A partial defense of Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates is right to ask for more space to have discomfiting conversations about human moral frailty.
Written by Bo Winegard.
“It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory!”
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
In a viral video cut from a longer conversation on Trevor Noah’s podcast What Now?, Ta-Nehisi Coates, referring to Hamas’s terror attack of October 7th, 2023, said:
And I haven't said this out loud, but I think about it a lot. Were I, 20 years old, born into Gaza, which is a giant open air jail, and what I mean by that is if my father is a fisherman and he goes too far out into the sea, he might get shot by somebody off of, you know, inside of Israeli boats.
If my mother picks the olive trees and she gets too close to the wall, she might be shot. If my little sister has cancer and she needs treatment because there are no facilities to do that in Gaza and I don't get the right permit, she might die, and I grow up under that oppression and that poverty, and the wall comes down, am I also strong enough, or even constructed in such a way where I say, this is too far, I don't know that I am. I don't know that I am.
Upon first watch, I thought this was a candid and contemplative admission of Ta-Nehisi’s own moral frailty and a healthy exercise in empathy, which all mature adults should practice from time to time to expand their ethical imaginations. His point was straightforward. Evil is not some alien or inexplicable force. It is in the human heart. And in the right context, many of us would be the opportunistic criminals, the callous soldiers, the fanatical terrorists we casually condemn.1
I was therefore perplexed when I saw several prominent thinkers on Twitter criticizing Coates for his moral depravity.
