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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or on demand, I'm really grateful you're here on today's show. Merrily We Roll Along has found new life on Broadway thanks to the direction of Maria Friedman, who once starred in the show herself. She'll join me in studio to discuss. A new collection of folklore from New York's indigenous tribe, Lenape, has been published together in a book for the first time. The editors join us to discuss On Turtle's Back. That's the plan, so let's get this started with Ta-Nehisi Coates.

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Alison Stewart: It is banned books week, and whether by coincidence or on purpose, several of the panelists scheduled to appear at The Apollo’s Festival of Arts & Ideas this weekend have had their work removed from schools, and that includes the festival's curator and our next guest, Ta-Nehisi Coates. You may remember back in July, Coates attended a South Carolina school board meeting showing support for a high school teacher who had been told not to use his national award-winning book Between The World and Me.

It is not the first time his writing has been challenged by schools or lawmakers. Book banning, Blackness, and music, visual arts, politics, sports, comedy, and food will be on the table during the festival titled [at] The Intersection. It's hosted by the Apollo Theater where Coates is currently artist-in-residence. The three-day event will feature leading artists and writers like Barry Jenkins, Kamasi Washington, Jemele Hill, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and many others. Joining me now with the preview is Ta-Nehisi Coates. Hi, Ta-Nehisi.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Hello, Alison. Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: Thank you for being with us. You've had this fruitful relationship with the Apollo, obviously the stage production of Between the World and Me in 2018. You've been an artist-in-residence for a few years. How long did you have to think about it before you said yes to being the artist-in-residence at the Apollo?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Oh, that's a great question. Not long. One of my oldest and best friends is the artistic director up there and I generally do what she says.

Alison Stewart: Kamilah?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Yes, Kamilah Forbes. By the time I became an artist-in-residence, she had already done the stage play for Between the World and Me, which I thought came off really really well. Of course, I love tradition and the Apollo is a great tradition.

Alison Stewart: What's appealing to you about the role at this point in your career?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Wow. That is-- how much time do you have?

Alison Stewart: [crosstalk] It's public radio, we have time. [chuckles]

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I think for previous generations, and I guess for my generation also, there was a real professional need to have affiliations with organizations that weren't always led by Black people and frankly did not have the greatest history when it came to Black people. I don't mean that in any personal way, the history is what the history is. I always knew, for instance, when I wrote The Case for Reparations, that it had to be published by a major magazine. It probably would not be run by anybody of color.

I knew that when my books were published that they had to be published at a certain place and at a certain way. I think what happens is hopefully you get to a point in your career where you can go back home and not as a charity case but because home has things to offer you. Home has a level of comfort, the Apollo. If I could throw in my appointment at Howard University also offer the ability to have a dialogue with not just Black people, in other words, not just people who are of the same race as me, but people who are of the same culture and history as me, which is much, much more important.

In other words, we have very very specific experiences that we are able to have conversations about and to create out of. Anytime I have the opportunity to do that, and anytime it's a institution like the Apollo, which has its own level of high reputation, it feels like a no-brainer.

Alison Stewart: What do you know about being a curator of a festival that you didn't know before?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Oh, man, it takes a lot of work. This is not my first time doing this, but I deeply underestimated the amount of work. Honestly, one of the things the Apollo did that really, really helped is they put a architecture around me. Look, I don't cry or complain about the level of work I have to do in my life. I know throughout the country, there are people who are working much much harder than I am but the fact of the matter is, there's a level of attention that you have to pay when you're a writer to the writing itself. There's a level of an attention in much the same way that you have to pay to something like this. I had just a ton of help making sure that the infrastructure behind this was done well.

Alison Stewart: The choice of the word festival, I want to zero in on that because that suggests celebration and enjoy. What is it that you hope to celebrate this weekend?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I think we're at a particular moment in the world of Black art. I don't think there's been a point in American history where African-American artists and writers have more prominence than they have right now. Now, I don't think that this group is any more talented but I think that they very very much stand on the shoulders and on the backs of their ancestors and really the previous two generations who fought so much for folks to have access. I was talking to a friend and he was making a case for me that Spike Lee was our greatest living director.

You know what I mean? I said, "Well, I'm a fan. I like Spike, but it's a lot of directors out there. How do you make that case?" and he said, "Look, but Spike has these great films, and he was doing it at a point. He starts off in the '80s where he's battling against the machine. He's the only one. He's doing it without the resources. He's doing without the support. He's doing it having to explain to people over and over again what he's trying to get across." That hit me really really hard.

