Recommended Listening: Why Ta-Nehisi Coates is Hopeful

One of the great tensions of working in advocacy, campaigns, or organizing is the duality of being a realist about the status quo and an optimist about future possibilities.

This episode of the Ezra Klein podcast was released in early June 2020, a time marked by turmoil and fear. The pandemic was raging, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor had just been killed, and millions of Americans were suddenly in impossible economic situations. In that context, this interview struck me as profoundly honest, yet hopeful, embodying that duality, of realism and optimism, and I’ve returned to it periodically in the year since. Surely Ta-Nehisi Coates shows us it’s possible to be clear about our past and present and still maintain hope for a better future. As Klein notes in the intro, one of the gifts that Coates has and so willingly shares in his writing is thinking about structures. This interview focuses on the imbalances of how we, as a society, hold expectations of non violence on those in power and those out of power.

Hope comes from many places, and one that works often is taking the long view, looking at the issues you care about through a looooong historical lens. Coates points, in this interview, to the diversity of people at BLM protests compared to the civil rights actions of the 1960’s and 70’s. While progress is not linear, and often feels too slow, it will cease entirely if we don’t maintain the fight for it. And we can only do that if we genuinely, to our very cores, believe change is not just possible but also OURS to make. 

The 90 mins of this podcast absolutely fly by, but the substance will stick with you for much longer.

Length: 1:31. Find it here.