Epic evening with Ta-Nihisi Coates at McGill Friday night. So much to think about.

• “People who think they are white.”
• “All this ideology, but does it have room for actual, individual people?”
• “The assumption behind the term ‘white privilege’ is that we want what they have.”
• “The policy of America is plunder.”
• And my favorite, the one that is really ricocheting around my brain (though he was quoting somebody else responding to Saul Bellow saying “Show me the Tolstoy of the Zulus and I’ll read him.”): “Tolstoy was the Tolstoy of the Zulus.”

His interlocutor was Rachel Zeller, whom I’ve never encountered before. Coates and her go back to undergraduate days, and the depth of their relationship and the acuity of her questions made for a rich discussion.