Glenn Loury
The Glenn Show
John McWhorter – Glenn and John Throw Down over The Message
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John McWhorter – Glenn and John Throw Down over The Message

This episode of The Glenn Show with John McWhorter is a continuation of our previous episode. In that episode, we talked about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message. But the conversation could only go so far, because John hadn’t yet read the book. Now he’s read it, and we really go at it. We disagree about the book’s value, we disagree about what it’s trying to accomplish, we disagree about its narrative strategies, we disagree about its author’s intentions, we disagree about the political project at its core. We disagree about practically everything, except this: the guy can write one hell of a sentence.

John thinks Coates has a responsibility, as a writer with a big audience, to take a broader historical view of the Israel-Palestine conflict. He believes Coates is imposing his analysis of American race politics—an analysis that John thinks is already overly simplistic—on a situation to which it’s just not applicable. The result, in John’s view, is an insufficient account of a complex situation that ignores the history of the region and Israel’s legitimate concerns for its own security. As you likely know, I see things differently. To me, the book—specifically the last chapter (which is based on his trip to Israel/Palestine, though related themes are broached in an earlier chapter on his visit to Senegal—is Coates’s deeply personal, humanistic account of the myths and narratives that enable both the violent repression of large groups of people and the persistence of those people, whether they be Jews, Palestinians, or anyone else.

This debate is about more than The Message, though. It’s about our divergent attitudes toward the current conflict, and the different frames through which we’ve come to view it. Our disagreement runs deep, but it’s not definitive: our friendship and intellectual partnership are very much intact. We’ll be discussing more books soon—David Greenberg’s John Lewis: A Life and Karen and Barbara Fields’s Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life.

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1:22 The Coates debate continues

3:18 John: Coates is a beautiful writer, but

5:44 John: … The Message is suffused with incuriosity and simplistic thinking

13:45 Glenn: Coates is talking about humanism and power, not race

18:11 Ground News ad

20:25 Is it “all about whitey”?

22:11 Glenn: Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote this book. What am I doing?

27:40 What kind of historical imagination is at work in The Message?

34:11 Moral clarity or abdication of responsibility?

36:30 Pro-Palestinian writers John considers acceptable

41:54 The next entries in Glenn and John’s book club

42:04 Coates’s now notorious interview on CBS Mornings

48:45 What is the black intellectual’s role today?

52:16 The counterexample of South Africa

Recorded October 19, 2024


Links and Readings

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, The Message

Glenn and John’s previous conversation

John’s NYT column, “Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Myth of Black Fragility”

Michael Chabon’s novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

Jeffrey Sachs on YouTube

Judge Andrew Napolitano on YouTube

Trevor Noah’s conversation with Coates

Ezra Klein’s conversation with Coates

Peter Beinart’s conversation with Coates

David Greenberg’s new book, John Lewis: A Life

Karen and Barbara Fields’s book, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

Glenn’s memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative

James Baldwin’s essay, “Letter from a Region in My Mind”


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Glenn Loury
The Glenn Show
Race, inequality, and economics in the US and throughout the world from Glenn Loury, Professor of Economics at Brown University and Paulson Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute