This article was originally published by The Emancipator.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of America’s most celebrated public intellectuals, at the height of his renown, retreated from the public eye to focus on writing novels and comic books. With “The Message,” Coates returns to his nonfiction roots, which is likely to be one of the most consequential books of the year. The book is filled with the beautiful sentences we have come to expect from Coates, turns of phrase that James Baldwin would call “as clean as a bone.”
However, Coates’s artistry is likely not enough to dislodge entrenched political positions, and responses to the book are already refracted through preexisting understanding of the Israel/Palestine conflict, the subject of the book’s final essay. In centering Palestinian suffering, Coates incinerates some of his accrued cultural capital, almost in penance, to make his case.
Coates is an atheist. Yet “The Message” — from its title through the central essay — repeatedly invokes religious imagery and feeling. He takes on the tone and cadence of the pulpit, documenting a war between what he perceives as evil and its inverse while creating a looming sense of catastrophic judgment (and a requisite, flickering hope of redemption). Ideas hit Coates as “revelations,” belying the reporting and careful study that shape the text.
South Carolina book banners, attempting to shape curriculum in their image, are “bearing the flaming cross” of a corrupted Christianity that worships Whiteness. Also, journalists who use objectivity as a cover for biased pro-Israel coverage are “playing god.” An atheist adopting the mantle of the moral bard may seem paradoxical, but the essays in “The Message” show religion often holds a central place in the self-justifying myths of the powerful.
Part of the religious undertone in Coates’ writing is inherited from his chosen intellectual lineage. He self-consciously modeled the writing in “Between the World and Me” on son-of-a-preacher James Baldwin’s work, and the many scribes of the Civil Rights Movement who brilliantly used prophetic language on their march towards freedom. The Black Radical Tradition is filled with church people.
However, Coates is too deliberate a writer to adopt pious language stylistically, or simply through inertia. “The Message” faces some of the central moral questions of our time — colonialism’s legacies and ongoing horrors, fights over teaching accurate history to shape the future, and Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine. Coates claims writing should contribute to an “emancipatory mandate,” and sees the writer’s task as nothing short of “doing our part to save the world.”
Since the sanitized language of scholarship often fails to capture an individual human’s singular irreplaceability, Coates reaches for the transcendent language of certitude and moral clarity offered by faith. Coates’ decision to challenge a murderous foreign policy consensus echoes Dr. King’s famous 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech at Harlem’s Riverside Church, which tied American foreign policy to domestic racism. Following this speech, many of Dr. King’s liberal supporters abandoned him, arguing that King’s critique lacked nuance and knowledge.
Coates applies the Black prophetic tradition’s fiery condemnation of hypocrisy to the mainstream media’s purportedly objective reporting on the Israel/Palestine conflict. Coverage of the conflict often fails on the media’s own terms, as neutral-seeming journalistic descriptions of Israeli policy are often thin justifications for said policy.
Journalism’s righteous commitment to truth, a motivation that drew Coates to writing, is betrayed when American media’s tacit support for Israel’s contemporary policy towards Palestinians reveres “factual complexity over self-evident morality.” American journalism generally recognizes and occasionally condemns the self-evident evil in our overthrown apartheid system.
Yet the simple conclusions that follow from condemning Jim Crow at home — that segregation is a sin that debases individuals and corrupts the state — are not extended to Palestinians.
Witnessing parallels between reality in the West Bank and America’s historical oppression of Black people was another revelation for Coates. “[My] ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man,” writes Coates, “Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere.”
Segregation is encoded into the very infrastructure of the state, with Israel controlling West Bank aquifers and limiting the collection of rainwater such that “water consumption for Israelis is nearly four times that of Palestinians living under occupation.” Witnessing this shocking on-the-ground reality in the West Bank, Coates claims that “Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself.”
Despite these easily observable realities, the media skews the field of debate in favor of Israel, choosing whose voices shape our collective understanding of the conflict. According to research cited by Coates, between 1970 and 2019, the nation’s leading papers rarely platformed Palestinian authors to challenge Israel’s justifications. By bearing witness, Coates shows no amount of journalistic complexity, or the false equivalence of reporting “both sides,” can launder the evil of a Jim Crow system.
There are places where Coates’ religious allusions fail. Writing about the shared understandings of disenfranchised peoples, Coates approvingly quotes W.E.B. Du Bois’ contention that “A ‘material handicap’ is transformed into a ‘spiritual advantage,’” in the writings of the oppressed. This is a myth as dangerous as any Coates rails against.
Material deprivation is not ennobling, and the belief that penury imparts wisdom is part of the destructive justifications Coates otherwise condemns. Yes, connections and associations shape the ways groups tend to think. But the poor can be as crass and cruel as the rich; what they lack is access to the coercive state power that allows the rich to impose their will.
Coates’ accolades, such as his award-winning work at The Atlantic, are marred by his understanding that recognition was granted on the terms of the very powers his writing hoped to challenge. The sheer scale of these triumphs, and the ebullience with which the mainstream audience he once critiqued embraced him, seems to have instilled self-doubt about just how radical his vision truly was.
“However much you try to remember your own motives, however much you may feel yourself to have succeeded,” he writes in the book, “you are ultimately in their world and are thus compelled to speak to them through their symbols and stories.” Bearing witness to the reality of daily life under occupation, “The Message” is also Coates’ pitch for personal redemption, as he publicly confesses — and seeks absolution for — the failures of his most celebrated writing.
