If you are not aware of this brother Ta-Nehisi Coates by now, i’m wondering what rock have you been sleeping under the past few years. Coates is national correspondent for The Atlantic, bestselling author and one of the most compelling and interesting African American intellectuals in the world.

When I first heard about him and the comparisons to James Baldwin, I thought the hype machine had gotten carried away again. However, after I read his piece in the Atlantic on reparations, I became a believer.

In fact, I just picked up his best selling book “Between the World and Me” to give it a read. Very excited about that. However, that isn’t the point of this article this morning. Coates major honor is the subject matter for today.

Each year the MacArthur Foundation issues 24 Americans their prestigeous MacArthur Fellowship, known as the “Genius Grant”….

this happened this past Tuesday and Coates was one of the recipients.

From TheRoot.com:

“Every year, the MacArthur Foundation selects a crop of extraordinary Americans and hands them $625,000 paid over the course of five years — no strings attached, no progress reports needed,” as Anne Quito reported for Quartz.

“When I first got the call from the MacArthur Foundation I was ecstatic, and then I was deeply, deeply honored. We labor in the dark,” Coates said in a video on the foundation website. “You know, if anybody even reads what I’m doing, that’s a, that’s a great day.”

Coates also said in the video, “. . . The challenge of writing is to see your horribleness, on page, to see your terribleness, and then to go to bed, and wake up the next day, and take that horribleness and that terribleness and refine it, and make it not so terrible and not so horrible, and then go to bed again, and come the next day, and refine it a little bit more, and make it not so bad, and then go to bed the next day and do it again, then make it maybe average.

“And then one more time, you know, if you’re lucky, maybe you get to good.”

The foundation says of its awards, “The MacArthur Fellows Program awards unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction. There are three criteria for selection of Fellows:exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.

”

It described Coates as “a journalist, blogger, and memoirist who brings personal reflection and historical scholarship to bear on America’s most contested issues. Writing without shallow polemic and in a measured style, Coates addresses complex and challenging issues such as racial identity, systemic racial bias, and urban policing. He subtly embeds the present — in the form of anecdotes about himself or others — into historical analysis in order to illustrate how the implications of the past are still experienced by people today.

”

“Between the World and Me” reached No. 1 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction list in Sunday’s print edition. It is No. 2 on the list for Oct. 4.

The best part of this grant and recognition, in my opinion, is there aren’t any strings attached. Coates isn’t required to complete a progress report to the foundation on his most recent works and there is no oversight on his future. He is free to do as he pleases.

And it is our hope that he continue to brings his black, intellectual and RAW usage of the language to continue to spread light, understanding and insight into not only race relations, but the healing of the global black community.

Hats off to you Mr. Coates, well deserved.

Source: TheRoot.com