The 2017 Zengerle Family Lecture in the Arts and Humanities
Ta-Nehisi Coates
As delivered
Major Joshua Leone: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Professor and
Head of the Department of English and Philosophy, Colonel David Harper.
Colonel Dave Harper: On behalf of the Superintendent, the Dean, the
Department of English and Philosophy, and the West Point Humanities Center,
welcome to this year's Zengerle Family Lecture in the Arts and Humanities. I'd
like to express a special welcome to some honored guests: Ms. Sue Fulton
(Class of 1980) and Vice Chair of the United States Military Academy Board of
Visitors, and her guest, Mary Tobin (Class of 2003). Thank you for joining us. I'm
also delighted to welcome members of the Zengerle family: Joe (Class of 1964),
and his wife Lynda. Through their generosity, each year the Zengerle Family
Lecture welcomes a leading figure in the arts or humanities in order to foster
important conversations and to forward the goal of the humanities to counter
insularity and challenge us to think -- more broadly, deeply, differently.
This is vital. As future leaders, you cannot afford to ignore inconvenient facts or
choose your own. And the nation cannot afford leaders who choose to remain
oblivious to history.
In 1963 James Baldwin published “My Dungeon Shook, An Open Letter to My
Nephew on the 100th Anniversary of the Emancipation.” When Baldwin's letter
was published, segregation was still legal in many states and would remain so
until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally made it illegal. But Baldwin's letter is
remarkable, because it encourages his nephew to see the work of integration
more capaciously than as a matter of law. Instead he claims integration will
remain incomplete until all Americans and especially white Americans are freed
from the ignorance and moral degradation caused by racism. Baldwin's
conclusion to that letter is powerful enough that I want to read it to you. He tells
his nephew that “If the word integration means anything, this is what it means:
that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to
cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.” Baldwin closes with a sobering
statement that “you know, and I know, that the country is celebrating onehundred years of freedom one-hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until
they are free.” If Baldwin's calculation is correct we are still at least forty-six years
too early to celebrate freedom and equality in this nation. Frankly, one need only
watch the news, one need only glimpse the dark extent of the carceral state, and
one need only listen attentively to what passes for civic discourse these days to
know that Baldwin was correct, that the time is still early. The work is not done.
I invoke James Baldwin because our guest today is carrying on his work in a real
way. No less an authority than Toni Morrison has said that Ta-Nehisi Coates fills
the “intellectual void” left by Baldwin. Ta-Nehisi is a national correspondent at
The Atlantic magazine. He's the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle and
most recently Between The World and Me, which debuted at number one on the
New York Times bestseller list. His Atlantic cover story, “The Case for
Reparations,” was awarded the George Polk Award for commentary in 2015. He
was named a MacArthur fellow. I do not hesitate to call him one of the most
important public intellectuals of our day.
Between the World and Me, a National Book Award winner, is written as an open
letter from Ta-Nehisi to his son. Intensely personal and sincere, it is unflinching in
its appraisal of what it means to be black in America today. Claiming that much of
America has been content to flee reality and take refuge in what he calls “the
Dream,” one of the most powerful moments in the book is that in which he tells
his son how he read his way towards understanding in the Howard University
library. In the archives and special collections, Ta-Nehisi grappled with the
realities of history he found in those books, and he grew as he grappled. We're
grateful for that, for he has produced one of the most powerful books of our
generation. And today he will talk to us, as he has elsewhere, about the
imperative for America to grapple with its legacy of slavery, discrimination, and
racism. Please join me in welcoming Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Ta-Nehisi Coates: Wow. Thank you guys. Thank you guys. When… I think I
received the invitation to come to speak at West Point, I guess about spring of
2016, I guess it would have been, I was abroad at the time in another country
and -- When you write a book you have no way of anticipating how it's going to
be received. Most writers don't prepare for success, they prepare for failure
because the vast majority of people, and the vast majority of writing done by
writers is not read by anyone at all. And so, when I had the task of writing
Between The World and Me, my whole focus was on it actually becoming a book,
actually you know getting to maturity, and I drove myself crazy, drove my wife
crazy, drove my kid crazy. People always ask me, “what was my son's reaction to
the book?” And… my son… I always tell them, “my son was just happy the book
was out, so he could stop hearing about it. But, I got the invitation to West Point.
