It's called the gray area right for a reason right you know I and I'm giving you black and white I love that I mean this is this is this is this is the and this is what we're here for you know I it's it's called that because I think life is messy and complicated and the temptation to blot out complexity for the sake hold on now hold on Professor just the the tendency to out complexity for the sake of a more simple story is understandable but I do think it can become dangerous in its own way and I'm constantly attuned to that threat maybe too attuned actually and I like that this is a reflex you challenge in the book and you're challenging here because it really forced me to think about it as I was reading it and I'm thinking about it now and this isn't a debate show like and it's not a certain CBS Morning Show I don't give a about winning arguments or creating spectacle like I really want to understand what someone is thinking and what I can

learn from them. So, but Sean, it is complex. It's just not complex in the way they say it is. Okay, so you got to help me understand that there is complex. It is extremely complex, but just not in what the way they, the complexity that they're selling you is not the complexity. See, that's what I want to iron out, right? So, like, when I was reading it in the book and listening to you when you compare Palestine to the Jim Crow South, right? Like, my reaction while reading that is, yeah, these are both moral obscenities, but they're different. And I do think it's complicated. And so, tell me about that. I would tell me about that. Why I think it's complicated? Yeah, like, why would you say it's different? You know, like, first of all, do you think the Jim Crow South was uncomplicated? No, just complicated in a different way, right? I mean, I can tell you why I think they're different. Okay, go ahead. I think it matters that many Palestinians still support the October

7th attacks. I think that black people in the Jim Crow South wanted to be treated as equal citizens and fully democratic in America. I think that matters. I don't think it's generally true that Palestinians want equal rights in a fully Democratic Israel, and if they had that, they might vote to end its existence as a Jewish State. And you know what? If I was a Palestinian who was pulling my friends and my family out of the rubble, I'd probably vote the same way. I mean, personally, I hate the idea of a state based entirely on religious or ethnic identity, but I'm not Jewish, and I don't live in Israel, and I understand why this is a problem for them, right? And I also think it matters that Jews are also indigenous to that land, have nowhere else to go. I just think that complicates the picture in other ways. That's my feelings now. You can go ahead, and so I'm... I am of the mind, and everybody does not have to agree with this, but I just want to clarify the

the a real distinction, and then I want to go through the example you gave because I actually think it's quite helpful. Yeah, I am of the mind that discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion is never acceptable. There is nothing in this world that will make separate and unequal, and as far as I am concerned, I will use this word, and we can debate this word if we need to. There is nothing that makes a part tile, nothing that's not complex for me. It's like the death penalty is not really complex for me. Yeah, because you cannot guarantee to me that the state will not execute an innocent person. You just can't, can't age. I mean, I might not be for it even if you could, but among other reasons like so I'm against it, period. Like there aren't exceptions to that. It's hard as an African American for me to argue for exceptions for aarti, and I will tell you why. See, the thing you have to do is not judge Jim Crow from right now, or I would

argue slavery from right now. You have to put yourself in the shoes of the people that were there in the debates at the time, and I assure you they did not think it was simple. And I like this reasoning about complexity. You talk to Thomas Jefferson, right? He would have said, did say, you know what, I think this is a moral abomination, but we have the wolf by the ear. That's how he described the practice of holding people and selling them for profit into slavery. What did he mean by we have the wolf by the ear? He means we need to let it go, but we dare not. He's trying to get to, in his mind, the complexity of enslavement. If not for the Civil War, I like if not for like a cataclysmic war that kills what, 800,000 Americans, or certainly there's no stroke of to pin abolition. Why? Because they describe what are we going to do with them, where they're going to go, you know what I mean, all of these, you know, sort of issues in addition to

this in addition what they would say is democracy is fit for a certain class of people. This is what they believed at the time, so you have to take it seriously even if it sounds ridiculous to you right now. Democracy is fit for a certain class of people. These people have not been educated. There are just a few generations out of the Ws of Africa where they worship some Savage God and they Bailey Chris like this. These, this is the logic. If you moved into the 20th century getting closer to our lifetimes, people would have said what about crime, crime in these people's neighborhoods. They would have cited the statistics and they would have been real. They would have been real. They said crime in these, you know, black quars, these start is ridiculous. If we integrate, we will inherit that. We will now have to deal with that. So like to them, segregation was also complicated. I think in those instances like you have to just like this becomes right or and wrong. Yeah, you know like I think was crime not higher in Black. Yeah.