I'm not saying that that still isn't true today but I think if you look at film, the singularity that Spike had in the '80s is less true today. That's true across the board for other art forms. I know that that's true for us as writers. I have colleagues and friends who pretty much publish at the same level that I do. We don't really have the same problems of there being an only or a singular voice as I think we did previously. We don't have enough but it's not singular. I just think the level, the profile level is just very very different at this point.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Ta-Nehisi Coates. We're talking about The Apollo’s Festival of Arts & Ideas. It's happening this weekend. It's [at] The Intersections. The hashtag is

[at] The Intersection. What's interesting about what's happening [at] The Intersections of some of the topics, because it's a diverse group of topics, you have music, you have food, you're going to talk about book banning.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I thought it was important to expand. We started off talking about the arts and I thought it was really important to expand what we thought about as art in that conversation and take it from the root level of African Americans themselves. I thought it was really important to have some sports in there. I wish we had more sports. I thought it was really important to include food because although we don't express it that way, I do think in our culture, in terms of how we interact with them, how we talk about them popularly amongst ourselves, I do think they assume the level of art.

I think there's an argument for instance, for the sport of football and basketball too as performance art. That's not generally the way we think about them or talk about them but I know that the feelings that are elicited from me, from art are very similar to the feelings that are elicited from me when I see a superior, historic, athletic performance.

Alison Stewart: That same passion.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: If you are not just the fan that just cheers for their home team, but really understands the difficulty, there is a level of sublimeness, if that's a word, that you feel.

Alison Stewart: There's those moments when just how you feel about it overrides any [chuckles] intellectual engagement with it.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: It's true. I think art does that. I think you can't always explain what you feel, but the feeling is the side-- I think about LeBron James going back to Cleveland, and that block you guys-- in the finals on Steph Curry. I think of all of that story taken together and him as an actor in that story. I have the same sense of awe, you know what I mean, that I do whenever I behold any great piece of art or writing or et cetera.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to take off my journalist hat for a minute and just say that there's something I really think is important about the festival and that I applaud you for the price point. There are a lot of other of these festivals where you have a great number of intellectual minds that come together and they cost thousands of dollars to attend or they're in little ski towns in the Midwest which cost a portion to get to, and you kept the price point under $100.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: We did and we would probably like to keep it lower if we did it again, you know what I mean? I don't mean to fantasy. We probably would think about ways to keep it lower if we could. You can't really have a festival centered around African-American art and ideas, Black art and ideas, and be in Harlem, and then not really be accessible to Harlem, and all the Harlems of America.

Alison Stewart: Who do you hope comes to the show?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Personally, I take a very selfish interest in this. The folks that are gathered, I just really, really look forward to hearing them because I'm fans of all of them. Just hearing them talk about their art and how they make it. I know as a writer, it can be really, really lonely. You spend a lot of time by yourself in creation and probably one of the things I fought myself for is not enough time in community. I hope, if anything, we can spawn some community out of this.

Alison Stewart: The first day of the festival tomorrow will not feature any panels, it's performances. The Apollo's going to screen three films from director Barry Jenkins, Medicine for Melancholy, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Moonlight. Then you'll be speaking to Barry on Saturday morning. Why is the work of Barry Jenkins a good way to kick off the festival?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Oh, man, Barry is one of our greatest artists, period, in all forms. I'm so happy for him and proud of him because I met Barry back in the Medicine for Melancholy days which I saw and was just blown away by. To see him just take it up a level every time has just absolutely, absolutely been incredible.

I think the way Barry and his crew, just to be blunt about this, the way they shoot Black people, it's a level of beauty and glamour, I would say, that I've never really seen before. I just think he's the embodiment of it. I remember when we had the premiere for If Beale Street Could Talk at the Apollo, we were able to celebrate Barry. To welcome him back for this, I think is remarkable. I'm glad he accepted. He could have been anywhere in the world, to choose to be with us is a beautiful thing.

Alison Stewart: The event page describes that you'll be talking to Barry Jenkins about maintaining authenticity and storytelling, how cultural and creative agency manifests in his art-making. We actually had him back on the show in 2018 to talk about Beale Street. We pulled a clip of what we think helps give a sense of the way he strives for authenticity and storytelling. This is Barry Jenkins.

