Vanity Fair’s September Issue Message

RADHIKA JONES, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, VANITY FAIR: What happened was we had been speaking with Ta-Nehisi about a different story. We were in dialogue together and the George Floyd murder happened, and the protests began to spread around the nation. And our dialogue turned to the September issue and we thought, how can we capture this moment, which is obviously radiating back into history and radiating forward to the desperate need in America for justice? How can we capture it and capture the urgency of it? And so, we set to work in early June and produced this issue of “Vanity Fair” which we wanted to address everything that’s happening in country right now.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: This is really remarkable painting cover and we’re going to in a second. But let me ask you, Ta-Nehisi Coates, as guest editor, what were you laser focused on? You know, obviously, we’ve said that the issue is about art, activism and 21st century America. What did you want your message to be?

TA-NEHISI COATES, GUEST EDITOR, VANITY FAIR: I wanted to make something in partnership with Radhika, the staff at “Vanity Fair” and all the writers and artists that we had assembled that would endure. I wanted to make something — I mean, this may sound overly ambitious, but that 100 years from now, when people look back at 2020, a period in which we had a plague that was killing upwards of 150,000 Americans, when we had officers of the law who were shooting African-Americans down in their back, when they look back and try to understand what exactly happened, my hope would be — I think all of our hope was that, you know, this issue of “Vanity Fair” would figure fairly prominently in trying to understand.