klein sit-down.

The whole thing is instructive, but if you’re short on time, just watch the last exchange, starting around the 54 minute mark. We’ll also be discussing it later.

For context, Mitch Landrieu, a white Democrat, was a mostly successful post-Katrina mayor for New Orleans. He made a dent in crime, and built trust in the black community by cracking down on police corruption and removing confederate monuments. He was well into his mayoral tenure at the time he spoke with Coates, who was himself weeks away from publishing his best-selling memoir Between The World And Me.

Landrieu wasn’t, and still isn’t, a major player in the Democratic Party. He served as Joe Biden’s “infrastructure czar,” wrote a book about confronting America’s racial history as a white southerner, spent some time as a CNN analyst, and advised on both the Biden reelection campaign and later the Kamala Harris campaign. He was a successful man at the time of his Aspen Ideas Festival appearance, but it was Coates’s star that was truly on the rise.

Landrieu had a lot to gain from this appearance. He would serve another three years as NOLA mayor, and had he been able to enlist to his cause the man who was a few weeks off becoming America’s preeminent black public intellectual, he could have reasonably expected great things. This was a big opportunity for Landrieu, not just for his personal profile, but for his project. Coates had the ear of the nation, and Landrieu had a good story to tell. If they could find common ground, it wouldn’t have been hyperbolic to describe the discussion in which it was reached as a turning point. For the speakers, for New Orleans, and possibly for the nation.

It didn’t quite go that way. Everything was perfectly amicable. No real sparks flew until the end, and at few points did Coates and Landrieu openly disagree. But despite careful, persistent attempts, Landrieu was never able to knock Coates off his narrative, or force him to step outside his ideology. He was never able to get Coates to accept the invitation he was extending to the world of a real mayor, overseeing a real police force, protecting real streets, plagued by real violence.

Coates was in the clouds. Landrieu, stuck firmly on the ground, tried repeatedly to tug at Coates’s balloon string and pull the writer back to earth. The whole talk is a dance of Landrieu trying to yank Coates in a direction that might actually be actionable or productive, and Coates flitting out of his grasp again and again. Landrieu is having a conversation with Coates. Coates seems to be more in conversation with himself.

Again you should watch the whole talk, as both men have interesting things to say. We’ll zero in on just a few segments.

It begins with Landrieu making an impassioned case for the urgency of the problem. Almost every night in his city, young black men were killing one another. And no, it was not a case of, “well, isn’t everyone killing one another?” It wasn’t. Most violent crime in the Big Easy was confined to a handful of neighborhoods, and the victims were overwhelmingly young, black males (95%), most of whom knew each other (88%). Landrieu called this a “culture of violence.”

Coates responded with an extended anecdote about his childhood, in which he describes the choices he had to make daily in service of avoiding violence being done to his person. How he dressed, who we traveled with to school, what route they took, where he sat in the lunchroom - all of these choices reflected a need to simply stay intact.

It’s a somewhat strange story, in that what Coates thinks Landrieu and the audience should take away from it, or how it represents any kind of rebuttal to what Landrieu just said, is somewhat mysterious. It might sound profound…to someone only just learning that violence, and the threat thereof, is a problem particularly in black communities. But since Landrieu had just finished making the very same point himself, it isn’t clear why he needed to be instructed on this.

Still, Coates was impacted deeply by this part of his upbringing - an upbringing made all the more stark by the dichotomy between it and the images of peaceful, white families he saw broadcast on television shows like All In The Family and Leave It To Beaver:

“And I was struck by the gulf between the world in which I live and the world that America projected out to the rest of the world. And so I knew, you know, as an African American, as a member of a minority population, that these sort of rituals that we went through, that I think the mayor could call a culture of violence, but I would call a culture of self preservation.”

How is a culture of violence different from a culture of preservation [against, one presumes, violence]? Isn’t this a bit like complaining that a boxing ring doesn’t harbor a culture of punching, but rather one of trying not to be punched?

The audience, it should be noted, is eating out of Coates’s hand as he tells this story.

