UNC Asheville welcomed award-winning author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates to campus on February 28, 2023. Coates sat down with UNC Asheville Chair and Professor of Africana Studies Tiece Ruffin to discuss his work, the history and current state of book banning in America, education systems, reparations and more. Coates also offered a master class for UNC Asheville students and faculty before his keynote address to the Asheville community.
Coates is the author of the bestselling books “The Beautiful Struggle,” “We Were Eight Years in Power,” “The Water Dancer” and “Between the World and Me,” which received the National Book Award in 2015. Over his two-decade career, Coates has written for The New York Times and The Atlantic, where he penned the National Magazine Award-winning 2012 essay, “Fear of a Black President.” Outside of his work as a novelist and journalist, Coates has enjoyed a successful career as a writer for Marvel’s “Black Panther” (2016-2021) and “Captain America” (2018-2021) comic series.
“It is not the case that we are in a sudden moment of book banning,” Coates said, in response to Ruffin’s question regarding the banning of Coates’ “Between the World and Me” in 2020. “We cannot treat book banning as something new. This is tradition. I’m shocked every time I get a letter from a teacher…that says some school district out there in Colorado Springs banned my book, or a teacher in Tennessee was fired because they’re teaching my book. But I shouldn’t be.”
Coates discussed the history of the suppression of the education of Black people in America, starting with enslavers prohibiting the people they enslaved from learning to read.
“Under the laws of slavery, the chief among those efforts to improve yourself that were outlawed was the ability to read and write. So we have a centuries-long history in this country of forbidding African Americans the right to access books and reading material, and then using those books and reading materials, using words in different ways, to interpret history and the world around them,” Coates said.
“When I think of myself as a black writer, those are the spirits of my ancestors that are walking with me. I never forget that I am practicing an art that my ancestors were banned from practicing.”
Coates and Ruffin also discussed the current education model in the United States, based on Coates’ own experiences with school in his youth. In “Between the World and Me,” Coates wrote that schools “were not concerned with curiosity” but only “concerned with compliance.”
“We have a common understanding of schools as sites for education. If that were true, I’m talking about higher education now, I don’t think school would be as expensive as it is,” Coates said. “If we believed that an informed populace was essential to democracy…if we believed that people could only make decisions if they were truly well informed, would we not erect an architecture that makes being informed as easy as possible?”
Ruffin asked Coates to address the process of reparations to repair damage caused by public and private systemic racism, bringing questions from UNC Asheville humanities students. The City of Asheville and Buncombe County were among the first locales in the United States to pass a resolution supporting community reparations in 2020. Coates wrote an article for The Atlantic in 2014, “The Case for Reparations,” and was invited to testify in front of the United States House of Representatives on the issue of reparations five years after the article's publication.
Though Coates refrained from making any specific recommendations for Asheville, he did address reparations more broadly, and the frustration students often share around the feeling that “conversation is not enough” and the urgency for action.
“Conversation is action, which is why people are trying to ban conversations,” Coates said. “But conversation alone is not enough…We’ll know reparations has worked when the system of white supremacy has been eradicated. That’s the goal.”
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