Thinking deeply

Just this past Wednesday, the talented and articulate Ta-Nehisi Coates confirmed that he would cast his ballot for Bernie Sanders this primary season. Coates is commonly considered one of the most revered journalists and scholars on the modern and historical prevalence of America racism, and he’s ruffled more than a few feathers in his writing. His prose illustrates the visceral, violent, emotional reality that persists for African-Americans. The elegance of his work and steadfastness of position have made him a figurehead of the discussion regarding American racism. The announcement that he would be voting for Bernie Sanders is a pretty big deal, especially for a candidate so worried and so dependent on attracting minority voters.

Pundits across the Twittersphere clamored over the news that Coates had cast out his endorsement.

But he hadn’t. In fact, he hadn’t done much at all.

Coates affirmed that fact only hours later online at “The Atlantic,” the publication on which he serves as an editor. His blog post, “Against Endorsements,” outlined his thought-process regarding Sanders. Without too heavily paraphrasing a far greater writer, Coates essentially said that, as a journalist, he feels obligated to ask questions that often make people uncomfortable in the hopes that their discomfort will advance some sort of common discourse. When asked a question he found uncomfortable, he recognized that reversal and, reluctantly, answered.

Yet, Coates’ clarification that his decision to vote for a candidate is not synonymous with approving of their politics led to a more important point. In very frank terms, he stated that “The idea that anyone would cast a vote because of how I am casting my vote makes my skin crawl. It misses the point of everything I’ve been trying to do in my time at ‘The Atlantic.’ The point is to get people to question, not to recruit them into a religion.” In those words lie the crux of Coates’ frustration—that people more quickly look to him as a gospel rather than skeptic.

What he’s saying is important. The idea of an endorsement, from a toothpaste commercial to a presidential election, is to convince those with less knowledge that someone with more knowledge would choose this and therefore the unknowledgeable should too. Why then should we care who Brad Pitt votes for? A phenomenal actor in his own right, it’s probably fair to say that he, and most of Hollywood, isn’t a foreign policy aficionado or a healthcare expert. We like their movies, and we might even like their political affiliations, but does their endorsement really affirm whether or not a candidate can aptly navigate a war or a natural disaster?

Part of what makes Coates’ writing so powerful is that he speaks about something he knows intimately, both as a form of lived experience and scholarly research. His confrontations with racism have left friends and family dead and have led him into the archives of our country’s ugliest past. He has used that knowledge as a way to better educate and, as an aspiration, recalibrate an integral aspect of American society. Whether or not you agree with the way Coates approaches and addresses racism in America, you can’t help but respect that his opinion is grounded in fact. When he talks about Ferguson or mandatory minimums or Al Sharpton, it’s worth listening. But Syrian refugees and the Paris climate talks? He’d happily point you in the other direction.

The emphasis here is not on the name behind the endorsement but rather the body of work that led to it. The conscious decision to listen to a talking head instead of a body of research is half of what plagues the American political system today. It’s the reason that the average citizen feels less involved and less interested. When powerful people rave about what they don’t know, it’s hard to hear the people that do.