It’s quite a frustrating exchange, and one that mostly sets the tone for the rest of the event. Landrieu has just invited Coates to join him in building meaningful consensus. When Coates ignores the invite, Landrieu is undeterred. He doesn’t care what we call this - what words we use - he just cares what it is, and what can be done about it. Coates is unmoved.

To Coates, hundreds of years of oppression isn’t something you can merely undo. He actually says this directly at one point, making clear that however long Landrieu has left on his term as mayor, it can’t be enough to move past the past. Black Americans already have done, and are doing, everything realistically within their power to stem the tide of violence plaguing their communities. What more could they do?

This too is discouraging, and not just because of the defeatism on display. If really true that the black community is doing not only its best but the best, doesn’t somebody else need to pick up the slack? Couldn’t that somebody be, for instance, a white mayor of a 60% black city? A city with an ethnic makeup not dissimilar to Coates’s native Baltimore?

Throughout their parley, Landrieu reminds me of an oncologist begging desperately for a consultation on a sick patient. Rather than agree to it, Coates would rather talk about the dangers of smoking. To Mitch Landrieu, crime and violence are acute ailments. Treatment is not only possible, it’s his job to offer it. To Ta-Nehisi Coates, they’re chronic conditions. Dangerous and regrettable, yes, but a long time in the making, and not sicknesses for which a mayor or anyone else has the medicine.

By the end, it’s clear that Landrieu is getting pretty frustrated. He’s been mayor of an unusually dangerous city for five years, he’s making progress but not enough, and he’s got the opportunity now to bend the ear of one of the most respected, celebrated, and listened-to writers in the business. And he can’t make headway. Every time they get close to a point of material agreement, Coates punts the conversation back to the philosophical. Any time Landrieu wants to explore a solution, Coates insists they revisit the cause.

After an hour of this, violence is starting to feel less like a problem Coates doesn’t think Landrieu can solve, and more like one he won’t allow him to, at least not in this discussion. Perhaps all this “culture of violence” business was veering too close to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” rhetoric (this despite Landrieu having emphatically rejected that framing). As exclusively as Landrieu is forward-focused, Coates looks to the past. Landrieu is waiting with a mop. Coates is saying “but look at all the mess.”

In the final minutes, things get heated. Coates is on the heels of having actually espoused a clear, albeit controversial policy; letting lots of violent criminals out of prison. Landrieu responds.

Landrieu: Criminal justice reform is really important, and we should do it. But this is how criminal justice reform works: you come forward with an idea, the folks on the other side say ‘I like it’ or ‘I don’t,’ you go to the state legislature, you go to Congress, you talk about it for two or three years, and then eventually you either get it done or you don’t get it done, and then in the meantime, 40 people a day are killed on the streets of America. Here’s my problem: I don’t talk in platitudes, I don’t talk in philosophy, I don’t talk about the black community or the white community, I talk about Joe or Jamal that’s gonna get their head blown out tomorrow. My life is immediate. So I guess what I want to know it–

Coates: My life is immediate though!

*Crosstalk*

Landrieu: …but as a mayor, as a mayor.

Coates: But I’m an African-American male, living in an African American community with a 14 year old son. It’s as- it’s immediate for me too.

And then:

Landrieu: There is an immediate, catastrophic epidemic that needs to be erased…If the cavalry’s not coming to save us…what are we in the community gonna do tomorrow, tomorrow, as fathers, as sons, as coaches, to change the way that we reconcile the differences that we have. That is really about–

Coates: But see, you’re not gonna do anything tomorrow to change that.

Landrieu: Well that’s not true.

Since we were at the advent of what we now call woke when this talk was staged, it seems reasonable to evaluate it through the woke lens. And I think this helps to explain our problem.

Landrieu is a guy with his sleeves rolled up. His literal job is to solve the problem of endless violence on his streets. He has to be effective. Coates just has to be right. But not only does this distinction earn Landrieu no points, and no benefit of the doubt from the crowd, it’s Coates who is considered the obvious authority. Of course he is. All one need do is note the skin tone of each man and that’s just…kind of that.

Coates knows of what he speaks. Coates is the expert. Coates has the real investment.