At that point I had gotten to a space in my life where I was so tired of talking, you
know, I just wanted to go in a room and just be by myself and, you know, just be
in the dark for a little while. And, you know, I have an assistant who helps me out
with this and I was, everything was “no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.” And I got this
invitation. And she looked at me, and said “no?” Or, should I send a note, you
know, “no?” And I said I said, “no no no…Yes. Yes.” I have to go here. I have to
come here. And the reason why I have to come here, is because I can't think of a
more important place to be for the things that I discuss, for the things I've spent
basically since my childhood pursuing, the kind of questions I've been looking
into. I write about the force of racism and the force of white supremacy in
American history and I make the argument that that force is greatly, greatly,
underestimated, and I'll try to detail that in a minute. But, in a broader sense, I
write about societies and how power moves through societies, and the lies that
folks tell each other, and the mythologies that we enroll ourselves in so that
society can continue to function as it was intended. Most citizens do this. It’s a
very, very normal thing; it’s not anything particular about America. I write about it
because I'm an American, so I focus on those lies that are most captivating to
me, those myths that are most captivating to me, but I spent the year abroad in
France and I know they do it in France. And you know I've read enough of world
history to know that there are very, very few societies, or none that I have come
across yet, that are not somehow founded on some sense of mythology or some
sense of benevolent or malevolent lying. But I don't think you guys can afford that
luxury. You’re different. And I could tell you were different when I saw you guys
lining up before I went into the mess hall. You guys were impressive, and the
whole time I was looking I kept thinking about being a young man, when I was 17
years old, how ill fit I would have been to come here to be a part of West Point.
When they say… and I know you’ve probably heard this before… but when they
say, you know, you guys are the best of us, the best of America. That's a thing
that's like it gets said so much, it's easy to become a cliché, but I really felt it
watching you guys. And when I had this conversation with Colonel Harper in
advance of my arrival, the thing I told him was that it was my feeling that those
who are charged with defending the country have to know the country, above all.
Above all. It’s most important because we ask our armed forces, and I would
actually include our police officers in this too even, though you know we’re not
here, but we ask our armed forces we ask our various arms of the state that
deploy violence in our name to go out and do that and I think those who do it
actually have the most responsibility to understand that deployment.
I got on campus before I came over to the mess hall, and we were walking
through a little memorial area -- and forgive me that I don't remember the name
of it -- but I believe it was erected by the class of 1961 and it represented the
reunion, the reunion once again of North and South over the Civil War. Now I'm
I'm a huge Civil War buff. I drive my family crazy sometimes. I used to, many
years ago, when my son was a little bit young… he's a little too old for this now.
But I used to drag him into the car, and get my wife into the car, and we would
throw on audio books of my favorite historian, James Macpherson or whoever.
And we would go to Gettysburg or we'd go down to Petersburg, or we would go
out to The Wilderness and… folks just kind of got tired of me. But the Civil War, I
felt it in a particular way. I felt called to it in a particular way, and so seeing that
monument obviously was of tremendous importance to me. And yet, as was
noted to me actually even before I looked to it, there was not much in the way of
anything about the cause of the Civil War on that monument.
Then I got to an area where I saw the cadet’s code on display. And I wrote this
down, because I would mangle it if I were asked to repeat it just off the top of my
head. And the code said that a cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those
who do. And I thought: “what if more of us could take that to heart?” Now I
understand what that code means, in terms of you guys, and in terms of
individuals. But what if we, as citizens, as Americans, actually took that to heart?
What if you guys actually took it to heart, not just for each other, but for the
country as a whole? In other words, not just interrogating the kind of lies that you
might see, or the kind of deceptions you might see, on an exam to a professor or
to each other, but those that the country tells itself, and that you tell each other.
I was born under the weight of a lie. I was born in West Baltimore, raised in the
80s, early 90s, a time of massive, massive, massive violence in the inner cities of
America. I know there's a lot of news about Chicago, and violence across the
country and in cities. Believe me it is nothing like what it was during what they
called “the crack era” of the 1980s. People were petrified. My parents were
petrified. I was petrified. By the time I was 12 years old, I had adopted a kind of
code, a way of being, of walking through the streets on the way to school. I
thought about how I cocked my hat. I thought about how I wore my jacket. I
thought about whether I was going to have my book bag over one shoulder or
whether it was going to be over two shoulders. I thought about who I walked to
school with. I thought about where they were from. I thought about how many of
them there was. When I got to school, I thought about whether I was going to go
to lunch or whether I was going to hang out in the library. I thought about who,
who I was going to sit with if I was g oing to be at lunch. When I got out of
school, I thought about when I was going to leave, whether I was going to stay
after school for coach, class, or whether I was going to try to hang around and
find some other excuse to leave a little later, and I thought about if I were leaving
which route I was going to take home.
