Not long after I finished reading The Message, New York magazine ran a cover story on the book’s author headlined “The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates.” This raised the question: Had he gone missing? It had been nearly a decade since the publication of his searing and prize-winning Between the World and Me. In the years since, Coates had published a bestselling novel and written comics and screenplays. Still, it appears media pooh-bahs were wondering when he was going to be done with such foolishness and return to serious journalism.
Even in his most heavily reported work, Coates can’t help but draw outside the lines. The Message is no different. The book comprises three separate journeys: a trip to Senegal, another to South Carolina, and, lastly, a 10-day visit to Israel and the occupied West Bank just before Oct. 7, 2023. New York focused largely on this last essay, portraying Coates as a David taking on the Goliath of a media establishment that, in all the ink spilled on the conflict in the Middle East over the past 76 years, has rarely allowed Palestinians to weigh in on their tragic lot, preferring to rely on foreign-policy experts with heavily stamped passports. The same establishment, in other words, that had enabled Coates’s rise, opening doors in Hollywood and putting out a welcome mat to congressional hearing rooms and the White House.
Not long after I finished reading The Message, New York magazine ran a cover story on the book’s author headlined “The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates.” This raised the question: Had he gone missing? It had been nearly a decade since the publication of his searing and prize-winning Between the World and Me. In the years since, Coates had published a bestselling novel and written comics and screenplays. Still, it appears media pooh-bahs were wondering when he was going to be done with such foolishness and return to serious journalism.
Even in his most heavily reported work, Coates can’t help but draw outside the lines. The Message is no different. The book comprises three separate journeys: a trip to Senegal, another to South Carolina, and, lastly, a 10-day visit to Israel and the occupied West Bank just before Oct. 7, 2023. New York focused largely on this last essay, portraying Coates as a David taking on the Goliath of a media establishment that, in all the ink spilled on the conflict in the Middle East over the past 76 years, has rarely allowed Palestinians to weigh in on their tragic lot, preferring to rely on foreign-policy experts with heavily stamped passports. The same establishment, in other words, that had enabled Coates’s rise, opening doors in Hollywood and putting out a welcome mat to congressional hearing rooms and the White House.
Coates’s writing voice is sui generis. He combines a poet’s metaphors with the skepticism of the autodidact. His sentences slip down unpredictable paths only to double back, weaving together memory, reportage, personal testimony, recent scholarship, and meditations on history until they are nearly indistinguishable. There is nothing flashy or self-important about him; he is as likely to confess his confusions and failures as share his insights, as likely to portray himself as hapless as well-informed. Yet from his earliest blog posts, there was no mistaking his moral seriousness. He makes a practice of habitually revisiting his earlier writings and misperceptions. For all these reasons, his voice beguiles and carries. I’ve found it revelatory, as a white reader, to be consigned to the status of interloper—peering through the window of his first book, The Beautiful Struggle, for example, to overhear what it was like for him to grow up as a Black boy in West Baltimore without the usual reassurances that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.
Similarly, The Message is addressed to Coates’s writing students at Howard University, stand-ins for the 14-year-old son he spoke to in his 2015 book, Between the World and Me. He teaches them that the way the American story is told implicates the country’s present politics and foreign-policy stance:
And so it is with the American Revolution and the founding of a great republic, or the Greatest Generation who did not fight to defend merely the homeland but the entire world. If you believe that history, then you are primed to believe that the American state is a force for good, that it is the world’s oldest democracy, and that those who hate America hate it for its freedoms. And if you believe that then you can believe that these inexplicable haters of freedom are worthy of our drones. But a different history, one that finds its starting point in genocide and slavery, argues for a much darker present and the possibility that here too are haters of freedom, unworthy of the power they wield.
Like New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones’s “The 1619 Project,” Coates’s ambition is to create a new canon, “in service of that larger emancipatory mandate,” as yet unrealized and only dimly perceived, for the U.S. political imagination to draw from. If politics is the art of the possible, he writes, “art creates the possible of politics.” He is counting on his college students, and young writers generally, to contribute to this reconstructed national narrative and do their part to “save the world.”
If the future of the United States is to be found in its beginnings, Africa provides the requisite starting point—not simply as part of Coates’s personal quest for an ancestral home, “that glorious Eden we conjured up as exiles,” but because the New World arose from the stolen labor of Africans.
