A conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates
By Ella Tracy
Award-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates spent an evening on St. Kate’s campus on Thursday, Oct. 23, speaking to a sold-out audience at the O’Shaughnessy as part of the 2025 One Read for Racial Justice series. Coates’ newest book, The Message, was selected as this year’s featured book. The One Read for Racial Justice initiative at St. Kate’s is an “annual, collaborative, campus-wide initiative that seeks to raise awareness about racial justice issues, create opportunities for dialogues across difference and discipline and to promote community.”
The Message is written as a letter to Coates’ students. By presenting personal experiences that have shaped his views, Coates explores how the stories we choose to tell - and those that we choose to exclude - influence our perceptions of reality. Coates travels to Senegal, South Carolina and Palestine, where he finds himself reckoning with myths, book banning and genocide.
In addition to Coates’ talk, collaborative events have been hosted throughout the semester encouraging St. Kate’s students, staff and faculty to engage in challenging conversation. Students in The Reflective Women courses submitted letters to Coates as part of their coursework, sharing their own thoughts about his work and asking nuanced questions. As part of their Community Engaged Learning project, some sections of TRW also constructed a dialogue wall in the Library, displayed for October. Coates met with several of these students, as well as graduate MLIS students and selected undergraduate clubs and organization representatives prior to the talk.
Photo credit: St. Catherine University, Rebecca Slater '10
Coates began his time on stage with a brief speech emphasizing how stories and experiences do not exist in silos. He said, “We can no longer continue to view our pain and our agony as separate from the pain and agony that our government inflicts around the world.” Coates described how so often groups or individuals try to win at the expense of another, but that approach will not bring liberation to all people.
The remainder of the conversation was moderated by Duchesne Drew, Senior Vice President at American Public Media Group and President of Minnesota Public Radio. Drew and Coates covered a wide range of topics, including Coates’ motivation for writing The Message, the strained relationship between journalism and race, the importance of reading and searching for one’s great passions to live a meaningful life.
I spoke with Coates after the event, seeking advice for young journalists entering a tumultuous professional sphere. He drove home the importance of being skeptical. During the talk, he said, “There’s a voice in the back of your head telling you when something sounds suspicious. Listen to that voice.” He told me he believes new institutions and publications are a necessary part of the future, and he will look to the new generation of journalists to know best how to build new spaces.
We also discussed libraries as a strategy to subvert book bans in schools. “From an African American perspective… there have always been people trying to police books,” Coates said. Coates added that he hopes that The Message is just one of many books students and young people will read that help them to envision a better future. After that, what we do with his message is up to us.
Cover photo credit: St. Catherine University, Rebecca Slater '10