it was, yeah, it was. Can I guarantee that they free all enslaved people? And they try to, you know, move into America. Actually went remarkably smooth, so that's not a good example, you know what I mean? I mean, it turned out that those arguments were cover for something else, as they might be here, by the way. Yeah, um, but what I'm saying is in that time, it is not as if people were like, This is simple and clear. They were not. I have to ask myself, Do I believe that a demographic project, which is what Israel is and what they say out loud, does that goal accord with my humanistic values? Do I want my country supporting that? And I don't think I do, because the moment you say that you must discriminate, you have to, yeah. There is no world in which you have a Jewish democracy, you have a Jewish state, yeah. But you just, and that, and again, I always had to be careful about this. It's not the Jewishness of it, you understand? Like, I would believe this about ethnicity, period, across the board. I

haven't been to Palestine. Oh man, you but I know it's bad, and I know what you saw there is wrong, and I don't believe there is any such thing as a moral occupation because whatever the reasons for it, you cannot occupy a people without visiting cruelties upon them. Just full stop, right? For me, the first question I go to, the main question, is, is it necessarily the Badness of the situation which is incontestable and egregious and obvious? It's how the hell do we stop it, right? And for me, all these complications that I was mentioning earlier, that's the stuff that has to be accounted for if there's any hope of a way forward. But you're not here to proffer some two-state solution or... but I am here for a solution. I have a solution for you, and it goes back to that interview on CBS. You, there is no... I mean, I don't actually have a solution, but I do. I do. We are sitting here asking ourselves why we don't have a workable

solution while we exclude one of the two significant parties, and I guess my politic would say the most significant party, because that's just where I come from in terms of the press from the conversation. How can you decide what is going to be the solution when every night when I cut on TV and I watch reports from the region? I can name only one person of Palestinian Heritage who I regularly see articulate a solution or an idea. How do we get to a solution when our journals, our newspapers, our literature that dominates the conversation is not just devoid of Palestinian perspectives, but it's devoid of Palestinians themselves? We are not having a conversation about solutions because we've basically prevented a whole group of people from entering into the frame. And so, it's like we're kind of putting the cart before the horse. We're frustrated that we don't have a solution, but we're not actually talking to somebody, you know what I mean? It's like, you know, you go into the sorry

I cook, so I have all of these cooking metaphors. No, I love it. Okay, so you go in, and you do your mac and cheese, and you know it turns out terrible, and you're like, Why did this turn out terrible? Well, do you have a recipe? Like, do you actually, did you take the time to come up with, you know what I mean, the ingredients? Did you talk to anybody? Like, or did you just go in and, you know, throw pasta and milk, and you know what I mean? And you know, do you know anything about a roux? Do you know anything about that? You know what I mean? Do you know anything about, like, what cheese melts and with that? Like, have you had these conversations? This is on us, by the way. This is journalism's great sin, and this is how, and I'm going to say something like you, I called, I'm about to say the extremist thing, is I called it CBS, right? This is our contribution to a part-time because we are the agents by which people are

dehumanized, you know, and I want to make that very, very specific. When you exclude people from the conversation, when they don't have a role in your journalism, when they don't have a role in your film, when they don't have a role in your TV, when they don't have a role in your books, they cease to exist as people and become these kind of cartoon cutouts that other people make of them, and they become much more easy to kill. That's on us. It's extreme, but I believe it. I don't know, man. I do. I think our moral imagination needs to extend in both directions as far as possible, but the more I've listened to you, and as I made my way through your book, I think I understand where you're coming from. I understand writing this as a kind of corrective, feeling like there was a lack of empathy for the Palestinian experience because their story hasn't been told enough, hasn't been represented enough. I can understand that. I really can. And if I'm being

honest. I mean, I think if I went there like you and saw the suffering firsthand, all of this would feel a whole lot less abstract to me, and it would hit differently. And I don't know how that would change how I... So, so when are you going to go, Sean? I don't know. You should go. I don't know. I know it's hard, and I look... I'm putting you on the spot, but it was extremely hard for... I'm going to fail this class, aren't I? No, no, you're not. No, no, no. Here's... Look, look, look. First of all, you are a journalist. That's the first thing, okay? That's my first case toward you for going. The second case is this is being done in your name, man, and we're going to pay for it. We're going to pay for it one way or the other. We will pay for this. We will pay for this. I... God, I'm now... I think it's your responsibility to go. I'm sorry. I really do believe that I...

