Ta-Nehisi Coates
speaker
893 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 19 Jun
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And I was made aware that there hadn't been an Arab American speaker on the stage since 1988.
And so what I saw is I was watching this praise of this person
who had been pushed out of the frame in 64 and was being claimed as his hero was another group of people being pushed out the frame too.
That was like my initial thing.
And then after doing the research, what became clear to me was that Fannie Lou Hamer was not just a champion of black folks in Mississippi and not just a champion of black folks at all, but a champion of human rights.
Spoke out at a time against the Vietnam war when it was still not popular within the civil rights movement.
That in fact, she was not the only black woman that did that, that Coretta Scott King spoke out.
against the Vietnam War at a delicate moment and against Johnson, you know, at a very, very delicate moment before her husband did, much to the angst of the SCLC.
And I guess I was struck by the contradiction of praising people who in their time were radicals or seen as radicals, I should say, but not really living up to their example.
give any pushback to that i guess do you want to just explain that point of view i mean look i'll just take it from hers i mean look i heard from numerous people um that she pulled folks aside and you know disproportionately black women told me this and she pulled them aside and said well and this is before she was running by the way before like joe biden had dropped and communicate her deep discomfort you know and her deep feeling and empathy
And when I talked to them afterwards, their thing was, I don't know why she didn't communicate this publicly.
So let me just start from the perspective of what my reporting told me was like, what she presented publicly was not what she actually believed.
Now I could be wrong about that.
I could be wrong, but this was told to me, I heard this numerous times.
It's not like something that I just heard from one person.
And so the first thing is, I would say is, were you true to your own beliefs?
And were you true to your own beliefs about the value of human life?
Secondarily to that, are you being true to the people you claim?
As I talked about with Fannie Lou Hamer and Coretta Scott King.
And the third thing is, Tim, I can't give an ultimate verdict on whether Gaza lost her to the election or not.
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