Baltimore. About family, influences about shaping identity. Coates i was very fortunate. I have six brothers and sisters total. I lived in a household in west baltimore, right across the street where the disturbances in baltimore started earlier this year. You know, the world you grew up in, what you know in terms of what you are going to go out and see, and then theres the world thats on tv, and the world i knew was one in which there was a great deal of violence in the neighborhoods, where violence shaped the social customs of folks, and where a larger violence that was not as obvious, not necessarily somebody pulling out a gun or five boys jumping you, but a larger aspect of violence shaped the community. The thing i think of, i live in a household where i had a mother and a father. This was not the typical profile for most of my friends. I had a mother and father who both worked, who by that point were both very educated people. I have the basics covered in terms of my food, clothing, etc. Yet, despite all that, when i went out into the world, when i left school left for school every day, i confronted all the sort of things that all the other boys in my neighborhood and girls in my neighborhood confronted. Rose which was the risk of violence . Coates all the time. Constant. The little things, as a child, i took it as normal, but now i look back and its insane. For instance, how many people am i walking with when i go to school . I think about that all the time. I remember when alan iversen came into the nba and it was all this hubbub about why he was with a posse, but i understood exactly why he needed a posse. He had come from a place where it was quite clear you needed security because you never knew what somebody might do to you. Rose is it true today in baltimore . Coates i dont know. I suspect it. I want to be very clear though i have not lived in baltimore in 20 years, but from what i can tell and what ive seen when i go back to visit family, i strongly suspect so. For instance, i just want to highlight this, the video of the woman beating on her son. Rose everybody praising her saying we need more discipline. Coates right, but that is fear. We need to be very clear. She said, i dont want him to end up like another freddy gray. That is fear from that woman. Rose fear that her son might be next. Coates very much so. She wants him to go home and be someplace where she feels he can be protected. That was very familiar to me. Rose that is commonly called the talk parents give to the children in which they say you got to stay away from where violence may happen. Coates right, and rose more though. Coates yes, and africanamerican parents understand the consequences. The idea is that you have to educate your children on how to basically deal with violence. While of the past year, weve seen that violence focus on the police and what police do and i was a child, and i suspect its the same for other folks. I know its the same with my son and my child, it does not just concern the violence of the police, but of the neighborhood. Africanamerican neighborhoods are on balance much more violent than other neighborhoods. Rose why is that . Coates that goes back to what i was trying to write about in the case for reparations. Africanamericans did not walk out of the cotton fields and chains and immediately walk into america. They suffered 100 years of segregation. What i focused on was housing segregation. This was important because housing segregation says where you can live, it also restricts what you can do with your money because housing is so central to wealth in this country. It also restricts what you are exposed to because your kids can only live in certain areas. On top of that, the other discrimination africanamericans suffered from, in terms of federal programs, discrimination in schools, Higher Education all of that piled into ones single geographic region, and the inability to escape that. It creates a sense of deprivation, a kind of frustration. We have people with obvious economic needs. So it is no surprise that those neighborhoods tend to be more violent than other neighborhoods where people have more opportunities. Rose you escaped to harvard. Coates not quite harvard. Rose but for you, it was better than harvard. Coates thats right. The long history that howard has for attracting people like Toni Morrison, for instance. It was an awakening for me. Rose how . Coates that was probably the first place where i saw black people who were doing a variety of things. Again, i had been aware of that. I was not deprived at all, but this was, like, the first place where you met black people, and someone might Say Something like they are going to take a year off and study in spain. What . Really . You can do that . That actually happens . The world is not as restricted as you think it is. Little things like that. Having professors from other places. I had a professor i think about this now from trinidad. The very thing i was talking about when i talk about housing segregation and what it deprives you of. I had so much exposure at Howard University to other ways of living, quite frankly. Rose you also talk thought about being a poet. Coates i did. I wrote quite a bit probably the first two or three years after i left my parents home. Even though i did not enough being a poet, i think that really marked my journalism, that study. Rose you think it was about command of language . Coates yes, and ultimately i think it was about the economy of language. Command, too, but economy, and that is so crucial in journalism , you know, the ability to Say Something with as much power as you can in the briefest amount of space. Rose you met a friend of mine and a friend of yours, david carr, sort of first job as a reporter. You spoke eloquently about him. What did he do that made you feel so thankful . Coates david saved my life. I think i met david two years after i had gone to college. I am two years out of baltimore at that point. It was not clear to me that i would make anything of myself. I came from a very, very positive home where folks really encouraged me. Rose but your dad had also been a former black panther . Coates he wasnt also present with very High Expectations for his children. It was not clear to me i had the ability to live up to those expectations. It was not clear to me i had it