really, really do believe that because, um, you are someone who is obviously curious. You obviously want to, you know, know things, and the reason why I'm pushing you is because that kind of, uh, vague sense of injustice is exactly what I had. That is exactly how I felt, man. But can I push you a little bit on that? Here's the thing. I have no doubt about that, but if I went to Israel and toured the villages that were plundered on October 7th, I'd feel the same kind of indignation and rage. You should, though. So what do you do with that? But I don't think those are contrary. No, I don't mean to say they're contrary. I'm just saying I would still be left feeling the sense of hopelessness, really, at the tragedy of it all, and the fact that it just seems to be... I think you would know more, though. I think you would know more, no doubt about that, and I think you can't judge how you would feel until you

go um and you know what one of the reasons I I haven't opined on this issue very much is that I feel like I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. That's why you that's why you go and I don't want to be one of those who opine on things great but it doesn't it doesn't you know uh obate the responsibility for going. That's why you go that that's why you go man and um I I don't know I mean I I I think you should not now I'm being Professor again like you just don't know until you go through it. You don't you don't know what's what's going to happen. I I I do want to speak to your instinct though that a horror at the desecration and destruction of of human life on October 7th is somehow contrary or somehow stands even in Conflict. I would argue with the opposition to a part tide and I I've thought about this quite a bit right there is a long record.

of people who have causes that I would find sympathetic erupting in a kind of violence that I recoil from. Okay, I'm going to speak as I I'll just speak from the perspective of an African-American and African-American history. Um, and all my black people are about to cast me out for what I'm about to say. Um, but I think it's a good example. 1830s. Um, Nat Turner is enslaved in Virginia, has no rights over his body, has no rights over his family, have no rights over their body. Anything can be done to him at any moment. He has no control over himself and decides in that situation. He's locked out of the political system, can't vote his way out, can't do anything, decides at that moment that the way out is violence. And the way out is not just violence. The way out is Massacre. That is to say, not a violent rebellion in which we strategically target things, for instance, like John Brown targets the Arsenal at Harper Ferry, but actual Slaughter. Okay

that means every slave master, every slave mistress, every child must die, gathers together his army, and they kill everybody they come across. They hack infants in the crib, kill women, men, etc. I, you know, I was raised with Nat Turner as a hero of resistance, and it's understandable why Nat Turner would be a hero of resistance. But the older you get, you know, especially if you're going to write, right, like you're going to write, you know what I'm saying, like not if you're just going to, you know, sort of construct a mythology that all people construct, but if you're going to write, you're going to interrogate your own stories. You take a deeper look at that, he say, does the complete degradation of my life make it right for me to take the life of any member of that class that is responsible for that? It never sat with me, it never, and even as a child, it didn't. You know, I heard you say your oppression won't save you. It won't. I mean, this is it. It won't.

save you from these moral conflicts. It won't save you from these moral quandaries. But Sean, my feeling that that doesn't sit right with me, my belief that somewhere on those plantations, there was an enslaved black person that looked at that and said, I can't get with this, doesn't make enslavement right. You understand recoiling at horror, at that death, does not somehow make it difficult to pass judgment on the system. I actually think they emanate from a, I hope they emanate, I think they emanate from a similar value, and that is the value of human life. I guess there's this broader question about how much context do we need in order to pass moral judgment, and I'm not sure how answerable that question is. Got to go because what fair, fair, Ian, fair. Um, this is what I thought. You sound like me. No, I mean you sound like me. This is what I thought. Like even like on the eve of the trip, I was like, Boy, this is going to be

really complicated, like I thought the morality of it would be. And I think part of it is, and you know, I want to say this is like, there's a reason why I began that chapter in Yad Vashem. And it is because the fact of existential violence and industrial genocide brought to the, you know, the Jewish peoples of this world is a very, very real thing. And it's like, how do you confront that and reconcile that with Israel? Because you have, you know, you want that group of people to be okay. You feel like that maybe that group of people is entitled to certain things. You know, I mean that in the best kind of way, like they're entitled to a kind of safety given what happened to them. You know, you feel deep, deep sympathy. And so before I went, I was like, wow, this is going to be morally like dicey. I think you should go. I'm not saying even saying you're going to agree with me, like that's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying you're going to end up

where I ended up, but yeah, I think you should go.

The Gray Area | Ta-Nehisi Coates on visiting Palestine

Vox helps you understand our world.

Vox video is Bridgett Henwood, Cath Spangler, Adam Freelander, Joey Sendaydiego, Coleman Lowndes, Christophe Haubursin, Kim Mas, Laura Bult, Ed Vega, Rajaa Elidrissi, and with research support from Melissa Hirsch. 

Become a member today: https://www.vox.com/support-now

Check out our FAQ on permissions and licensing of our videos: https://www.voxmedia.com/pages/licensing

✉️ Write us: voxvideo@vox.com
