Ta-Nehisi Coates, Black Panther writer: 'Far be it for me' to advise reparations committee

ASHEVILLE - When The Citizen Times reported in December that Ta-Nehisi Coates' would be speaking Feb. 28 at UNC Asheville, Dwight Mullen, a retired political science and Africana studies professor at UNCA, expressed the hope that Coates would provide guidance to city and county leaders on the issue of reparations for Asheville's Black residents.

For many years, Coates' name has been linked with discussions of reparations. His 2014 article in The Atlantic, "The Case for Reparations" brought more mainstream attention to reparations and inspired countless conversations. In 2020, it was named the "Top Work of Journalism of the Decade," by a panel of judges convened by New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

At sold-out Kimmel Arena, Mullen, chair of Asheville's historic Community Reparations Commission, asked Coates how he felt the committee should proceed in its next steps, but the former journalist said he deferred to the work of reporters.

"I actually wouldn't recommend at all, and here's why: I'm a journalist by trade," he said. "The first lesson I learned in that is the way in which you come to see something or understand something or write something, it always has to be built on the foundation of a reporter. This is my first time in Asheville. I just flew in today. Far be it for me to sit back and recommend to you guys who are enmeshed in this on a daily basis.

"'The Case for Reparations' itself is an article that's built on reporting. I haven't done the requisite and required research and reporting to have the understanding to make (a recommendation)."

Asheville's Community Reparations Commission is a 25-member board intended to make short, medium, and long-term recommendations that will make progress toward repairing the damage caused by public and private systemic racism going back 400 years to the time of slavery, to the Jim Crow era and even today with large gaps in wealth, education, health and more between Black and white residents. The commission was officially seated in April.

According to Tiece Ruffin, director of Africana studies and professor of Africana studies and education at the university who led the discussion with Coates, the committee has been assured appropriation of $1 million in reparations funding — $500,000 from the Asheville City Council and $500,000 from Buncombe County. Asheville became the second municipality in the country, after Evanston, Illinois, to appropriate reparations funding for Black residents.

But Coates wasn't completely silent on the issue of reparations.

Coates also brought up reparations in a discussion on the pitfalls of cryptocurrency, which he likened to a "virtual pyramid scheme" in a student-submitted question wondering whether Coates saw capitalism as an impediment to a racially just society, and how social change can be affected without deconstructing capitalism.

"(Cryptocurrency) was an investment with no guarantees," Coates said. "It ultimately awarded folks who were early adopters, and took from folks who were late adopters. You don't have to do too much guessing about who the late adopters were. You don't have to guess who was holding the bag - the same people who were left holding the bag in the housing bubble.

"(Due to) this mentality that 'I have to be a boss,' or 'You're a sucker because you're a worker ... and that I control my own destiny through the accumulation of capital, and I'm a person that takes and that is not taken from,' as long as you don't have a collective society, any sort of reparations — and I wouldn't have said this five years ago — any sort of program of reparations will always be seen as taking from someone else."

Earlier in the event, Coates remembered the times before being recognized as a National Book Award winner, when he was first starting out as a writer and speaking to crowds of less than 20 people.

He's come a long way since those days, as evidenced by the crowd Feb. 28 at UNCA.

"I always tell my students, 'Nobody is ever promised an audience,' and if you find one, you are particularly lucky and you are particularly fortunate,'" Coates said. "My first book, I think maybe 15 people showed up, and I think about 10 of them were family."

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. From 2016-18, he also wrote the Black Panther comic series.

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."

In fall 2022, Coates joined the faculty of Howard University as a writer-in-residence and the Sterling Brown Chair in the Department of English.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Ta-Nehisi Coates: 'Far be it for me' to advise reparations committee