Barry Jenkins: We wanted to create a New York that was a landscape of faces in a certain way. It's why the closeups are so prominent in the film. This was a time in the city's history, especially up in Harlem, where the public services, utilities, and things like that just weren't as kind to Black folks as they were to other more [unintelligible 00:13:45] parts of the city. We did a lot of visual research, a lot of these still photos. There's this really simple scene where Tish and Fonny are walking down the sidewalk and the camera's pushing behind them.

It just drifts to the left and you see these kids jumping up and down on a rusted-out car. The city wouldn't come and take these cars, these things, or all these vacant lots that were filled with trash, with refuse, and the kids would make playgrounds out of them. Whenever we could find things like that, they're very simple and grounded, we tried to bring them into the film to reflect the world of Harlem in the early 1970s.

Alison Stewart: Which made me think about Harlem. Harlem feels like it is a part of this festival. That it's as important as a Barry Jenkins or a Kerry Washington. Why is that?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Long time capital of Black America. It just is. I lived in Harlem for six years, and to this day, I regret leaving. [laughs] I loved it there. I loved it. Man, I came to Harlem for the first time in, Jesus, '99 maybe. I remember catching the train and getting off at 116th Street to meet a friend. It felt like my hometown of Baltimore, but times a hundred. It was everything I loved about being Black and being around Black people.

I'll never forget, it was an evening. Whereas where I was from in Baltimore, I'm used to the streets being quiet. It was like, "Man, everybody got somewhere to go. This is incredible." You know what I mean? Just out of personal preference, I love that it's in Harlem. Obviously, Harlem has been home to so much, you know so many of us across the years and so I'm very very happy with doing it there.

Alison Stewart: You're going to have these in-depth conversations. Then there's this cool thing, it's called 15 minutes with Sage Adams, creative director for SZA, and then 15 minutes with [unintelligible 00:15:40]. What's the deal with the 15-minute shorter conversations?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I'll be honest with you, that was the infrastructure around me coming up with that idea. I think it's good. Just when you're trying to structure this stuff out. Look, we try to avoid this, but sitting in your seat for an hour-long panel, it can be hard. It can be difficult. I think mixing it up is a really, really good thing. I think just also on top of that, the way most of these conversations will work is it will allow the artists to speak for themselves as opposed to being interrogated by the likes of me which I think is also a good thing.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Ta-Nehisi Coates. We're talking about [at] The Intersection, the Apollo's Festival of Arts and Ideas. It's happening this weekend at the Apollo. We'll discuss music and banned books after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Ta-Nehisi Coates. We are talking about [at] The Intersection, the Apollo's Festival of Arts and Ideas. It's happening this weekend. Ta-Nehisi is the curator of the festival, along with a whole bunch of other folks. He's been very kind about mentioning that he had good infrastructure for this event that's happening this weekend. One panel is called Why Does Our Wokeness Scare You: History and Context Erasure, Violence and Fear. Nikole Hannah-Jones is going to be on the panel. Ibram X. Kendi, Dr. [unintelligible 00:17:18]. What are some of the important questions you hope are posed at this event?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Well, fortunately, I don't have to moderate that panel. My good friend Jelani Cobb is going to do it. Again, I think it's really important to have this conversation at the Apollo, though, because the fact of the matter is book banning and really Black literacy as a threat to status quo is not a new thing in America. This goes back to the Slave Codes and forbidding Black people from learning how to read. It goes all the way up through the murder of Elijah Lovejoy, a White man who was an abolitionist and had his press destroyed and tossed into the river.

The mysterious disappearance of David Walker and the banning of his literature. Frederick Douglass, with a price on his head after he publishes the narrative. Ida B. Wells, being run out of Memphis for investigating lynching, the profiling of Black-- not the profiling, the investigation by the FBI Black booksellers in the early 1970s. Toni Morrison, whose work was banned virtually through her entire professional writing career from Bluestar onward to this very day. We have a long, long history of this.

My hope is that we can contextualize it and have people understand that you can't make the critiques that I think folks like Ibram and folks like Nicole make of the country and not have the expectation that those elements of the country that you are critiquing won't react accordingly. I think that's what's going on.