Yet from the moment his plane touches down in Dakar, Senegal, Coates’s feelings race wildly: anticipation, sadness, homesickness, and the anxious self-consciousness familiar to many travelers. “I was trying very hard to hide the wonder behind my eyes, because I knew that would mark me as a tourist, and tourists were targets,” he writes. “I failed.” Warm encounters with Senegalese people are shadowed by the worry of how much of their assumed kinship is real and how much an unrealized hope. His trip to the island of Gorée’s much-mythologized Door of No Return, which memorializes the forcible removal of people from Africa, leaves him undone for reasons he is unable to fully account for. Although Coates guards himself against all such mythologies, in weaker moments he admits he is susceptible. Still, he manages to sustain the tension between unwieldy expectations of what he hoped to find in Africa and an honest account of what he did: a solidarity born of the twin traumas of colonialism and enslavement.
Coates’s second journey, to the small town of Chapin, South Carolina, is both a work of reportage and a meditation on his journey as a writer and how his classroom education hampered him. Coates remains haunted by the humiliations of his bookish and daydreaming youth; vivid scenes from the schools and streets of his Baltimore childhood reappear again and again in his books. Only upon reaching the “safe space” of Howard as an undergraduate did he begin to assemble the tools he needed to tackle the subjects he was most curious about. At the heart of his visit to South Carolina is an encounter with a white high school teacher. She is among the many educators pilloried and threatened with dismissal for teaching Between the World and Me and similar works that endeavor to challenge the dogmas of American exceptionalism. Attending a school board meeting alongside her, Coates encounters not the far-right Moms for Liberty in full-blown moral panic but a white, middle-class community of teachers, parents, students, and members of church book groups pushing back.
It is worth recalling that the 2015 release of Between the World and Me coincided with Dylann Roof’s massacre of Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina. Coates was among those who challenged Gov. Nikki Haley to remove the Confederate battle flag from the state capitol in the aftermath of the shooting. Five years later, then-President Donald Trump signed an executive order directed at all federal contractors, including educational institutions. The order outlawed diversity and equity employment initiatives as well as the teaching or dissemination of “divisive concepts” that might provoke “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress.” While the flag is now gone and the order has been revoked, Coates notes that South Carolina’s 2022 budget contained identical prohibitions and that monumental statues of Confederates, enslavers, and segregationists still enshrine white supremacy on the statehouse lawn of the once-majority Black state. The ferocity of the legislative backlash to Coates and other purveyors of these so-called divisive concepts is a measure of their success. The Black Lives Matter protesters in the streets in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd are heirs to the new political culture Coates had a hand in creating.
Coates’s critics, including some on the left, have often asked why white readers are so invested in his books. Scholar Cornel West famously assailed him as representative of the “neoliberal wing” of the Black freedom struggle, telling him that “[white people] claim you because you are silent on what is a threat to their order.” New York portrays the final essay of The Message as an attempt to lay that accusation to rest, as if Coates’s decision to write about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were a radical and calculated departure, rather than continuous with every question Coates has ever asked of himself and his readers.
Once again, Coates doesn’t marshal arguments; he doesn’t labor to persuade or impress. He simply lets the reader overhear conversations, follow his reflections, and vicariously experience the anguish that invariably arises in places where a historic injustice has occurred. Whether in Yad Vashem, in the Old City of East Jerusalem, or waiting to pass through the Lion’s Gate into the Al-Aqsa complex, Coates holds up a mirror and shows us what can be seen when a writer refuses to employ the impassive and authoritative voice of the Middle East envoy.
“[W]atching those soldiers stand there [at the Lion’s Gate] and steal our time, the sun glinting off their shades like Georgia sheriffs, I could feel the lens of my mind curving to refract the blur of new and strange events,” he writes. Through this lens, schoolchildren across time and space are refused entry at checkpoints. Separate and unequal living conditions are registered. Israel one-upped the Jim Crow South, Coates notes, by segregating “not just the pools and fountains but the water itself,” as the state controls and restricts access to water supply, including rainwater, and infrastructure in the West Bank and Gaza. When a Black Israeli soldier stops and questions Coates about his religious background, he is reminded that race is only one of the many weapons by which power has its way with the powerless.
Beyond the ready analogies to Jim Crow, settler colonialism, and South Africa’s apartheid, however, beyond even the recognition that the Zionist project provides a cautionary tale for a battle-weary people dreaming of a mythical African homeland, Coates gives space for voices of the Nakba—those Palestinians who were displaced in 1948—with their ongoing history of exile and now genocide. And it is the latter—still unfolding—horror that establishment journalism, so-called serious journalism with its insistence on objectivity, continues to obscure and to justify.
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