the making of a martyr

I spent the better part of my Sunday afternoon listening to and reading the transcript from the conversation between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ezra Klein. Coates is one of my favorite contemporary writers, and given his response to Klein’s NYT op-ed in Vanity Fair on Charlie Kirk, I was surprised to see the news of their conversation. As I started listening, I was even more surprised to find out that they are friends (or at least, acquainted enough to text pretty frequently).

As I listened to their conversation, I was reminded of many conversations I’ve had with so many “well-meaning” white liberals over the years. Klein spends the bulk of the interview trying to persuade Coates into the idea that we must engage with the Charlie Kirks of the world as a matter of political strategy. He effectively reduces so much of the failure of the Democratic party to an abandonment of people we “disagree with”. 

It has been very interesting (derogatory) to see so many people come out in droves to whitewash Kirk’s very documented legacy of hatred. And it has been extremely revelatory whether or not they understand who they are actually abandoning when they ask us to make concessions for bigotry and bigots; they are willing to make that choice. Personally, I believe that we do not need to throw the most vulnerable groups of people under the bus to move our people forward. And by engaging with the Charlie Kirks of the world, and contributing to sanitizing his legacy, that is exactly what we do.

To his credit, Coates resists that pressure from Klein throughout their conversation. He acknowledges Kirk’s murder as a “horror”, while still holding his line on people and values over political strategy. He thankfully also problematizes the deep desire we have seen from people to detach his legacy from his life:

And I don’t take any joy in saying this, but we sometimes soothe ourselves by pointing out that love, acceptance, and warmth are powerful forces. I believe they are. I also believe hate is a powerful force. I believe it’s a powerful, unifying force. And I think Charlie Kirk was a hatemonger. 

It quickly became clear to me how much people like Ezra Klein see politics as an ideological thought experiment. Klein’s ability to separate Kirk’s life (all of the vitriol in his own words and actions) from his death (what happened to him) is the clearest reflection of his privilege. He sees engaging with Kirk as a necessary evil to widening the net, an exercise in the Jubilee-style of seeing “both sides” with people committed to others’ dehumanization. By treating politics as a thought exercise, he sees engaging with someone like Kirk, who is diametrically opposed to his values on paper, as an innocuous effort. Perhaps, even as an intellectual endeavor in pursuit of objectivity. With that understanding, it’s easy to see how much he simply fails to understand Coates throughout their conversation.

Coates recognizes that many of his readers have never shared Klein’s same privilege to see politics in that way. He goes on to explain why, as a result, many of us would naturally find it a lot harder to muster up any sort of empathy for a man who explicitly and loudly wished a similar fate for many of us.

I think Klein was also clearly looking for Coates to indulge his desire to admire Kirk. He comes across in the conversation (a few times) arguably as deeply enamored with Kirk. Even in his original op-ed in the NYT, he infamously argued that Kirk was doing politics “the right way”. In his decision to separate the man from his words,  I think he allowed himself to indulge the martyrization that the media propped up around him in light of his death. And given the blowback online, I think he wanted to use this conversation to get Coates to appease his desire to like Kirk. He wanted him to tell him that it was okay to admire the white nationalist propagandist, to want to include him in our tent.

At one point in their conversation, Ta-Nehisi spends some time talking about how he sees himself as a writer as part of his ancestry, and how that tradition is inseparable from his understanding of political violence in this country:

The fact of the matter is, as horrifying as the killing of Charlie Kirk was, and as horrifying as the feeling is in this moment, that we are in an era of political violence — and I don’t want to sound flip here. Political violence is the norm for the Black experience in this country. It just is. I don’t even mean like the Malcolm X, Martin Luther King variety of it — which is the norm, too.

You would be hard-pressed to have a conversation with a Black person in this country who is a descendant of slavery and not have them be able to tell you themselves: Look, my uncle, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, they lived in a small town in Mississippi, in Tennessee, in Alabama, and they got into some sort of dispute with a white man. Either they were lynched or we had to run.

Political violence runs through us. It is our heritage. Is that good? No. Do we valorize it? Absolutely not. Do we minimize it? Absolutely not.

But a life free of it is not a thing that’s really in reach in my time.

Klein responded:
Sometimes I think that having a historical scope that wide can make the present too deterministic.

And in that moment, I saw the play. I saw most visibly where our paths diverge, from journalists, intellectuals, pundits, and regular people trying to understand the world. The line between actively engaging with the history of this country and the desire to turn away from it, and to sanitize it. This is a play I am all too familiar with. 

When faced with the ugly truth of this country’s sins against communities of color, plenty of “well-meaning” liberals would rather avert their gaze and narrow the aperture of history. Using specific moments of violence (like Kirk’s murder) to further narratives on the perpetrators of said violence is a deliberate (and dangerous) choice. It constrains violence to specific moments against one specific group, in stark contrast to the long scope of political violence against multiple groups of color throughout our history. This twisting of history encourages an erasure of the very real lived experiences Black people have had (and continue to have) with racial terror.

Oddly enough, Coates’s acknowledgment of history (where we have been and what we have already endured) is precisely what allows him in the conversation to operate in a much more optimistic ideological positioning than Klein. Klein swan dives into the pessimism that many have attributed to Coates’s early work. It’s interesting to see them oscillate between fatalism, doomerism, and pessimism to land in a more realistic place at the end.

I finished the conversation thinking a lot about the backlash period that Klein touched on, and that I have seen many people talk about online. For many people of privilege, I think that they see cancel culture as the worst thing that can happen to them. Klein discusses some of the backlash over the last few years as the “politics of content moderation”, and laments about an unwillingness to engage “even opportunistically”. 

I actually do think we’re living in a backlash period of multiple movements, but I don’t see it in the same way that Klein does. I think the pendulum always swings back and forth.

Politically, I think that we’re in the backlash period of the Obama years and the Black Lives Matter movement. I think that becomes clear in the ways we’ve seen white nationalism normalized and platformed, and with people like Kirk becoming global martyrs. Quite often, I think that we are also dealing with the backlash from the #MeToo movement, when I reflect on how incel culture has been normalized and how so much discourse has shifted to prioritize the “male loneliness epidemic”. With all of the attacks on trans people and other members of the LGBT community, I think we’re dealing with backlash born purely out of hatred (of trans people wanting to live normal lives) and of the marriage equality wins. 

With all of that in mind, I land where Coates lands by the end of their conversation. I think we can actively choose to resist doomerism. I don’t think an unwillingness to engage with both sides is problematic because I firmly believe that we can get through this without sacrificing anyone in the process. I do not think we need to fight fascism with fascism.

And in light of the last few weeks, I do think we need to be a lot more honest and judicious about the people we choose to venerate. As Coates said, “I always think it’s important to differentiate how people die versus how they live.”