These were not innocent choices. These were choices designed to deal with my
safety, to preserve my body from the threat of violence that was everywhere in
the communities that I lived in. I always say, “it's normal for folks to go to school
and, you know in school you're supposed to be thinking about school.” But, when
I went to school I was only half really thinking about school; at least a third of my
brain was obsessed with protecting myself. And I was young; I was an 11-, 12year-old boy. And I would come home, as I talk about in Between The World and
Me, and I would cut on the TV, and I’d see all these sitcoms out in the world that
they called “America,” and I’d see Family Ties, or Wonder Years; you guys were
too young for this you don’t remember any of this. But I would see these beautiful
sitcoms, you know, in these places with these beautiful houses and these
beautiful lawns, and nobody seemed to be worried about violence. The boys
worried about Boy Scouts, girls worried about Girl Scouts, I guess, or whatever
they were worried about… worried about whether you were going to make the
little league, you know football team or baseball team… and you know we
thought about those things too. But above all, we thought about the protection of
our body.
And I had parents who were very, very well educated. They were not generally
like the other parents that lived in my neighborhood. Both my parents had gone
to college. All of my brothers and sisters (there’s seven of us) are college
graduates. I am the only one who is not a college graduate, standing before you
right now. I’m the black sheep of the family. But I grew up in a very, very
educated household… books everywhere… and I couldn’t understand why we
lived in the kind of neighborhood that we lived in. Why didn't we live in that other
America? And so this became a pursuit of mine. I didn't know what the lie was at
that time. I don't know what the deception was at that time. But I had a feeling
that something was off about this picture. Something about what I was being told,
or what I was being asked, and about the environment I lived in was off. And so,
for the next few years, you know, as I went through school, being a terrible
student as I was, went off to university and remained a terrible student at the
university, but the animating feature of my life was trying to understand the
curtain, as Baldwin says, between the world and me, between the world I lived in
between the world that was advertised on TV. The origin of that lies in that, that
monument that I that I saw outside.
You know, when I would go and I would tour these civil war battlefields, it would
be very interesting because everybody wanted to talk about, you know the kind
of interesting things that people want to talk about when you talk about war. You
know, we talk about how Lee turned this person's flank or what defense
Stonewall Jackson did here what Grant did at Fort Donelson. And I was
interested in that. I want to hear that. I like hearing about hardtack and, you
know, what it felt like to actually be in a hot war uniform. And I wanted to hear
about all of that. And people would be very, very mournful because of the
casualties. You know back then, when I first got into the Civil War, they were
saying only 600,000 people died, and each year it's actually creeped up. We…
now we're at seven hundred fifty thousand people died. I believe somewhere on
the order of 20 percent of the white male population in the South perished in the
Civil War by the end of 1865 and you would hear these numbers, and folks would
talk about that. But during the tour through the battlefields nobody would talk
about what kind of force it must be that would lead 750,000 people to kill each
other.
I'm assuming that the cadet code is quite old. And I don't know, maybe, maybe I
have that wrong, Colonel Harper, I'm not sure about that. But I imagine that when
Lee and Grant were here, that it was there. And a question I had to ask looking at
that, is “what lie was being allowed to pass?” What lie was being tolerated? That
I would see the memory of a war where three quarters of a million people died
and you could not talk about the cause, because the thing that haunts us today.
I'm assuming I'm in a room of very, very intelligent people. We’ll have a Q&A
after this, so I’m happy to take on this debate if I have to, but I don't think I'm
breaking any sort of taboo, or saying anything remarkable when I say the cause
of that war was slavery. We know it was slavery because if you look at the
declarations of secession at that time, the states said they were seceding
because of slavery. It’s in plain ink. Vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander
Stevens said, “slavery is the cornerstone of our new society.” It was right there.