Perhaps it requires actually being a writer, as I am, to understand how astonishingly arrogant and misguided this is. We sit behind keyboards. When we die, our lives are not measured in deaths prevented, or criminals locked away, or jobs attracted, or neighborhoods made safe. Our metrics are simply how many seals clapped for us, and how hard.

But Coates being presumptuous on behalf of my profession is not what bothers me here. Coates doesn’t really bother me here. I just think he’s wrong - something I think of a lot of people. His clapping seals are the ones on my nerves. Here’s how they recorded their views prior to the talk:

To say that the deck was stacked against Mitch Landrieu from the jump would be a comical understatement. Listeners had their minds made up, there’s no indication he was able to sway them, and now, 10 years after this exchange, we’re still fundamentally arguing about the same things, in the same ways.

A writer being wrong is only a problem to the extent that they are persuasively wrong. And we all ultimately own our persuasions. The audience for this talk, and Coates’s audience more broadly, is a class of well-heeled NPR-listeners, who more than anything, just want to be told stories they find validating. Politics for them isn’t just about what politics can do, it’s about how it can make them look. When those things are in conflict, there’s a predictable way they lean. The people who buy Ta-Nehisi Coates’s books don’t just buy them to read them - though probably a lot of them do - they buy them to carry them, cover-side out, outside their backpacks or briefcases, always ensuring their arm isn’t obscuring the title.

The psychologists out there may be detecting a note of guilt here, and as well they should. Didn’t I just get done saying that I first watched this talk, and was first bothered by it, more than 10 years ago? Where was my essay then? The answer, of course, is that I didn’t have the balls to write it then. Being a white person who criticized people who weren’t white, wasn’t the done thing. I was unwilling to pay the social cost for stepping out of that line.

But it’s about the most patronizing, disrespectful thing a person could do to pull punches when a few deserve to be thrown. Feeling like I can’t criticize you is the surest sign I could give that I don’t really consider you my equal. I wasn’t honoring Coates then by keeping my thoughts about him to myself, I was patting him on his dear little head and saying, “nice job, sport” for handing me macaroni art. I don’t owe Coates any apology for writing this. I owe him one for having had these thoughts for 10 years without writing them.

Doing that then would’ve sent me afoul, not of Coates, but of the army of head-nodders making sure they always had one of his hardcovers on hand, just so it could sit at the top of the pile on their coffee table. It was their approval, not Coates’s that I sought, and their judgement I feared. But as much as we own our persuasions, we own our cowardices too. Mine should never have been triggered by such morally vapid and intellectually sleepy people. And for that I’m sorry. Not to them - f**k them. F**k them, all the way to spring training. I’m sorry to Coates, who deserved better engagement for his efforts.

Coates would go on to stardom, of course, becoming one of the best-selling black authors of the decade and a voice of his generation. And how has he used that voice? At nearly every turn, he has used it to distract from progress, pulling focus instead to cause (though I expect he views the former as unachievable without an understanding of the latter).

Black victims of crime are not suffering from a curable disease, so much as they represent symptoms of an incurable one. Race relations aren’t fixable, they’re perennial. The damage isn’t a mess to be mopped up, just one to be observed, lamented, and occasionally blamed on the appropriate party.

Even “The Case for Reparations,” which was mostly just a lengthy call for Congress to pass HR 40, which would have studied reparations, concludes with this passage:

“John Conyers’s HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.”

We must wrestle with these questions, not answer them. Ask what is owed, not decide. This has been Coates’s entire career. This is his one magic trick.

A mayor tries to engage him on ending a cycle of pointless slaughter, and he balks; that’s the wrong focus. A liberal extends a hand of friendship across the aisle to honor a slain conservative, and up pops Coates to wag his finger.

But what if America isn’t, as Coates thinks, “looking away?” What if it’s looking forward? Looking beyond? What if America has simply grown weary of trying to answer for a past it can’t change, and has decided instead that that most problematic of goals - a solution - is a more worthy pursuit than yet more recriminations?

So long as Ta-Nehisi Coates, and those in his mold, remain uncontested in their issuing of these non-prescription prescriptions, we may never find out.

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