Krista Tippett, host: “And so we must imagine a new country.” These are words of the poet, journalist, prophet of our times: Ta-Nehisi Coates. This hour, he’s with us in a conversation that is joyful and hard and kind, direct and soaring and down-to-earth all at once.

I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.

[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating]

Ms. Tippett: We spoke at the 2017 Chicago Humanities Festival before an audience of 1,500 people. It was a beautiful cross-section of humanity, black and white, young and old. The Rockefeller Memorial Chapel was brimming with energy. And the technology didn’t play along, so we ended up adding an extra microphone as the conversation began.

Ms. Tippett: OK, so we’re gonna — it feels kind of old-fashioned, which is kind of refreshing, maybe. So do you like holding a microphone?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I actually have three microphones.

[laughter]

Ms. Tippett: [laughs] I know. I know. You have to forget about the other two.

Mr. Coates: Because what I have to say is so powerful that it requires three — evidently, three microphones. [laughs]

Ms. Tippett: [laughs] OK, it’s an honor to be here with all of you and with Ta-Nehisi Coates. And I always start my conversations, whoever I’m speaking with, asking about the spiritual background of your childhood. I wonder, one thing that — you’ve written a lot about your childhood. You’ve written, for example, that you didn’t have “Christian optimism,” you had “physicality and chaos.” If I ask you about the spiritual background of your childhood, where do you start? Where does your mind go?

Mr. Coates: Well, the first thing I think about is an absence of it, because the African-American community — obviously, the black church is so important. And it was important for my cousins, and it was important for my grandmother; and it was so absent in my house. This is probably not the way to think about spirituality, but as a child, what I understood is that people got gifts on Christmas, and I did not. And so there was this absence: “OK, these people are religious; I’m not.”

Having said that, I grew up, as I think about it — I grew up with a heavy sense of what I would not call ancestor worship, but I would call ancestor reverence. So there was a strong sense that the people before you had sacrificed, and they were the reasons why you would be there. I can remember being a child and going to various political events in the African-American community, and there was this whole tradition of saying libations: where you poured water into a plant, and the plant representing the earth and folks who had gone back to the earth. And you would say names, and those names could be anybody from Malcolm X to Toussaint L’Ouverture to your Aunt Grace to whoever it was who you felt had somehow sacrificed for you to be there. And it wasn’t until — see, this is why you have this job: because it wasn’t until you asked that question [laughs]…

Ms. Tippett: It’s a great question, isn’t it?

Mr. Coates: No, it is a great question. It’s a great question. You’re shaming me as a journalist. But it wasn’t until you asked that that I connected that to — because I talk about that, actually, a lot, in my writing.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, and here’s something you wrote in your new book, in We Were Eight Years in Power, which is really fantastic. You wrote, “I can somehow remember all that I did not allow myself to feel, walking away from that unemployment office and through the Harlem streets that day, just as I remember all that I did not let myself feel in those young years, trapped between the schools and the street. And I know that there are black boys and girls out there, lost in a Bermuda Triangle of the mind or stranded in the doldrums of America, some of them treading and some of them drowning, never feeling and never forgetting.”

And that’s spiritual background too.

Mr. Coates: Why?

[laughter]

Ms. Tippett: That’s — [laughs]

[laughter]

Mr. Coates: No, I’m serious. Why? I’m not trying to…

Ms. Tippett: Because I feel like that feeling, or not allowing ourselves to feel — that Bermuda Triangle of the mind — to me, it’s inner life, which is just a way to talk about spiritual life. It may not be the way everyone defines it.

Mr. Coates: I think about that, and I talk about this in Between the World and Me. And I guess as highfalutin as that might sound — why, I don’t know any — I think about neurons when I hear that. And I recognize that when I’m writing, I’m doing something else. I’m talking about it like — that sentence would not sound the same if I said, “Certain neurons in my brain fired. And then…” That wouldn’t — that doesn’t quite convey the feeling. It’s so funny. I don’t mean to say it’s not spiritual. It’s just not as — when I write, it’s not what I think about, which does not mean it’s not there, I guess, but it’s not the process.

