Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Atlantic Interview

The Atlantic Monthly Group, LLC

Society & Culture, Politics, News

4.4 • 977 Ratings

🗓️ 15 March 2018

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The growing prominence of The Atlantic's national correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates means that he's often asked to comment on matters on which he lacks expertise, but he demurs. In a conversation with The Atlantic's editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, recorded in front of an audience at South by Southwest in Austin, Coates explains why he isn't interested in interviewing Donald Trump, why he cannot use Twitter ever again, and how his complicated feelings about America inflect his writing for Captain America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Atlantic Interview. I'm Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic.
0:07.0	Over the weekend, I spent some time with Tana-Hasi Coates on stage in front of a couple of thousand of our best friends at the
0:12.8	South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. If you like the Prime Minister of
0:17.5	Great Britain or something like that. There's enough people walking over
0:20.6	with their cell phones. It's all right.
0:23.2	Tana Hasey of course is a national correspondent for the Atlantic
0:26.4	and one of America's preeminent writers on matters of race
0:30.4	and equality and justice.
0:32.6	We spent quite a bit of time at our session
0:34.7	at South by Southwest talking about these issues,
0:37.1	but we started our conversation,
0:39.2	which you'll hear in a moment,
0:40.6	talking about his latest project
0:42.3	as the writer of the Captain America comic.
0:45.0	You know, I grew up in West Baltimore in the 80s in this household where, you know, I tell people all the time,
0:51.0	Malcolm X. We didn't have Jesus but Malcolm X was like Jesus.
0:55.0	And it would not be very likely at that point in my life that I would read a comic book called Captain America.
1:02.0	Because he's called Captain America.
1:02.6	Because he's called Captain America,
1:04.1	you think he's sort of this nationalistic flag waiver.
1:08.7	But in fact, I want to say something, but I don't want to say it.
1:14.0	It's just us.
	...

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