But that doesn't tell the full story. We have to understand the kind of force slavery
was in this society.1860: Four million enslaved African-Americans in this country
in the southern states. It’s a lot of people. If you went to South Carolina in 1860
the majority of the people you -- if you took a count -- the people there were
enslaved. If you went to Mississippi in 1860, the majority of people there were
enslaved. If you went to Louisiana, Alabama: half the people. Georgia: half the
people are enslaved. If you went to Virginia, where the majority… which had the
largest number of enslaved people… you’d find whole counties where
somewhere on the order of 70, 80, 90 percent of people living in that country
were enslaved. In a democracy, in a place that is tolerating a lie. And if you took
those four million enslaved African-Americans, collectively they were worth
somewhere on the order of 3.5 billion dollars. Today somewhere around 75
billion. That's what it would come to when you mark it up for inflation. To give you
some sense of what that means, what that meant within the economy of the
society itself at that time: if you took all the nation's factories, all the banks, all the
shipyards, the entire productive capacity of all of America itself in 1860, and you
put it in one pile -- the bodies of those four million enslaved black people were
worth more than all of that put together. Sixty percent of our exports, American
exports (not Southern exports, American exports) sixty percent of our exports in
1860 were cotton. The great historian Eric Hobsbawm says, “Whoso says
‘industrial revolution’ must say ‘cotton.’” If you were going to find where the
wealthiest of Americans lived in 1860, you would not go to New York City, you
would not go to Boston, would not go to Chicago. You would go to the Mississippi
River Valley. Because that's where the biggest planters actually lived, that was
your largest concentration of millionaires in the country -- in the south, and in the
Mississippi River Valley. You start dealing with those sort of economic forces and
then you begin to understand how a war could be fought in which 750,000 people
died. And as we know with any sort of economic institution, economic institutions
have a way of becoming social institutions. So, for instance, I always say the best
way to understand enslavement in this country during the 250 years it was
practiced, is to think about home ownership today. Now, home ownership is the
primary means of wealth building for most people. Most people have their wealth
in their homes. If you were born of a certain class in a southern state before the
Civil War, owning slaves and a little piece of land was how you built wealth; it
was the way it happened. But home ownership isn't just an economic proposition
in this society. I don't own a home, but I know some home owners and I know
homeowners like to get together and talk about home owning things. They like to
talk about how they're going to put a new deck on, or they like to talk about the
kid just moved out they're going to turn that room into a study. You know, all the
little, you know how it needs to be repaired. And this becomes a kind of bonding
experience between homeowners. And homeowners have block associations,
and they comment on who's doing what or… it’s a kind of social cohesion. The
dream of homeownership, for instance, is very, very much entwined with the
dream of being an American. You see that: picket fence; home; separated, nice
yard; two kids, etc. Home ownership is caught up in that; it’s a big, big part of it.
In 1860, owning slaves was much the same way. Much how home owners have
magazines that they look at, and shows they look at: This Old House, or
whatever, like I said, I'm not a home owner, I don’t know, I just see it….
Slaveholders had journals that they passed amongst each other, such as De
Bow’s Review, and in those journals they talked about how to wring the
maximum amount of labor out of a human body. That was part of it; it was a
socializing force. When I give this talk from time to time, when I'm in the southern
states sometimes even when I'm in the northern states, you know -- and I love
engaging, I always have a Q&A period -- and someone says to me, “well, TaNehisi, that was excellent, but I'm from [insert Southern state here] or my family
is from [insert Southern state here], and my great, great, great, great grandfather
lived there and my great, great, great, great grandfather fought in the Civil War
for the Confederacy, but he didn't own any slaves, so how was he part of this?”
And I always tell them, “your great-great-great-great grandfather may not have
owned slaves, but I assure you he wanted to.” And he did not want to because
he was a bad person. He wanted to because the system angles towards that,
much like the system angles toward home ownership. You buy a home today,
you get certain tax breaks, there are things that come with it. Years from now
there will probably be some sort of environmental critique about why
homeownership was ultimately a bad thing maybe for the society, but it is what it
is today, and slaveholding was much the same way; it had a hold on people. It's
a huge part of us, and that is how you come to understand how so many people
ultimately died.
We don't just notice from the data; we notice from some of our best Americans
who actually came out and said it. John C. Calhoun: intellectual, senator from
South Carolina, a very, very interesting man. It was a period in this country's
history where this country actually had come, early on, to actually regret the sin
of slavery. You know, even those who owned slaves believed it was a sin that
should pass out of existence. But as slavery actually became more profitable in
the 1820s, 30s, 40s, and 50s there became a class of people who thought
slavery was, as John C. Calhoun said, a “positive good.” But what he focused on
when he talked about enslavement, was what it did for the majority population in
this country, how it allowed the forging of a broad aristocracy and Calhoun said,
“with us the two great divisions of society are not rich and poor, but black and
white, and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class
and are treated as equals.” James Henry Hammond, who would come on as a
senator in South Carolina after Calhoun said, “in a slave country every free man
is an aristocrat. Be he rich or poor, if he does not possess a single slave he has
been born to all the natural advantages of the society in which he is placed and
all the honor left open to him inviting his genius and industry.” That’s slaveholding
as a basis for membership towards an entire class.
