Video by Novara Media
In a wide-ranging conversation, Ash Sarkar and Ta-Nehisi Coates open with a playful contest over which country has exported more racism, with Coates arguing that America has outdone its British origins through sheer scale and cultural footprint, while Sarkar counters that British fingerprints are everywhere from Palestine to the invention of the concentration camp. They then turn to the word “comrade,” which Coates chose as the opening of The Message, explaining it as a gender-neutral term of shared struggle inherited from his father’s Panther Party days and the political friendships he refuses to let slide into mere socialising.
The discussion deepens into how to build cross-racial working-class solidarity without abandoning those under attack. Sarkar describes trying to find common ground with her white working-class brother-in-law rather than letting immigration disagreements push him toward the right, while Coates insists that mass incarceration and racial wealth gaps in America mean race is itself a material interest that cannot be triangated away. Both agree that defending minorities is a moral imperative that should not be traded for majoritarian economic terrain, and that art and storytelling are necessary to justify systems of oppression, even as material conditions drive them.