Journalism Coates's first journalism job was as a reporter at
The Washington City Paper; his editor was
David Carr. From 2000 to 2007, Coates worked as a journalist with various publications, including
Philadelphia Weekly,
The Village Voice, and
Time. The article led to an appointment with a regular column for
The Atlantic, a blog that was popular, influential, and had a high level of community engagement. and his June 2014 feature "
The Case for Reparations", have been especially praised, and won his blog a place on the Best Blogs of 2011 list by
Time magazine and the 2012
Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism from The
Sidney Hillman Foundation. His blog was praised for its engaging comments section, which Coates curated and moderated heavily so that "the jerks are invited to leave [and] the grown-ups to stay and chime in". Coates said he worked on "The Case for Reparations" for almost two years. He had read
Rutgers University professor
Beryl Satter's book
Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America, a history of
redlining that included a discussion of the grassroots organization the
Contract Buyers League, of which Clyde Ross was a leader. The article focused not so much on
reparations for slavery as on the
institutional racism of housing discrimination.
Author The Beautiful Struggle In 2008, Coates published
The Beautiful Struggle, a memoir about coming of age in West Baltimore and its effect on him. In the book, he discusses the influence of his father
W. Paul Coates, a former Black Panther; the prevailing street crime of the era and its effects on his older brother; and his eventual graduation and enrollment in Howard University.
Between the World and Me Coates's second book,
Between the World and Me, written as a letter to his son Samori, was published in 2015. The title is drawn from a
Richard Wright poem of the same name about a black man discovering the site of a lynching and becoming incapacitated with fear, creating a barrier between himself and the world. Coates said that one of the origins of the book was the death of a college friend,
Prince Jones, who was shot by police in a case of mistaken identity. One of the book's themes is what physically affected African-American lives, such as their bodies being enslaved, violence that came from slavery, and various forms of institutional racism. The book won the 2015
National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2016
Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. It was 7th on
The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.
Black Panther and Captain America In 2016, Coates wrote the sixth volume of
Marvel Comics'
Black Panther series, which teamed him with artist
Brian Stelfreeze. He also wrote a spinoff of
Black Panther—
Black Panther and the Crew—that ran for six issues before it was canceled. In Coates's first storyline, titled
A Nation Under Our Feet, T'Challa faces a popular uprising against his monarchy. At the conclusion of the story,
Wakanda is reformed into a constitutional democracy, with the Black Panther continuing as a figurehead king rather than a ruler. This series introduces a new version of
The Crew, now including
Storm,
Luke Cage,
Misty Knight, and
Manifold. Critic Todd Steven Burroughs called the story "ultra-cerebral" and suggested that some of the previous authors of the character may have found it pretentious. He interprets the story as a fascinating
deconstruction of Wakanda that removes "what [Coates] might call the intellectual crutch of
Black nationalism" from the mythos of Black Panther. In Coates's second storyline,
Avengers of the New World, Wakanda's mythology was expanded, showing the panther goddess
Bast as a member of a pantheon known as The Orisha, the term
orisha, a
Yoruba word for spirit or deity from
Yoruba mythology, the pantheon is composed of
Egyptian gods and other origins, such as
Kokou, an orisha from
Benin. Coates also wrote a six-issue series called
Black Panther and the Crew that addresses the problem of
police killings and also suggests that the Marvel universe includes a number of previously unknown superheroes from the
Bandung Conference. In 2018, Coates announced he would be writing a ninth volume of the
Captain America series, teaming him with artists
Leinil Yu and
Alex Ross; in that volume, he depicted the Nazi supervillain
Red Skull espousing the writings of the Canadian clinical psychologist
Jordan Peterson. Peterson said his work was used out of context to portray him unfavorably, calling it an attack on himself.