And what happened after the Civil War was fought? What happened after we
decided that we weren’t going to have slavery in this country, after so many folks
who came here, from West Point, died? Did we stop? Did we say to formerly
enslaved African-Americans, go on about your way? Be Well? No we didn’t. We
had 100 years of Jim Crow. We had a 100-year-long terror campaign. Terrorism
is obviously a subject that is very, very important to you guys, to all of us.
Domestic, homegrown terrorism, specifically, we hear a lot of talk about that
today. Never forget that the most lethal, domestic terrorism, homegrown
domestic terrorism campaign, was the 100 years of white supremacy that
happened here. Where the right to vote was abrogated, through lynching. Where
the right to do ordinary, everyday things, to be human, to participate in your
society was abrogated through state violence. The line of plunder, the line of
taking things, the line of stripping rights from African-Americans, is the most
consistent line running from the foundation of this country to today when you
want to understand the relationship between African-Americans and their broader
country.
I wrote a story some time ago, titled “The Case for Reparations,” and I went and I
chronicled how this extended from slavery all the way up to some of the housing
decisions made by the federal government in this country, and how you could
see this line of African-Americans repeatedly being denied access to the kind of
wealth-building opportunities or citizenship opportunities that you saw all across
the country. And I wrote this the way I'd done it, went out to Chicago, done the
reporting. My mother read the story. She called me up, and there was a big part
of it that dealt with access to home loans, and access to buying homes in
general, and about how African-Americans in the generation just before mine had
been denied that right. And my mother called me up and she was very, very
emotional. She said, “you know that whole process that you're talking about in
there -- red lining -- that happened to your grandmother.” It was right there. It was
close to me. And I immediately understood that it is not some sort of abstraction,
that the legacy of slavery, that the legacy of all that taking, that the legacy of all
that violence, was right there, written into our very policy, written into my blood.
And it's written here at West Point. That's what I see when I walk through that
monument.
So I know you have this responsibility. Great, great responsibility… while you're
here: to not cheat, to not lie, to not tolerate those who do. And to not steal, don’t
want to forget “steal.” But I want you always to think beyond the individual. Think
about the country you're charged to defend. Think about a country that invests so
much in you, think about the institution that you love here. And it's a great
institution I'm going to tell you. I couldn’t have made it here, man. I couldn’t have
made it here when I was your age. Think about that. And if you're going to be
intolerant, about the deceptions amongst each other, there's nothing wrong with
being equally intolerant about the deceptions that people ask you to submit to.
Thank you so much. I want to make sure I leave some time for questions so I can
interact with you guys. Thank you.
<<Standing Ovation>>
Major Leone: Ladies and gentlemen, at this time we will now begin the Q&A
portion of our lecture. Please clearly mention your name before posing your
question to Mr. Coates.
Q [Cadet Brandon Fast]: Sir, thank you so much for coming. I really enjoyed your
speech. So, in class we were discussing your book, Between The World and Me.
Specifically, your experiences observing 9/11, and we came across a quote that
seemed contentious, and so I'm just wondering if you could explain it to me. And
I’m going to read the quote so everyone kind of knows what I'm talking about. So
on page 87 you said, “I could see no difference between the officer who killed
Prince Jones and the police who died, or the firefighters who died. They were not
human to me; black, white, or whatever. They were menaces of nature.” Thank
you very much, sir.
