It’s our job to ask the tough questions.
By Karen Attiah
Coates has long been celebrated for his clear-eyed work on race and anti-Black racism in the United States. The intellectual rigor and moral clarity of his writing made Coates a household name and a favorite of the news media — at least, it seems, until he directed his attention to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
What else is there to conclude after Dokoupil’s first question to Coates went like this: “I imagine, if I took your name out of it, took away the awards and the acclaim, the publishing house goes away, the content of that [Israel/Palestine section in Coates’s book] would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.”
And then he asked Coates: Do you not believe that Israel has the right to exist?
The controversy over Dokoupil’s tone and choice of words led to internal reviews at CBS News and broader questions about the role of journalists in this moment.
Tough questions are to be expected whenever an author tries to sell a book, but that doesn’t mean they are always neutral. Questions can be wielded as tools of curiosity or a point of view — and some questions even pack ugly stereotypes while hiding behind a shield of neutrality. And just because people get upset at a journalist doesn’t always mean their queries were hard to handle.
The problem with Dokoupil’s questions was not that they were tough. They were textbook, really. Even the mildest critics of Israel’s government are often asked whether Israel should exist. Coates responded to that question, appropriately, by saying he was skeptical of any nation that made ethnicity its highest principle.
No, the really tough questions were those posed by Coates, who asked why there are no Palestinian voices in the upper ranks of the American news media; who asked why he recognized a superstructure similar to Jim Crow in Israel’s treatment of Palestinians; who asked why we should accept policies subjugating people based on race and ethnicity anywhere in the world.
To these questions, Dokoupil and his co-anchors had no answers. So, who was really asking the tough questions?
Dokoupil’s “backpack of an extremist” jab at Coates was the most troubling. When the idea of humanizing Palestinians is recast as a form of extremism, or as a threat to Western civilization, we are in dangerous territory. Dokoupil’s implicit message is that merely questioning the condition of Palestinians might be a rationale for censure — or much worse.
Which is a reminder that there has long been an attempt by the supposedly impartial or knowledgeable to put second-class peoples into a special box of “problems” or “questions” that defy easy answers:
“What shall be done with the Indian as an obstacle to the national progress?” wrote Francis Walker, the American commissioner for Indian Affairs, in his 1874 book, “The Indian Question.” “The principle of secluding Indians from whites for the good of both races is established by an overwhelming preponderance of authority.”
In 1884, N.S. Shaler suggested in his essay “The Negro Problem” that there was no easy path for Black people “bred first in a savagery … and then in a slavery that tended almost as little to fit them for a place in the structure of a self-controlling society.”
Too often, the solutions to these “questions” have been the same: displacement, camps, reservations, segregation and genocide.
But back to journalism: In his “CBS Mornings” interview, Coates was asked about the role of writers in a world with so many challenges.
Coates replied that the task for writers is nothing less than “saving the world.” It was his way of saying we write ourselves and each other into existence, into history and into posterity. And that is the particular cause of young journalists, Coates said.
“Who we believe is human, who we don’t believe is human, what policies we believe should be in the world, which policies we don’t, are actually shaped largely by writing and the stories we tell.”
So, it is important to tell them fully, with tough questions for all sides. That is the real message of Coates’s new book.
