AMHERST — Ta-Nehisi Coates, an award-winning writer about being black in America, told 1,000 people at Amherst College Tuesday night that race should be a nonissue.
“I’m not for black and white together,” Coates said. “I’m for getting rid of the whole idea altogether.”
As Coates approached the podium, the crowd that packed LeFrak Gymnasium erupted into an extended standing ovation. “I’m overwhelmed!” he exclaimed.
Raised in Baltimore in the 1980s, Coates has written about experiencing a multitude of problems prominent in black America: overwhelming drug use, crippling poverty, and being seen as of a different class of American than the norm.
Coates, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, won the National Book Award in 2015 for his nonfiction “Between the World and Me,” written in the form of a letter to his son. He currently writes “Black Panther” for Marvel Comics.
On Tuesday he read an excerpt from “Between the World and Me,” in which he emphasized the power that fear has over many black Americans:
“I felt the fear … My father was afraid. I felt it in the black leather of his belt … To be black as a Baltimore youth was to be naked to the world.”
Coates described many common problems faced by black youth. Recalling an incident when he was 11 years old, Coates said a fellow young black boy aimed a pistol at him. “I was amazed that death could rise up from a boyish afternoon,” he said.
Coates spoke about American democracy and how it evolved based on, and not despite, the prominence of slavery. “At the roots of any society is somebody taking something from somebody else,” he said. “Go back to how these democratic processes came to be and you find a big crime.”
Coates touched briefly on the current presidential election. He did not officially support either candidate, yet spoke about Donald Trump: “You couldn’t be a major party candidate for governor acting like that if you were black.”
Coates suggested that “being black does not give you great insight into racism in this country,” noting that simply being American does not give one insight into what it means to be American.
This point rang true with Tanya Calvin, 19, an Amherst College student from Chicago.
She attended the talk on the advice of her father, who is black. Her mother is Mexican. “I knew that since my dad had read (Coates’) book he must have been a pretty big deal,” she said, noting that her father is not much of a reader.
“I had never really considered what kind of superiority I felt,” she said about her feelings of race relations and morality. “I thought (the talk) would reaffirm a lot of what I thought, but it put all of my ideas on their head.”
Sean Paul, 20, of New York City, said he attended the event because of the lack of such speeches on race in America. “I gained a lot of validation,” he said.
Coates’ thoughts on safe spaces appealed to Paul, who is black. “Safe spaces are actually implicit for a very wide subset of the population,” Paul said, while recognizing that other groups are discredited because of their desire for such safe spaces.
Sheila Chukwulozie, 22, from Nigeria, said she came to see Coates speak because she read “Between the World and Me” and is interested in race in America. “It’s interesting because I feel like to understand any part of the world, you have to understand how America operates because American culture manifests itself in so many parts of the world.”
She added, “My culture — Nigerian culture — has been affected by American culture.”
Even Nigerian ideas of race have been influenced by America’s view of race, Chukwulozie said. When she told her relatives in Nigeria that she was attending the predominantly white Amherst College, “They said ‘Thank God, you can focus on your studies.’ It’s very shocking.”
Geoff Dempsey can be reached at geoffrey.i.dempsey@gmail.com.