Alison Stewart: In July, you attended a South Carolina school board meeting supporting a high school teacher who had been told to stop using your book in her class. How did you learn about this teacher?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: In the news like everybody else. There's a news article written about her. It's always been upsetting to me when I see this. It's not upsetting because it's my book per se. It's upsetting because, you see, they can't really hurt me. Every time one of these bans happens and it's announced, it's like, we, as authors we sell more books. They can't really affect us, but for people who are in the community who are our readers and the teachers of our literature, and the students, they can affect them.

It's very, very upsetting. To be honest with you, Alison, I had to spend a long time thinking about how I should react. If you show up and visit, are you causing more of a scene and making it worse? You don't want to go down there and grand stand and then you leave for folks to have to deal with what you've left. When I talked to Mary Wood, who's a teacher down there, she was like, "Please come. In fact, we're having a school board meeting next week, so please come." I came. I just wanted to be there, to let these folks know more than anything-- on the one hand for teachers like Mary, "We see you. We appreciate you."

For those proposing the book bans, "We see you too. We are not here in New York alienated from this stuff. We're watching and we see."

Alison Stewart: What was the energy like in that room?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I went in there really prepared for battle. I wasn't going to say anything, but I just expected to hear the worst possible things. The fact of the matter is they had-- Mary and her subordinates had organized. Honestly, the energy was extremely anti-book banning and pro-book.

I cannot tell you how it felt to have people come up to me and say, "After George Floyd died, we organized a reading group at our church, at our school, and your book was one of the books we read." To hear that-- this is red South Carolina, deep. This room is probably 80% white. We're talking about in the main white teachers, white students. This is not a Black versus white issue in terms of its directness. To be there and see them fighting-- you can forget a 70%, 30% red district. That's still 30%. 30% is still a lot of people.

Alison Stewart: They can be fired up.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: They can be fired up and they really were. They really were.

Alison Stewart: Walter Mosley was here yesterday. He told me to tell you hello, by the way. We talked about this because his book 47 has been banned. He said, "Book banning is because of fear."

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Yes, he's right.

Alison Stewart: Fear of what?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Of the future. I think, and this is some of what I'm writing right now, people are not aware of the extent to which books were used to create the architecture of white supremacy. The book that ushers in the modern age of-- or the film that ushers in the modern age of movies is of course Birth of a Nation.

Before Birth of a Nation was a film, it was a book, The Clansman. Indeed, The Clansman, the book, and the film are responsible for the rebirth of the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. Many of the traditions that we associate with the Klan come from a book. Cross-burning, for instance, that was in the book. That's not from anywhere else. Gone With The Wind, which is to this day the most profitable film in Hollywood history when you control for inflation, it started off as a book.

These are pinnacles of racism and white supremacy. When you go to the South, for instance, and you want to visit sites of enslavement and you wonder why all of them are people in hoop dresses and drinking mint juleps or whatever, you go back to books for that. You go back to books. You have a group of people who have for so long controlled what the literature was and used it to reify their image of the world. Increasingly that privilege of this is under assault. Folks are remaking the imagination. Again, I emphasize that when I was in South Carolina, this was about white kids, for the most part. This is about what white students were going to be reading. It's a deep fear that your kids will not hold the same priors that you hold about the world.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Ta-Nehisi Coates. We're talking about things and the [at] The Intersection, Apollo Festival of Arts and Ideas. I do want to get some music in here. Your successor as the Apollo's artist-in-residence is the composer and saxophonist, Kamasi Washington, who'll be performing Saturday evening. Have you talked to Kamasi about the role? What were--

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I haven't. I'm certainly available to, but you don't want to infringe either at the same time. Kamasi is absolutely brilliant. I think that is just a beautiful choice and I look forward to his festival or whatever he does. He may not want to do a festival. He may want to do something else. I'm a huge supporter and I look forward to just being there in any way that he would want.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a little bit of Kamasi Washington. Here's some of his score from the Netflix documentary Becoming about former First Lady Michelle Obama.

[MUSIC - Kamasi Washington: Becoming]

Alison Stewart: That's Kamasi Washington. He'll be performing as part of the [at] The Intersection, the Apollo's Arts & Ideas Festival happening this weekend. We're speaking with Curator Ta-Nehisi Coates. Before I let you go, I did want to ask you about-- there's very few people who have been in this space that you are in, where you start as a journalist and then go to the more creative, and now you're doing curation. You've had to deal with the spotlight, and you've been really open about it's harsh, that spotlight is harsh. There's a New York Times article talking about how you decided not to move to a certain apartment because The New York Post had written about it. Some of your fellow scholars and your peers are--

Ta-Nehisi Coates: It was a house.