Ta-Nehisi Coates: Sure. Prince Jones was a gentleman I met at Howard
University, which obviously occupies a big part of Between The World and Me,
and I don't know how many you guys actually, I'm not going to presume that you
read the book. Like I said, when you're an author you presume nobody reads the
book, so I’m not going to come in and assume you guys read the book. This
gentlemen who I had met at Howard University. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful,
beautiful human being. Smart, intelligent, he was the product of a mother who
was born into a sharecropping family in Appaloosas, Louisiana and had herself
raised herself up; gone to LSU, went into the air force and become a radiologist,
had pulled, literally pulled herself from the lowest classes of America and up into
the upper echelons of America. And her pride and joy was her son, also her
daughter, too, obviously I’m focusing on here, her son Prince Jones, who was
just this beautiful, intelligent human being who I came across at Howard
University. Prince was killed in 2000. I believe it was September 2000, my own
son was a month old at the time. He was on his way to visit his fiancé. And his
then, I guess about year-old daughter, I think she was about a year old at that
time. The officer who killed Prince Jones was supposed to be working on
narcotics duty so he was dressed in undercover attire. He was looking, he'd been
involved in another affair, and he was looking for, you know, someone else who
had done some sort of other crime but had not thought to change his attire. He
saw Prince in his mother's Jeep. Um, as you can tell, these emotions are not
completely gone for me. He saw Prince in his mother's Jeep. He ran the plates;
the plates came up for his mother who lived in Philadelphia at that point. This
was not enough for him. He and another officer followed Prince Jones from the
suburbs of Maryland, through Washington D.C., out into Virginia, and shot and
killed Prince Jones. This was before the era of “Black Lives Matter;” there were
no videos or anything like that. We don't really know what happened. But, I
watched over the next few months as the state of Virginia investigated not the
officer, but investigated my friend Prince Jones. They were sure he had to be a
drug dealer or something. They looked at every angle, interviewed all of his
friends, looked at every aspect of his life. The officer was not only not charged;
he wasn't even disciplined publicly at all. Nothing happened. He went right back
to work. This was in the middle of the town where the police department he
worked for had countless cases against it. You have to understand what that
does to you. How that makes you feel about your country and your relationship to
your country. These police are the representatives of your country, and they're
charged with the most harrowing responsibility possible; that is, they have the
ability to take your life. And to continue on, I understand that we need police
officers to do that, we need police if we're going to have a law-abiding society.
But when there's absolutely no accountability, and that's built on all the other
decades of no accountability when you're black in this country, and it’s built on all
the times that, at that point in my life, I been stopped myself and not ended up
shot, [or] assaulted, but had been stopped for reasons that I knew not to be
legitimate. No; I had no sympathy at all for anybody at that point. Because I felt
so strongly that the country had no sympathy for my friend Prince Jones who was
dead in the ground, no sympathy at all for his daughter who's going to grow up
without a father. I just….I didn't have it.
Time passes. And you grow. You get a little wise. You understand your anger is
not good for anybody. You understand that your inability to perceive people as
human beings represents the fact that you yourself have somehow been stripped
of something. That allowing Prince to die that way, and the legacy only to be the
anger -- which I admit that I still feel today -- only to be anger and my ability to
dehumanize other people. That if I allow that, I've somehow lost something. So I
don’t feel that same way today. I definitely don't. But Between The World and Me
is a work of literature, and its job is -- more than anything -- to capture the feeling.
And I felt that way at that time. I was cold, man. I was absolutely, absolutely cold.
And I think any other human being exchanging places in that situation might have
felt the same way.
<<Applause>>
Q: Sir, Alex Weatherhead, Company D2. In Between The World and Me you
talked about one of the keys to your development was that when you asked your
father a question he didn't give you a straight answer, but he gave you a book to
read. So I don't have a straight question for you, but I want to know what we read
next. I know you don't assume that we've read this, but if we have, what do we
read next?
Ta-Nehisi Coates: Do you guys have to… and I’m just going to go on my little
nerd phase right here…. Do you have to read Ulysses Grant's memoirs? Do they
make you read that?
[Disappointment when the cadets indicate they don’t].
You should read Grant's memoirs. It is an incredible… the greatest presidential
memoir ever written. It is an incredible literary achievement. It helps. It holds a
great place in my heart, because I was not the greatest student in the world and
nobody thought I was going to be any kind of writer outside of maybe my
household. And Grant came up that way in his life in general. He was not
supposed to be the great man he ended up being, and he certainly wasn't
supposed to write a book like that. Nobody thought of Grant as any sort of
literary… anything. And the way he wrote that book… I think there’s a portion,
like maybe about three quarters of the way through, it literally says at this point
President Grant found out that he had terminal cancer. And he just keeps writing.
But the background of that is that his family had gone broke, actually, and he
knew he was going to die. But, if he could finish this book, if he could get it out,
and if it could do well, maybe his family would have the opportunity to recoup
some of their wealth and live pretty well after he passed. And he wrote that book
and I literally think like days later he actually died. It is a tremendous fusion of the
kind of work it takes to be a writer and just physical courage and it's a beautiful
book. All of y’all should read it. It’s an incredible, incredible book. Huge influence
over my style of writing, by the way.
Q: Sir, I was wondering, you know, when reading this -- I'm sure that I'm not the
only one – but, when reading Between The World and Me and “The Case for
Reparations,” a lot of what you said came across as surprising.
Ta-Nehisi: I’m sorry, as what?
Q: As surprising.
Ta-Nehisi: OK.