within me. When i went to david when i went to work for david, 20 years old, very young, right out of boyhood, he made it clear that i could do this and i could write and that that was possible. I could not believe that the essence of the job was find it interesting question, call some people, meet with people to investigate it, and then write it down. And they give you a check for it. Rose and he taught you coates oh my god, i remember the story i think about most with davids i had caught wind of a story in washington to perform the act of fictions when evictions when people would not pay their rent. There was a service and they were going around hiring Homeless People to do these. Homeless people making other people homeless effectively. David, brilliant journalist, but knew he had to sell a paper. That headline just got him right away. He said, go find that story. I had no hint of who was doing it or where it was. I went to a homeless shelter a few days after he sent me, and i just went up to the first person, scared out of my mind and said, do you do evictions . And the guys said, no, but that guy over there does. That was the story. And he demanded that. He demanded you face your fear. I stopped working with david like, in 1999. I worked a series of really not fun jobs. I think i lost three straight jobs, and i came to the atlantic in 2008. It was david who got me that job. Rose because he knew james bennett. Coates he knew james bennett. I think they had overlapped at the times together. Im sorry david is not here to see all of this. Rose me too. He was such an often guest on this program and had something unique about the ability to go right to the core. Even if everybody else was somewhere else, he knew where it was. Why is what you are doing resonating so much and so deeply with people like Toni Morrison . Coates that i cannot answer. I dont know. What i can tell you is i think certain aspects of africanamerican humanity, anger is one of those aspects, are not allowed to be aired in public the same way with other people. I think there is great fear when black to talk about their anger, black people talk about their anger, their negative emotions, their hatred of certain things. I think that makes people very very uncomfortable. Rose you also think, though help me understand. In a sense that there is builtin to the establishment of america and understanding that building on slavery, that what we have is people who feel empowered to do violence to the body of other people. I select those terms violence and body directly from reading you. Coates i do think that. And i think that rose you think it is power and control . Coates yes, and i think we have ways of covering that. One of the things i try to make clear repeatedly is any sort of term you think as innocuous or a euphemism that relates to race and policy in terms of race and black people ultimately comes back to violence and doing violence to africanamerican bodies. For instance, take something that seems abstract and disconnected like affirmative action. How is that related to physical violence . I assure you there are africanamericans in this country that want their kids and leave aside what you think of the policy, but those africanamericans trying to get advantages for their kids are trying to get them in the hopes that they approve their station and grow up somewhere not like where they grew up. Behind that is not just not growing up poor, workingclass or whatever. Its almost always i dont want you to have to walk out the door and look and watch your back the way i did. It is everywhere. Rose that brings me to an essential point. It is still very much with us, this act of violence against the body your terms. You have a basic difference in terms of how you see that from the president. Coates probably. Rose probably . You have had debates with him in the white house. Coates that is true. I think the president reflects in his Public Comment a kind of optimism that is very much rooted to the africanamerican experience. I think the notion of hope, the notion that it will be better tomorrow is almost maybe not even almost religious within the africanamerican community. A lot of that comes out of the church and the aspect or belief that good ultimately does triumph and justice ultimately does win out in the end. This comes out of my beliefs about the world in the natural world. If you were, say, an africanamerican who was in slaved in this country and died during the period of slavery that is the end of your arc as an individual human being. You lived and died as an enslaved person. Black folks who lived and died during the red summer thats the end of their arc. There is no date, broader sort of justice. There is no big sort of justice. Rose what about People Killed by acts of violence today . Coates that is the end of their arc. It ended right there. Eric garner, when he was choked out in staten island, that is the end of his body. Whatever great thing is going to come of it, he will not get to see it. Even assuming some great reform comes out of it. That is just my belief about the world. I do not believe there is an afterlife in which he will look down and see rose you are an atheist, to . Coates yes, i am, and that informs my belief on this. Sort of routing this in the body. If you can get that, you can get to the pain of what is actually happening. Martin luther king was shot and killed, and that is it. That is it. The wisdom rose and your hero, malcolm x. He was shot and killed. However, if i would say to you malcolm was killed by black people, if i would say to you the case that so stung you, so resonated within you, the story of a very accomplished young man, a family friend, if i remember coates my friend who was killed by an africanamerican police officer. Rose but that does not matter to you. Coates no. Rose you are saying what is relevant is he was a black man not who shot the gun. Coates yes, and he was living in a system that cast him a certain way. Rose and you dont want to hear about black on black violence. Coates i can hear it. Take the example of malcolm x. He should have never been in that fight to begin with. He should have been a senator somewhere or governor. Rose because of skills and talent. Coates right. He never should have been there. But he never should have been in a conversation. The very