We can't compromise with people who want to take our liberties

If Ezra Klein is the white liberal the rest of us are supposed to be counting on in the fight for our collective liberation, we’re cooked.

By Shalise Manza Young

“We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity, and right to exist.”—Robert Jones Jr.

It became pretty clear during the hour-plus sit-down Ezra Klein had with journalist and cultural commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates in late September that Klein is the type of person Jones meant when he posted those words on Twitter a decade ago.

Because to hear him tell it, in Klein’s world, the way forward for Democrats is to pander to the MAGA set.

“Even before the question of what your policies are, and I believe this very deeply, there is a question of whether or not people feel like you respect them and like them, even if they disagree with you. Before I think people will give you power, they don’t even ask if they like you, they ask whether you like them. And I think a lot of the country feels we don’t like them,” Klein said.

He continued, “And that’s going to require, changing that, is going to require making moves that somehow send a loud enough signal that people begin to think we have changed at some level.”

Setting aside Klein’s use of “we” there—he is supposed to be a journalist and not a Democratic Party representative—his words are those of someone who has never seen himself as part of a marginalized group.

As a Black woman with three daughters, one of whom is queer, I will not now, nor will I ever, think people are swell if they have gleefully voted time after time for politicians who tell them Black people are both lazy and violent but also being handed the jobs white people are “entitled” to, that queer people shouldn’t exist, and that women shouldn’t have control of their own bodies (even as those politicians cut the social safety net from under them).

This discussion between Klein and Coates was spurred by their opposing reactions to the killing of Charlie Kirk. The day after Kirk’s death, Klein wrote in the New York Times that Kirk—a far-right podcaster who took bad-faith arguments and belittlement on tour to “debate” college kids and who oversaw an organization that targeted professors and other academics (many Black, people of color and/or LGBTQ) for speech it didn’t like—had done politics “in exactly the right way.”

A few days later in Vanity Fair, Coates ran through a litany of Kirk’s public statements, some of them so beyond the pale that Coates told Klein he was uncomfortable just repeating them in print. In his column, Coates noted that the most telling part of Klein’s column was that “for all his praise, there was not a single word in his piece from Kirk himself.”

Even by the time they sat down for their discussion, after days of Klein being criticized for whitewashing Kirk, Klein wouldn’t bring himself to simply say, “yeah, with reflection I missed the mark on that one.”

Instead, he tried to rationalize to Coates that he wanted to be part of the public discussion and collective grieving of those who admired or loved Kirk (which a cynic might interpret as a self-important figure simply wanting the attention that would come from writing on a significant event).

Listening to Klein, Coates rubbed his temple and finally said: “I guess…was silence not an option?”

The conversation could have ended there. Gather your belongings, tip your bartender, head outside to meet your Uber.

But it continued for a little more than an hour—an hour of Coates offering his experience, his great-grandfather’s experience, his grandfather’s experience as Black men in this country, and the history of political violence Black people have endured here for centuries, all of which makes the current moment upsetting but not surprising.

Klein spent the hour brushing all of that aside, calling Coates’ history-rooted views “fatalistic,” and coming off as a little brother desperately trying—and ultimately failing—to show his big brother that he really is smart.

If Klein is the white liberal the rest of us are supposed to be counting on in the fight for our collective liberation, then, as the kids would say, we’re cooked.

Klein lamented the rise in political violence we’re seeing, which everyone can agree is troubling and destructive. With a far deeper understanding of history, Coates brought up the period of Reconstruction, saying that before the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s, it was the “only glimpse at the possibility of a real democracy in this country,” calling it a hopeful, incredible, beautiful time. He then reminded Klein that those efforts and that progress were “violently destroyed” by Southern Redeemers, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and massacres of Black people across multiple former Confederate states, and that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of non-violence and love and was killed for it.

Coates isn’t a fatalist; he’s a realist.

There’s seemingly no group Klein won’t consider sacrificing, no capitulation to right-wing temper-tantruming he won’t attempt to appease despite it showing time and again that it will never be appeased, and is obsessed with a style of politics that no longer exists.

He brought up trans people, saying a “huge” amount of Americans have beliefs about them that he and Coates would find morally wrong and mused about how to win them over. With Coates, as he has with one of his Times colleagues, Klein advocated for Democrats to run pro-life candidates and again twisted himself into knots to justify his reasoning after Coates reminded him that multiple Republican-leaning states voted in favor of preserving reproductive rights.

Coates, echoing Robert Jones, said the thing all of us should believe, whether we’re part of a historically marginalized community or not. The thing Klein professes to believe even as he argued otherwise.

“I’m all for unifying. I’m all for bridging gaps. But not at the expense of my neighbor’s humanity.”

Shalise Manza Young was most recently a columnist at Yahoo Sports, focusing on the intersection of race, gender and culture in sports. The Associated Press Sports Editors named her one of the 10 best columnists in the country in 2020. She has also written for the Boston Globe and Providence Journal. Find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.

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