Q: And it struck me how much of an information gap that you see… about how
we as society you see as society is perpetuating a lie. How Baldwin wrote a lot
on this half a century ago and not much has happened since. And about how a
bill as simple as H.R. 40, just can never go anywhere. I was wondering: from
your perspective, especially after having published “The Case for Reparations,”
how much of a difference have you seen starting to be made.
Ta-Nehisi Coates: It is being talked about. You know, I mean you're asking the
question here, I think does a great thing, to be at West Point and discussing it. I
was at Harvard a month ago (and I don’t mention that to namecheck Harvard) I
mention that to say that many of the elite universities, quote unquote elite and
ivy-league only universities in this country, because of the point at which they
were founded virtually all of them have roots in slavery. The law school at
Harvard, for instance, was basically underwritten by a man by the name Isaac
Rhode who's a huge slaveholder in Barbados. Georgetown: some of the guys
that owned, actually owned slaves, some of the clergy that actually owned slaves
in Maryland helped found Georgetown. This is a normal story. You know, up until
a couple of years ago at a place like Yale, you would see a rendering of John C.
Calhoun, literally with slaves in the rendering, and blacks are walking past that all
the time. I say to say that, you know, colleges and universities founded in this
sort of thing are coming to have to reconcile themselves to it. And they admitting
it, that yes, this is a huge part of our identity. Yes this made us possible. But…
you ask about reparations and things get a little skittish, and these are some of
the most quote unquote enlightened environments you could ever be in. And so I
think we got a long, long way to go.
But, honestly for me the deeper question is not even about reparations. I mean,
this is something that I just I haven't had the opportunity to pursue this up like I
want to. The real question is what are the limits of a human society? Has there
ever been a human society that willfully, without being forced to, and without
something else having happened, actually apologized and made itself
accountable for that. And I have not come across a single example of that.
People often talk about Nazi Germany, but you know I make the case. I think
Germany killed 90 percent of the Jews living there at the time so you don't really
have a political force that’s there. And they lost a war. So it's a different sort of
situation, not a civil war by the way, lost an actual war. But would you require
what you hope to see, you know in a country like America, is not to have some
sort of violent exterior force force us, to a situation we say we can't afford this
anymore. We can't afford to lie to ourselves anymore. And you hope that that can
come about naturally and consciously. That would be a revolutionary thing
because I think what we might be bumping up against is the limits of human
societies in general.
Q: Sir, my name is [name unintelligible], company H4. You talked a lot about the
deceptions and the lies that our country was founded on. Can you talk a little bit
about the deceptions that you see that remain in our society today and what we
can do as, as people to stop or try to change them?
Ta-Nehisi Coates: I don't want to get you all in trouble.
<<laughter>>
I really don't, because you know I didn't come here to do that. You know I love
you guys. I don't want to put anybody in any sort of difficult position at all.
The first thing I would say is I think societies in general lie to themselves. I mean
all societies have founding myths. Again, I don't know that America is particularly
unique in it. But, if I were to pick one I just go back to the thing I base my talk on
and that is the Civil War. I know we're getting better about that. But, you have to
understand a state like South Carolina (and maybe I’m going to get you in trouble
here) in a state like South Carolina, you had a situation in which you needed a
literal terrorist attack to happen to get folks to lower a flag of white supremacy.
That's what the flag is by the way. Again, all you have to do is go and read the
documents that South Carolina itself wrote, when it left the union. That is all you
have to do: just read what they were saying at the time, and it will be incredibly
clear what that flag was for. Now I know, people say all the time, “well you know
things change meaning and da da da-da, and this and that.” You know, the Nazi
symbol is actually older than Nazi Germany. And if I walk around with a Nazi
symbol and said, “no, no I don't mean Nazi Germany,” people would look at me
like I was crazy -- as they should. As they should. But for some reason we treat
the Confederate flag, even to this day, differently. And it takes somebody walking
into a church and butchering innocent people for folks to lower that flag. And they
don’t necessarily lower the flag because they see the error of their ways, or they
see history in any sort of different way. They lower it because it's impolite. They
don’t lower it because of the lie that they're telling themselves which is a very
very, very different process. So you guys, here at West Point, I go back to the
talk that I base this on, man. I think the Civil War is the… because I think once
you can grapple with the fact that 750,000 people died for enslavement, and
once you can understand how central that is to this society, like this society
would not exist without it. Then you know you can be free of some stuff. We all
have to go through this. I write about this in the book. Man, when I went to
Howard University I had this vision of slavery as white people coming into Africa
and kidnapping black people. That's what I thought. That how it was talked about.