fact he had to be out there cannot be taken away from the context of White Supremacy the very fact that my friends my friend jones was gunned down cannot be subtracted from the fact that he was mistaken for another black person who was a suspected criminal. It does not matter at the end of the day who the actual agent is. There is a broad, systemic thing. Rose you believe and write eloquently that this is simply the forward projection of history from slavery. Coates i do. Very much so. There is some sort of serious direct reckoning with this. Were just going to keep going over and over and over again. I dont mean to harp on this but this question of who the killer is and what race i think is one of the distractions that takes us away from rose what is also a distraction, tell me when you watch the eulogy that the president gave in charleston. You were being interviewed somewhere . Coates i was sitting there, but the sound was off. We watched later. Rose it now is enshrined as one of the great president ial moments. Coates i thought it was a great speech. In my lifetime, i thought it was one of the greatest president ial addresses ive seen. Rose but . Coates i dont have a but. Rose yes you do. Coates i have to judge it within the context of who he is. President of the United States rose he had to speak that way . Coates yes, but anyone else who has been president or could have been president , anybody else potentially in that spot, i want barack obama in that spot, and i thought the address he gave was better than anything anyone else had done. Rose he did do a bow to the fact that we are all responsible. He has always said that. And you quarrel with that, dont you . Coates no, i dont. Because i think as americans, we all are responsible. Rose he quarrels with the fact that not only are some people responsible, but we have to be accountable with our self. Coates he actually did not do that in that speech. I quarrel with the notion that individual virtue is somehow a match for the forces and resources of a society angled in a particular direction in this case, towards White Supremacy. I dont think individual virtue, which some people call personal responsibility, is enough. Rose it will not get you there. Coates my parents were very morally and personally responsible. This did not change the fact that they lived in a community that was shaped by housing segregation. My grandmother raised three kids in the projects, sent all three of her young daughters off to college. She scrubbed white peoples floors and went to school at night. When it was time for her to buy a home, she had to buy a home on contract in a way that white people did not. That decreased the ability of my family to accumulate wealth. No amount of personal virtue on behalf of my grandmother would have stopped that. That goes to the issue of the state and society. That is structural. Rose what about baldwin . Coates i was deeply inspired by james baldwin. That is at the core of it. Rose what was it that inspired you . Coates he was a beautiful writer. Rose of course he is. Coates no, that is what inspired me. Rose it was not what he wrote about, but the way he wrote it. Coates the literary ability the form, how he begins as a letter and then slips into memoir and then the whole way drawing a theme through the entire book is an amazing act of literature. Rose what do you aspire to do . Coates to continue to write for the rest of my natural days and to continue to i hope one cannot really aspire to this but i hope that allows me to continue to care for my family and if i can do that, i would have a very happy life. Rose i do want to try to understand the message, beyond the eloquence, beyond the command of words, beyond the poetry. It seems to me those inks are those things are tools and skills in the exercise of presenting beliefs, ideas, convictions, experience. Coates right. Thats true. Im not trying to be difficult. You are exactly right. Its not that i dont im a writer, and its not if not for my interest in the tools, i would not care i would care about the message, but i would probably be home thinking about it. I would not be writing it. The tools are very, very important to me. There may come a day when i use the rose are the tools more important than the content . Coates thats a great question. Personally, probably, yeah. Rose i hear that from you. But you are being championed. Coates right. I appreciate that. Rose yes, the skill, but the content. Maybe you have given the content more fire because of your coates my hope someday very very soon is to use those same tools to do something else. Rose you mean write the Great American novel . Coates who knows . When i think about the rest of my life, i do not necessarily see myself using those tools to write the same thing, to convey the same message. Rose do you go back to all that malcolm x did and said and say you are most amazed by the eloquence he brought to it rather than what he did and said . Coates i am pretty amazed by his eloquence. I really am. The reason im differentiating as there were a lot of people who certainly a lot of black people who felt like malcolm felt, but the ability to articulate it in that way is incredible. Rose you know much more about this than i do. What happens is what artists do is give expression with their talent, their skill, to what we feel, and i suspect you are giving, i seem to think that you are on the raw edge to what they feel. Coates i cant say. Rose you go to aspen, and you write about that. Coates theres no guarantee they will experience the way i do. The obvious case of that is charleston. What i just was talking about, the idea of forgiveness and the way folks interacted with that the optimistic notion of there being some sort of great justice that will triumph at the end of the day i dont share that. A large number of africanamericans do. It is all through the tradition. It is dominant. Even in malcolm x, but i dont have that. It was deeper than his nation of islam idea because the idea was that through nationalism, one will triumph in the end. I do not necessarily know that i have that. Thats why its hard for me to say that i am necessarily connected with a large mass of people because its a very internal thing. Its very, very internal. Charlie rose on bloomberg televisions brought to you by boeing, where the drive to buil