a-Nehisi Coates: ‘Next Black Presidency’ Must Confront American ‘Empire’

“The Case for Reparations” author and left-wing activist Ta-Nehisi Coates contended in Vanity Fair that Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign exposed a contradiction between Democrats’ invocation of black civil rights heroes and their support for an American foreign policy he described as “imperial.”

In the essay, titled “Did Kamala Harris’s Silence on Gaza Cost Her the White House?” Coates described Harris’s rise as the product of a coalition of black women activists who, in his telling, had already delivered what he called “an enviable string of political victories.”

“They demanded a black woman on the ticket. They got it. They demanded a black woman on the Supreme Court. They got it. They demanded a black woman at the Federal Reserve. They got that too. And they got even more,” Coates wrote.

Coates credited the Biden administration with appointing a “record number of black women to the federal bench,” cutting black unemployment and black poverty to “record lows,” and passing a temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit that he said “reduced black child poverty rates by half during its single year of operation.”

When Biden withdrew from the 2024 campaign and endorsed Harris, Coates wrote, “The most tantalizing victory of all was at hand,” as the same coalition of black women who helped secure Harris’s place on the 2020 ticket pressed toward the possibility of electing the first black woman president. But he maintained that Harris’s campaign also exposed a deeper contradiction: a “black presidency,” he wrote, “owes its power to a movement against racist state violence at home” while seeking an office that has “always practiced racist state violence abroad.”

Coates wrote that for African Americans, presidential elections have “almost always been exercises in lesser evils and harm reduction.” But he said the next black presidency will have to “think bigger,” adding “empire” to its list of adversaries alongside “a renewed white supremacy,” “a rapacious billionaire class,” and “an energetic Christian nationalism.”

Coates broadened the essay into commentary about American history. “The portrait of America as an imperial power cuts against its self-image as a righteous cradle of democracy,” he wrote. “But from its inception, the country has been aggressive and expansionist, seizing land from its Indigenous population, paying off some European powers while menacing others.”

Coates’s argument comes as Harris remains a leading prospective 2028 Democratic contender. Breitbart News previously reported that Harris said in April she “might” run again, and recent polling has shown her leading the hypothetical Democrat primary field. 

One survey taken May 1-5, 2026, among 3,612 U.S. adults, showed Harris at 38 percent support on the Democrat side, far ahead of California Gov. Gavin Newsom at 16 percent, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg tied at nine percent. Another recent 2028 poll showed Harris at 37 percent among potential Democrat candidates, while Vice President JD Vance led potential Republicans at 38 percent.

Coates has previously criticized Harris and other Democrats. He said that Harris and Biden both had criminal justice “baggage,” called Harris’s past support for prosecuting parents over truancy “chilling,” and argued that her approach raised questions beyond domestic criminal justice, including what it would mean to “hand over the keys to the armed forces” to her. 

In 2016, Coates endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders for president despite criticizing Sanders for lacking “more explicit anti-racist policy” and not supporting slavery reparations, saying a voter could be “very, very critical” of Sanders on that issue and still consider him “the best option” in the race.

In 2024, on the What Now with Trevor Noah podcast, Coates said he had wondered whether, if he had grown up in Gaza under what he described as “oppression” and “poverty,” he would have been “strong enough” to reject the kind of violence carried out by Hamas on October 7.