Then you get to Howard University and find out it was black people selling black
people. That was hard to take. That was really, really hard to take. I had a… it
was painful. I had a lot of thinking that I had to do around it, but once I got past it,
once I got rid of it, I came out on the other side. And it’s not like I hated being
black, it's not like I hated folks. I felt like I understood so much more about the
world. And so to understand enslavement as the root of American society is not
to understand America as particularly evil, its understand America as the work of
human beings. Scratch any society and you'll find this; you really will. But as I
said at the beginning, you guys, you guys specifically, can least afford the lie.
Even if some large -- hopefully shrinking -- portion of the populace continues to
function under it.
Major Leone: OK. We have time for one remaining question.
Q: Afternoon, Sir. My name is John Lorenz. So after reading your article, “The
Case for Reparations,” and listening to your talk today, I just wanted to ask you if
you have, in your studies, noticed any trends in subjugation or supremacy that
you would want us to know as future leaders, so we can try to avoid it in
leadership in any scale or anything that you would want to tell, you know, the
leaders of our country about subjugation supremacy as a whole.
Ta-Nehisi Coates: Yeah. I swear I'm trying not to get you in trouble.
<<laughter>>
I'm working really hard here. I hope you appreciate that.
<<laughter>>
One of the unfortunate things that's happening that I see, one of the trends that I
think is definitely happening, is I believe on the census for the first time in history
there's going to be a Arab category for race. And one of the arguments I make in
Between The World and Me is that race is the child of racism, not the father. So
the idea I think that undergirds much of the dialogue around racism in this
country is that there's a “pure black race,” a “pure white race,” a “pure Latino
race,” a “pure Asian race,” and if we can only get these pure races to get along
everything would be ok. Anyone who's ever been to an African-American family
reunion knows that there is no purity in races; it’s quite obvious. Just look at the
people around you. I'm black here, standing before you at West Point, happy, to
be black, proud to be black, etc. But I'm wise enough to know that if I were in
Louisiana say 200 years ago, they might call me something different. I'm wise
enough to know that if I were in Brazil right now -- I think was 70 some odd
different categories for race -- they might call me something different. This is
important. Because what you then are able to get to is that we actually have
created this thing -- this is a man-made thing. Why is it that all of a sudden, out of
nowhere, we're suddenly going to have an Arab category for race? Did
somebody discover some new Arab genes? Did something happen in the
biological studies? Is this science? Or is there something happening in the
broader society that leads people to feel that they need to be able to mark
themselves as certain things so that they can mark the experience which is
actually happening to them. Whenever you see races being made, look for the
shadow of racism. It's always there. It's always there. It’s not like being an ethnic
group. It's not like having a particular culture. When you see people talking about
race, always look for the shadow of racism. And I argue that black people, in fact
I know that black people are not unique in this, it is not like when Irish Americans
came to this country they were instantly regarded as white. That's not what
happened. It's not like when Italian-Americans came to this country they were
instantly regarded as white. It's not like Hitler thought the Jews were white. And
so, whenever you see people marking off those categories you should be
instantly skeptical – you should immediately start looking behind that, right away.
And it won't just be for black folks that that’s true.
<<applause>
Ta-Nehisi Coates: Thank you, guys. Thank you. Thank you.
Colonel Harper: As a “thank you” for his provocative and insightful presentation,
we're honored to present Ta-Nehisi Coates a framed facsimile of the cadet oaths
of U.S. Grant, Oliver O. Howard, and Henry O. Flipper. As you can tell from the
Q&A, the selection of Grant represents Ta-Nehisi’s esteem for Grant and his
memoirs… which you should all read. Colonel Seidule has told me he will fix that
as the head of History.
And you know, you know as the Corps Celebrates annually at the Flipper Dinner,
in 1877 Henry O. Flipper was the first African-American graduate of West Point.
What you may not know is that Oliver O. Howard, an 1854 grad from my own
great state of Maine, fought for the Union in the war, fought to protect freed
slaves after the war, and was a leader in promoting higher education for
freedmen, most notably founding Howard University and serving as its president
from 1867 to 1873. He later served as the Superintendent here from 1881 to 82.
We present this to you as a “thank you” for helping us face our complicated
history, to celebrate some long, slow progress made, and to acknowledge work
yet to be done.
Please join me in thanking Ta-Nehisi Coates once more.
<<standing ovation>>
Major Leone: For those who would like to have a book signed or to engage with
Mr. Coates in a more informal setting, I invite you to meet briefly with him now on
the stage. Thank you for attending the second annual Zengerle Family Lecture in
the Arts and Humanities. Cadets, you are released to your instructors.