Alison Stewart: It was a house?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: A beautiful brownstone, beautiful.

Alison Stewart: I'm sorry. [laughter]

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I'm not mad. Can you tell how not mad I am?

Alison Stewart: I know, but I felt that. [laughs] There is a certain group, your cohort, your peers who are going through this like Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ibram X. Kendi where people are watching what they're doing. They have their say about what they're doing. They're writing op-eds about what they're doing and how they're doing it when their first mission is their scholarship. Their first mission is their writing. What did you learn from being in the spotlight which you think would be valuable to anyone in that position?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Look, I would be remiss if I didn't say watching what Ibram is going through right now has been painful and really triggering. I would never say that his scholarship and his writing is above critique. I don't think anybody feels that way, but I've read through pretty much all of the journalism that's been done on this and I do mean journalism which is to say the reporting about what is actually happening up there.

There's a pretty good article in The Boston Globe this weekend. My understanding is that basically, they set certain goals. They raised a lot of money. Set certain goals, and they weren't able to meet them. To refocus, they've had to lay off some people. Now, that's not great. That's not good. I don't know why I'm reading op-eds in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Two op-eds actually at last count in The New York Times.

It seems an outsized response to what has actually happened. I haven't seen any evidence about Ibram stealing money. I haven't seen any fraud or anything like that. Organizations all the time don't achieve the goals that they set out within the first three years or so. That's not a good thing. I'm not celebrating that, but the response seems really outsized. I have to tell you the feeling is, on my part, that this isn't about what happened. This is about who he is and what he's saying.

Some of the words that have been used, basically calling him a con artist, or whatever. You can disagree with the word. You can say, "Look, I don't believe that there should be an anti-racism book for children because X, Y, and Z." Fine. "I don't even believe in this kind of anti-racism." Fine, but the rhetoric and the heat of the rhetoric is really outsized from what is actually happening. You're correct. I watched Nikole go through this. I watched Ibram go through this.

My way of dealing with it myself has always been-- this is really sad. I just try to restrict how much I talk and when I talk. I try to make sure that it's around something that I really feel like I'm standing on. This is why we're talking right now. This festival has been developed. It's something we've built, we've been working on for over a year so now I can talk about that. I'm not in any way saying somehow anybody who does the opposite deserves it, but this is treacherous territory, man.

There was just a history for whatever reason of Black writers who attained a level of almost a prominence that transcends their field, and everybody comes for them. It's very, very sad. It was painful for me to go through and it's painful to watch Ibram going through it right now.

Alison Stewart: I appreciate you being candid and speaking on it. Really do.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: No problem. Thank you for giving me the space to. I'm not on social, so it's not like I can say anything. You know what I mean? Thank you for giving me the space to say something.

Alison Stewart: Oh, you're not on social for your mental health?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I'm not on social for the exact reasons that I just stipulated. It's funny. What I eventually realized is everything you say, you're giving people a target. There's a weird, if I'm honest with you, dynamic by which they eat off of you. You say something and there are people who are not in the mode of creating anything, but basically, wait for somebody else to say something and then point out, in the harshest possible terms they can, why that's wrong.

Again, I'm not saying critique should not exist, but if I'm going to have to go through that, not off of a tweet, man. Make it off of a book that I thought a long time about. Tell me why this festival we're doing up in Harlem sucked. Do that, but not because I woke up, had a cup of coffee, or before I had my coffee, said, "This is what I think about John McCarthy," or somebody. "Here's all the things I dreamt about that Obama got wrong."

Now, make it off of something I wrote. Something that I thought about because the storm's going to come. It's going to come, but I would like to, at least, feel fully confident. I found Twitter, and really, all the social, it makes it too easy for you to just fling off your thoughts. If you're going to do that in public, you should, I think, invest a little bit more energy in it.

Alison Stewart: [at] The Intersection, the Apollo's Festival Arts and Ideas is happening this weekend starting tomorrow at the Apollo Theater. Ta-Nehisi, thank you for spending part of the day with us.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Thank you, Alison. Thank you so much.

 

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