Talking race, hope, and writing with Ta-Nehisi Coates

The dark and vibrant best-seller Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates is part memoir, part jeremiad, and part prose poem, written to his son Samori about the world in which African Americans live, a world of constant threat to the African American body. Coates reads at the Free Library at 7:30 p.m. Friday.

" 'White America' is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies," he writes. "Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, 'white people' would cease to exist for want of reasons."

Coates wants his son to be "a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world," but he brings scant comfort. "We cannot save ourselves," he writes; "there is no velocity of escape." Instead, he offers a vision of personal and cultural self-fashioning that may give meaning to black lives in a system built on their destruction.

Such is the uncompromising power of one of the most celebrated books - certainly the most celebrated single essay - of the year. Coates, a national correspondent for Atlantic.com, was just awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, and Between the World and Me is on the nonfiction long list for the 2015 National Book Awards. He spoke to The Inquirer from his office at The Atlantic in Washington.

How did the book get started?

I adore James Baldwin, especially [1963's] The Fire Next Time. It's a kind of essay, and a kind of writing, you don't see too much anymore. I thought that at this moment we could use something like that. He was a master of combining reportage, research, and the personal essay - it's a very valuable form and style of writing, and it was, I thought, a good lens through which to look at the world we're in right now. It has enough of the personal touch that it can address what it is like to be within a system like the one we're in.

Publishing a book is an act of hope. You're saying, "I think there's value in setting this work before other people." Yet in this book there is little room for hope.

Well, there's a kind of hope in it. It's not the kind of hope that says, "Everything's going to be all right." It's more like, "Things might not be all right, but you still have to go out and do your job. You still have to find a way to live your life." I don't know if that's the kind of hope people are looking for. In terms of putting the book out there, people read for all sorts of reasons, and hope is relatively low on the list. Think of The Great Gatsby, or any number of other masterpieces of American literature. They do not say, "Hey, it's going to be OK." Above all, they are works of art. I'm not calling my book a work of art necessarily, or trying to rank my book with anybody else's, but I was literally trying to write a work like this. It's really bizarre that readers would have this expectation of hope.

Yes, it's bizarre, but it's something some readers do look for.

It might have to do with the perception of African American writers, and their role, in the past. I don't quite understand how it got that way. People are confused about the job writers are supposed to do. Writers really don't do that. Think of Joan Didion, in books such as The White Album or The Year of Magical Thinking. She's a reporter trying to say what she sees, and maybe there are kinds of hope within that, but that's not what she's trying to do primarily. I just felt like it was not my job. My job is to call things as I see them.

You meet a man at Howard University, Prince Carmen Jones. He is brilliant, stylish, and promising - and in 2000 he is shot to death by an undercover police officer. Although you were only acquaintances, he and the manner of his death assume huge importance.

Prince has always been big in my memory. He was always there. I've been thinking about him since he was killed; it never goes away. When it became time to write the book, I wanted more than anything to talk to his mother. In that sense, the end of the book, when I go to talk to her, was one of the first parts to have been written and finished.

You write that "the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning." You write that "we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could - and must - fashion the way of our walk." Why is that important?

You can't predict how things are going to end. They may be better, and they may well not be. To put it in coldhearted terms, I can't guarantee what's going to happen to the world. One has to value struggle nonetheless. Struggle in and of itself - attempting to do impossible things - is intrinsically meaningful. You have the right to define yourself outside of what the society does. You can shape your own identity, who you are, and why that is right for you. And that process probably doesn't have an ending.

It's a book sure to spark questions.

People always have questions about the whole thing. They have questions about my atheism.

Throughout the book, you have to deal with many who aren't atheists, and with the role of the church in African American history.

I understand the place of religion. It's not who I am. You have to leave room for people to see the world the way they see it.

How does having a successful book differ, if at all, from having a successful social-media presence?

It's been bizarre, totally bizarre, all the people who are reading the book. If a writer is going to be successful, you have to gird yourself for failure. And I had girded myself for failure. I was writing into the darkness. I simply don't know what to say about the book's success. It's certainly a different experience.

What project is on your desk right now?

I'm trying to get my script done for a comic book for Marvel. They have commissioned me to write a series for their Black Panther character. I have to write 12 issues, and I'm trying hard to do that. I have to stay in close touch with the artist [Brian Stelfreeze], going back and forth as I write. It's really very difficult.