The Fine Print

The official commemoration of America’s 250th birthday is in the books. But the work of realizing the American dream remains as urgent as ever.

How can we rebuild trust in systems that everyday Americans believe have failed them over the last 70 years?

And how do we push back against forces that want to divide us while stripping us of our humanity and autonomy?

On Saturday at Faneuil Hall, Embrace President and CEO Imari Paris Jeffries, Ph.D., sat down with Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me, The Message, and Black Panther, for an honest accounting of America’s first 250 years and a critical discussion about its next 250.

Below is an excerpted transcription of their conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity. Read the complete transcript on our website.

​Imari Paris Jeffries: When Marvel handed you the keys to Black Panther—the first thing you did was put the throne on trial. You wrote that his own people rose up and asked, "Why should any one man rule the throne?" On the day that America celebrates literally overthrowing a king, what were you trying to work out on these themes of self-governance through that comic?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: You know, I have a sentence—actually in my second book, Between the World and Me—that I took forever to articulate. What I mean is I drafted the sentence over and over and over again, over the course of months, actually, to get it right. And the sentence is: "Race is the child of racism, not the father."

The point is, races don't exist. They are not inherent qualities of people. There are systems that assign qualities to people and then distribute power accordingly. And if you accept that, it does not just mean that any group of people could end up enslaved, genocided, colonized—pick whatever malady you wish. It also means that any group of people can do it.

So when I had the opportunity to write Black Panther, I think a lot of us comic book fans took great pride in this all-Black nation—[it’s] never been colonized, [it’s] advanced. But the history of human civilizations that achieve that type of power is not a great one. And I thought it would be a betrayal of my politics, my own perspective on the world, and my deep belief in the common humanity of all people—and thus the common vices of all people—to write it as though it were a fairy tale, and not write it out of the same spirit with which I write anything else when I'm critiquing this country.

Imari Paris Jeffries (left) with Ta-Nehisi Coates at Fanueil Hall. (Photo: City of Boston)

TC: The numbers you cite there—they did not happen by magic. There are people who profit off of disunion. There are people who become billionaires not just by attacking folks' trust in the government they elect in a democracy, but also by attacking folks' basic trust in each other.

And I say that as somebody who has certainly made my bones as one of the biggest and loudest critics of some of the romanticism about what America is, what Americans are, exceptionalism, and so forth. But I never do that out of a deep belief in innate evil in people, or an inability for people to reconcile themselves to each other.

This is my home. I'm here. I'm a part of this. I may not like how it happened. It may make me really, really angry. I may not like how politics are being conducted, but I am American.

IPJ: What's the message we can give young people in the face of AI, in the face of social media, that wasn't available to us 10 or 15 years ago?

TC: This hits me very personally because I teach writing, and I've taught writing. I taught writing at MIT, not too far from here.

As somebody who has loved the process, not just of publishing books but of actually writing itself—which is to say, having a notion or a question in my head that I cannot work out, and using writing to figure that out—teaching young people to do that, watching them do that, watching them be rewarded by the process of it. The idea that people have decided they are going to profit from robbing young people of that—I think that's a problem. I think that's a huge problem.

And what I'm trying to get across—what I'm most concerned about—is that there are people making ungodly sums of money by pretending as though this is a natural process. They are robbing you. They are robbing your children. They are hacking into the brains of your children as we speak, and making it seem like they're Darwin on the Galapagos Islands just observing something that's happening.

And I guess this really strikes me at this moment—here we are, everybody proud and excited to be here on the 250th anniversary. And I just have to say: the fact that we have convinced ourselves that our future and our children's future is no longer in our own hands is an abomination.

I'm here for the speeches. I'm here for the conversation. I'm here for the poetry. I think all of that's important. But if people walk out of these celebrations and just go on with their lives, I question how much they believe in the pageantry they just witnessed. 

I just don't know how we celebrate these words and not walk out and act.