We Were Eight Years in Power Coates's collection of previously published essays on the
Obama era,
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, was announced by
Random House, with a release date of October 3, 2017. Coates added essays written especially for the book bridging the gaps between the previously published essays, as well as an introduction and an epilogue. The book's title is a quote from 19th-century African-American congressman
Thomas E. Miller of South Carolina, who asked why white Southerners hated African Americans after all the good they had done during the
Reconstruction Era. Coates sees parallels between that period and the Obama presidency.
The Water Dancer Coates's first novel,
The Water Dancer, was published in 2019. It is a surrealist story set in the time of slavery and centers on a superhuman protagonist, Hiram Walker, who has a photographic memory but cannot remember his mother. Walker is also able to transport people long distances by "conduction", which involves folding the Earth like fabric and allows him to travel across large areas via waterways. The novel is also an
Oprah's Book Club selection.
The Message Coates's most recent nonfiction book,
The Message, reflects on his visits to
Dakar, Senegal;
Chapin, South Carolina; and the
West Bank and
East Jerusalem. The latter trip left a deep impression on Coates. In a 2024
New York magazine profile, he said: "I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel." He joined the
CUNY Graduate School of Journalism as its journalist-in-residence in late 2014. In 2017, Coates joined the faculty of
New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute as a Distinguished Writer in Residence. In 2021, he joined the
Howard University faculty as writer-in-residence in the College of Arts and Sciences and holds the Sterling Brown chair in the English Department.
Projects In 2015–16, Coates was awarded a visiting fellowship at the
American Library in Paris, during which he worked on an unpublished novel about an African American from Chicago who moves to Paris. As of 2019, Coates was working on
America in the King Years, a television project with
David Simon,
Taylor Branch, and
James McBride. The project is about
Martin Luther King Jr. and the
Civil Rights Movement, based on one of the volumes of the books
America in the King Years by Branch, specifically ''At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–1968''. The project will be produced by
Oprah Winfrey and air on
HBO. Coates is set to adapt
Rachel Aviv's 2014
The New Yorker article "Wrong Answer" into a full-length feature film of the same title, starring
Michael B. Jordan and directed by
Ryan Coogler. In February 2021, it was reported that Coates had been hired to write the script of a new
Superman feature film from
DC Films and
Warner Bros. Pictures, with
J. J. Abrams producing, although the project was temporary paused sometime in 2022 after
David Zaslav rejected a screenplay that involved the project featuring a black version of Superman fighting injustice during the
Civil Rights era. The project resumed development after
James Gunn agreed to co-lead
DC Studios with him offering support to the project and expressed interest in reading the script, although Gunn stated that the film wouldn't be greenlit unless the screenplay was impressive. He later confirmed that it would become a
DC Elseworlds film if it was produced and that it was still in development in January 2024.
Views on race in the United States In an interview with
Ezra Klein, Coates outlined his analysis that the extent of
white identity expression in the United States serves as a critical factor in threat perceptions of certain
European Americans and their response to political paradigm shifts related to
African Americans, such as the presidency of
Barack Obama.
Views on Israeli–Palestinian conflict In an interview with
Amy Goodman, Coates criticized
Israel's behavior toward Palestinians in the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the United States' support for Israel. He compared the
segregation between Palestinians and
Israeli settlers in the
occupied Palestinian territories to
Jim Crow laws in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. On September 30, 2024,
CBS Mornings anchor
Tony Dokoupil discussed the Israeli–Palestinian conflict with Coates during the latter's appearance on
CBS Mornings to promote the book
The Message. Dokoupil implied that the book "reads like the work of an extremist" and questioned Coates about Coates's view of
Israel's right to exist. Some CBS staffers were angered by the interview, and CBS executive Adrienne Roark said that an internal review found that it did not meet network standards. Dokoupil was defended by
Paramount chair
Shari Redstone and other CBS staffers, including chief legal correspondent
Jan Crawford, who said that a journalist is obliged to ask tough questions when interviewing someone presenting a one-sided view. ==Personal life==