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Atlantic editor Ta-Nehisi Coates has also been covering the Trayvon Martin story since very early on. However, he tells Brooke that he hesitated for a couple weeks before he started writing about the story. Coates says he sees so many stories about young black men who are killed in questionable circumstances, and those stories are rarely covered by the media. 

 

Breton - The Commission

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor for The Atlantic, discusses the killing of a Florida teenager, and what it says about race, fear, and gun laws in America.

The uneasy embrace of slavery in colonial America produced an economic boom, rendered the founder's debates over freedom from kings and despots questionable distortions of truth and logic, slavery enshrined rascism in the U.S. Constitution and made the Civil War inevitable. The War itself created an identity for the United States from which there was no escape, even though it seems from time to time that the Civil War blinks out in relevance. Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates says this narrative has to change. In a piece in this month's Atlantic, Coates says more black Americans need to study the war and their role in it in order to understand their place in history.

In "Game Change," a book about the 2008 presidential campaign being released today, the authors report that Nevada Sen. Harry Reid's

encouragement of Obama was unequivocal. He was wowed by Obama's oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama – a "light-skinned" African American "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one," as he said privately. Reid was convinced, in fact, that Obama's race would help him more than hurt him in a bid for the Democratic nomination.

Reid's words have drawn a flurry of criticism from RNC Chairman Michael Steele and other politicians who compare the statement to Sen. Trent Lott's 2002 assertion that if the country had voted for segregationist Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond in 1948, "we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years." Here to help unpack coded racial statements and point out those sitting in plain view are Omar Wasow, contributor to The Root, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor for The Atlantic, and author of “The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood.”

This week marks 25 years since "The Cosby Show" first hit the airwaves. The show documented the rich and often hilarious family life of the Huxtables, an upper-middle-class black family living in Brooklyn. The show starred Bill Cosby as Dr. Cliff Huxtable, an obstetrician, his wife Claire, an attorney played by Phylicia Rashad, and their four (and later, five) children and eventually, grandchildren. The show revolutionized television's portrayal of black families; our friend, Essence Magazine Senior Editor Patrik Henry Bass, has been looking back at the television phenomenon and thinking about how it has aged. We also get a perspective from Ta-Nehisi Coates, who profiled Bill Cosby for The Atlantic last year.

In Post-World War II America, when the American Dream was in full bloom, African-Americans were systematically written out of the narrative. Key programs of FDR’s New Deal consciously excluded African-Americans and reinforced patterns of racial segregation. Today as we see the dream dwindling, a new Pew study reports that African-Americans are the most optimistic group about their economic future. An upbeat vision that persists even though unemployment among African-Americans is at 13.4 percent; a rate that surpasses the nationwide average.

Joining The Takeaway to sort through the trajectory of the African-American experience in pursuit of the American dream is Ta- Nehisi Coates. Coates is a contributing editor and blogger for The Atlantic, he’s also the author of “The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood”.

Adam Gopnik, New Yorker staff writer, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, contributing editor to The Atlantic and author of The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, talk about fatherhood in the age of Obama.

Adam Gopnik, New Yorker staff writer, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, contributing editor to The Atlantic and author of The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, talk about fatherhood in the age of Obama.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, journalist and author of The Beautiful Struggle, and John McWhorter, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, discuss Jesse Jackson's comments that Barack Obama talks down to black audiences.

What does it take for a father to raise black boys in 1980's West Baltimore? Just ask Ta-Nehisi Coates. His new book, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, details how his father raised him and his siblings under otherwise bleak ...