It’s interesting that you receive it that way, though.

Ms. Tippett: One thing where you are writing and thinking these days takes off a little bit — and in some ways, your career — from this — that place, and in that same season that you were in that Harlem unemployment line, the campaign was starting for Barack Obama, who would become the first black president. I want to talk about — the problem of the color line, which was language of W.E.B. Du Bois, is just a thread that runs through. It’s been your fascination. Do you remember when you first read that, or…?

Mr. Coates: Read Du Bois, or when I became first aware?

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, well, when you read “color line” and how that — when that captured your imagination. What happened?

Mr. Coates: Well, I had to read Souls of Black Folk at a very, very young age. I probably was nine or ten. My parents — there was this book I had, and for some reason it had Up from Slavery, Souls of Black Folk, and, I want to say, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, in the same book. You have to understand how I was raised. There were just books everywhere. And in my house, about 90 percent of those books were either by or about black people or the black diaspora in some respect.

Ms. Tippett: Your father was a librarian.

Mr. Coates: He was. My father was a research librarian. And he had loved books, so that sort of thing — it would’ve just been around. And I read it — and then at the same time, I gotta say, I didn’t get it. It’s probably only in the last five to eight years, [laughs] as I articulate in that book, that I got it. I didn’t understand blackness and whiteness and white supremacy as central to American history. And I had people around me that said that. They would say, “This country is built on our back.” But I would wonder, “Why? How do you illustrate that? What does that mean?”

And I guess — and now I’m getting to the answer to your question [laughs] — it probably was actually during my studies of the Civil War that I got it, that what he meant by it being the problem of the — not just a problem for black people, not just something that people should not do, but a thread that ran through all of American history during that period. And thinking on that, he probably underestimated.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, he said the problem of the 20th century was the color line, and for you, the color line shape-shifts, but it doesn’t go away, and it’s with us in the 21st.

Mr. Coates: Yeah, and it probably was the problem of the 18th, 19th, 20th, and hopefully not 21st — but not looking like that.

Ms. Tippett: You talked about neurons a minute ago, and I do feel like one frontier we’re on, of advance, is understanding our brains better, and that in fact the color line is in our heads. We change laws — you go through this history of the Civil War and Reconstruction and how betrayed the promise of those events were, because we didn’t change ourselves, ultimately.

Mr. Coates: Yeah, and I think that’s hard for people to accept. I guess the place, in terms of the book, that I most recently encountered it is the implicit idea that President Obama was prone to repeating: that the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. And I just — that sort of notion of destiny — I don’t know how you measure that against the very human practice of repeating brutality over and over again.

And beyond that, what about the people who — what if you don’t believe in humanity as this kind of collective, but believe that every individual life is a unit, in and of itself, and when that life is snuffed out, that arc is over, and so people who were lynched are not a part of a long-term historical process — that in their minds, that’s their life, and history ended the minute they were snuffed out? And so this kind of providential understanding makes them bricks in a road in order to give it a happy ending, in order to say it was all worth it.

But I maintain it was never worth it. It was never just. It was never right. The process is never — it’s always wrong. It’s always wrong, and I think there are a lot of things implicit in that that devalue — I would probably say not just the lives of African Americans, but the lives of people who live underneath of the boot.

Ms. Tippett: And actually demean the lives of white people too…

Mr. Coates: Yes.

Ms. Tippett: …if not in the sense of being on the other end of violence in the same way. You say this — you’re really fascinated with the Civil War. You’re really a student of the Civil War. You say something interesting I’ve never heard anybody talk about in this way before. It’s one of these very simple truths that someone suddenly puts words around, and you see it: that there’s this — you say, “And for black people, there is the burden of taking the Civil War as Our War.” Even that piece of our history is a history of white people. I don’t know.

Mr. Coates: The trouble with this book is, I don’t remember everything I wrote.

[laughter]

Ms. Tippett: [laughs] OK. All right.

Mr. Coates: I can say something — I can dance. I can still dance. [laughs] No, because