Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Ta-Nehisi Coates and Angela Davis spoke at the University of Michigan’s Rackham Auditorium on February 19, 2025, interviewed by my colleague Angela Dillard, the vice provost for undergraduate education. The event was arranged by the Letters, Sciences and Arts Student Government.
It was a wide-ranging conversation, and I only want to call attention here to some of the remarks on Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Early on, Ta-Nehisi Coates observed, “We are at a moment right now where people are asking themselves why can’t the Democratic Party defend this assault on democracy . . . and I would submit to you that if you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.”
Coates said he was convinced that there was some way in which the Democratic Party’s support for the Gaza genocide cost it the election — not, he said, necessarily in a demographic sense, but in a moral sense.
I think he was implying that the party did not seem to stand for anything. He said he attended the Democratic Party Convention last year, and noted the praise heaped on prominent African-American leaders of the past and present. But, he said, everybody knew that one group would be excluded from these paeans.
He was referring to the party’s refusal to allow a Palestinian to speak on the convention’s main stage.
The Democratic Party has long had an Arab-American Caucus, built by James Zogby, but although the party uses it to seek Arab-American votes, they are treated as second-class citizens.
Coates spoke about his brief visit to the Palestinian West Bank in 2023, which he reflected on at length in his recent book, 
The Message (Penguin Random House 2025). Click here to buy.
That led Angela Davis to recall her 2011 visit to the West Bank, in the company of some South African activists. She said that it struck her and her friends as in some ways a worse human rights travesty than Jim Crow or Apartheid.
Coates agreed. He pointed to the segregated highways in the Palestinian West Bank, such that Palestinian drivers are excluded from some roads used by Israel squatter-settlers.
Davis said she was always able to be in the street in the segregated south.
Davis recalled being shocked by what she saw in 2011, which in turn surprised Coates. He seems to have been a little embarrassed by only catching up to the Apartheid reality in the West Bank a couple of years ago and hadn’t thought that even an activist like Angela Davis could have also been behind the curve.
It goes to show, they agreed, the way in which American mass media pull the wool over our eyes about certain political realities.
Davis also recalled the long history of Black and Palestinian solidarity. She remembered sympathy for the Palestinian struggle among her colleagues at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s.
Coates reflected on the severe pushback he received in media interviews for The Message. He said no other reaction could be expected, given the investment in oppressive ideologies of American institutions. What else, he asked, would you expect.
CBS journalist Tony Drokoupil, an Israel booster whose children live there, implicitly accused Coates of terrorism for his criticism of Israeli Apartheid in places like al-Khalil (Hebron) on the West Bank. CBS reprimanded Drokoupil, but one Paramount executive defended him.
The US media and public sphere has taken on board the demand for Israeli impunity and special pleading made by powerful backers of the state in the United States, including Evangelical Christians, so Coates’s matter-of-fact descriptions of the reality in a place like Hebron seemed outlandish to these ignorant or bigoted media interviewers.
CBS journalist Tom Fenton once lamented that the coverage of foreign affairs in the US mass media is so bad that it constitutes a danger to national security. In recent years the problem has gotten worse and worse.
Kudos to Davis and Coates for reflecting so powerfully on that sordid reality, which most Americans seem determined to ignore, despite their active complicity in Palestinian Apartheid and genocide.
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