Ta-Nehisi Coates
Encyclopedia
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor for The Atlantic and blogs on its website. (He pronounces his name ˌtɑːnəˈhɑːsi ˈkoʊts .) Coates has worked for The Village Voice
The Village Voice
The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...

, Washington City Paper
Washington City Paper
The Washington City Paper is a U.S. alternative weekly newspaper serving the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.Founded in 1981, and published for its first year under the masthead 1981, taking the City Paper name in volume 2, by Russ Smith, it shared ownership with the Chicago Reader from 1982...

, and Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...

. He has contributed to The New York Times Magazine
The New York Times Magazine
The New York Times Magazine is a Sunday magazine supplement included with the Sunday edition of The New York Times. It is host to feature articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted many notable contributors...

, The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...

, The Washington Monthly
The Washington Monthly
The Washington Monthly is a bimonthly nonprofit magazine of United States politics and government that is based in Washington, D.C.The magazine's founder is Charles Peters, who started the magazine in 1969 and continues to write the "Tilting at Windmills" column in each issue. Paul Glastris, former...

, O, and other publications. In 2008 he published a memoir, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood.

Personal life

Coates was raised in a working class family in Baltimore, Maryland. His father, William Paul Coates, was a Vietnam veteran
Vietnam veteran
Vietnam veteran is a phrase used to describe someone who served in the armed forces of participating countries during the Vietnam War.The term has been used to describe veterans who were in the armed forces of South Vietnam, the United States armed forces, and countries allied to them, whether or...

 and former Black Panther
Black panther
A black panther is typically a melanistic color variant of any of several species of larger cat. Wild black panthers in Latin America are black jaguars , in Asia and Africa they are black leopards , and in North America they may be black jaguars or possibly black cougars A black panther is...

. His mother was the breadwinner in the family and his father was a stay-at-home dad during Ta-Nehisi's childhood. In high school, he attended Baltimore Polytechnic Institute
Baltimore Polytechnic Institute
Baltimore Polytechnic Institute is a US public high school founded in 1883. Though established as an all-male trade school,it now is a institution that emphasizes mathematics, the sciences, and engineering. It is located on a tract of land in North Baltimore at Falls Road and Cold Spring Lane,...

. Coates attended Howard University
Howard University
Howard University is a federally chartered, non-profit, private, coeducational, nonsectarian, historically black university located in Washington, D.C., United States...

 but dropped out to become a journalist. He currently resides in Harlem
Harlem
Harlem is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan, which since the 1920s has been a major African-American residential, cultural and business center. Originally a Dutch village, formally organized in 1658, it is named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands...

 with his wife and son.

The Beautiful Struggle

The Beautiful Struggle is Coates's first and only published book to date, an autobiography of his coming of age in West Baltimore. Chronicling his middle and high school years, it narrates his experiences both with his father's consciousness – his father's awareness of himself as a part of history, and his awareness of the strength and oppression of black people, born from his days in the Black Panthers – and the harsh, violent realities of life on the streets. Despite obvious intelligence, Coates remains unresponsive both to traditional schooling and his father's consciousness; however, as he matures he comes into his own consciousness – for him, a melange of Black Power texts and hip-hop beats. Armed with his knowledge of contemporaneous rap along with budding literary talent, he barely avoids failure; indeed he ends up at "Mecca," also known as Howard University. The book ends there, as Coates turns away from the rapidly changing world of hip-hop and the violence that governed his youth.

Key themes in this memoir include finding alternatives to coming-of-age narratives and achieving a non-violent masculinity. Coates turns to hip-hop during its Golden Age for the hyper-masculinity with which it was so clearly associated. Public Enemy, for example, a hip-hop group featured in the text, presented a clear image of masculine strength that was ultimately based on the performance of their poetry, rather than gang violence. The Afrocentricity of his school was also a key alternative because it created a rites-of-passage system that wasn't life-threatening like the coming-of-age narrative in the gangs. With the Afrocentric model, Coates can achieve manhood without needing to participate in the gang violence of his other school (the streets).

Blogging

Ta-Nehisi Coates was on the list of Best Blogs of 2011 by TIME Magazine
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...

 .

External links

  • His Atlantic blog
  • Ta-Nehisi Coates at Random House
    Random House
    Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...

  • Video conversations/discussions with Coates on Bloggingheads.tv
    Bloggingheads.tv
    Bloggingheads.tv is a political, world events, philosophy, and science video blog discussion site in which the participants take part in an active back and forth conversation via webcam which is then broadcast online to viewers...

  • http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100814580Interview with Terry Gross on NPR's radio show Fresh Air
    Fresh Air
    Fresh Air is an American radio talk show broadcast on National Public Radio stations across the United States. The show is produced by WHYY-FM in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Its longtime host is Terry Gross. , the show was syndicated to 450 stations and claimed 4.5 million listeners. The show...

    ]
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