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The Message
Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set off to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic Politics and the English Language, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities.
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk” city of “old traditions and new machinery,” but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.
He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning” of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares.
And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating.
Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk” city of “old traditions and new machinery,” but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.
He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning” of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares.
And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating.
Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.
256 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 1, 2024
About the author
Ta-Nehisi Coates
274 books15.5k followersTa-Nehisi Coates is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Between the World and Me, a finalist for the National Book Award. A MacArthur "Genius Grant" fellow, Coates has received the National Magazine Award, the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, and the George Polk Award for his Atlantic cover story "The Case for Reparations." He lives in New York with his wife and son.
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November 4, 2024Another excellent and thought-provoking read from Coates. Like Between the World and Me, it offers no easy solutions to the problems it highlights -- focusing mostly on the importance of further writing, further conversation and self-education to uplift the narratives of those who have been erased. As Coates says toward the beginning: "this tradition of writing, of drawing out a common humanity, is indispensable to our future, if only because what must be cultivated and cared for must first be seen."
Unlike Between the World and Me, The Message is more loosely focused. It reads somewhat like a writer's journal, as we hear the author working through new information and revelations, putting diverse experiences together to synthesize a new understanding, rather than arguing for one particular approach or resolution. This is not a criticism. It feels appropriate for the subject matters involved. As he suggests himself toward the end, this is an ongoing process both for the author and the readers: "I felt that I was still waking up, feel that I am still waking up, still searching for the right words."
The book reminded me of a triptych -- three separate panels that speak to one another but seem distinct until you look at them all side by side and begin to see the thematic connections. This approach was effective, though for me it took a little time and patience to figure out where the author was going with this book. The experiences he relates are difficult and messy and overwhelming, so his style makes sense.
The first 'panel' of the triptych is Coates' journey to Senegal. He shares all the powerful feelings this trip evoked, and ponders how a 'return to Africa' for African Americans is a potent but strange experience, looking for an ancestral home that may exist only as an ideal. He talks about how his own name Ta-Nehisi is meant to evoke a sense of connection with Egypt, which opens up all sorts of questions about how Egypt has been seen and appropriated over the eons, but his major revelation is that one can and must draw a distinction between having an ideal image of one's ancestral roots, without trying to physically find or reclaim them.
Coates says it better than I can, so it is worth quoting: "We have a right to our imagined traditions, to our imagined places, and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess that they are imagined. We have a right to imagine ourselves as pharaohs, and then again the responsibility to ask if a pharaoh is even worthy of our needs, our dreams, our imagination."
The second panel of the triptych covers Coates' experiences with the American education system, from his own upbringing to the recent furor over book bans in schools that often focus on his own books. Here, he finds cause for both hope and despair. He describes an educational system that is about the passive reception and regurgitation of information rather than the development of critical thinking skills. It is a system meant to create certain kinds of citizens, who buy into the national narrative, and deliberately downplays or erases points of view that do not serve that narrative: "Great canons angle toward great power, and the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it." And again: "History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates or justifies political order."
Perhaps most interesting to me was Coates' discussion of why books, in particular, are considered so dangerous to those who do not want the mainstream narrative challenged: "Film, music, the theater—all can be experienced amidst the whooping, clapping, and cheering of the crowd. But books work when no one else is looking, mind-melding author and audience, forging an imagined world that only the reader can see."
Books challenge and engage the mind, creating a new reality between writer and reader to which both contribute, and which belongs to both. This is what makes them dangerous and powerful. They offer not just another point of view, but the possibility of creating one's one point of view:
"The danger we present, as writers, is not that we will simply convince their children of a different dogma but that we will convince them that they have the power to form their own."
The final panel of the triptych is Coates' trip to the Palestinian Literary Festival and his first experiences in the Levant. Here the thematic connections of the entire book become clear. Coates experiences what is like to move through this ancient land with Palestinians, then with Israelis, and he finds the experience and the disparities both shocking and chillingly familiar. In the treatment of the Palestinian people, he sees a direct extension of the American system of racial oppression, which has been veiled in a noble narrative of enlightened democracy and progress. Even as a journalist himself, he feels a deep sense that he has been lied to by the media, deceived in a way that leaves him feeling horrified: "I felt a mix of astonishment, betrayal, and anger. The astonishment was for me—for my own ignorance, for my own incuriosity, for the limits of my sense of reparations. The betrayal was for my colleagues in journalism—betrayal for the way they reported, for the way they’d laundered open discrimination, for the voices they’d erased."
Coates does a good job humanizing the issues by sharing his personal encounters with both Israelis and Palestinians. He points out the uncomfortable truth that being oppressed does not automatically make one more enlightened, but can in fact blind one to the oppression of others: "Your oppression will not save you, that being a victim will not enlighten you, that it can just as easily deceive you." There is a grim observation here about human nature: That those who have suffered from terrible oppression should know better than to oppress others. They should recognize, empathize, and work to eliminate such systems. Zionism, in this view, is and was exactly the wrong corrective for the Holocaust. As Paulo Freire puts it, speaking generally about human societies: “The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors.” This also calls back to Coates' trip to Senegal, and the idea that a historical ideal of homeland cannot be expected to translate into an actual physical right of possession.
But Coates is also stunned to find how little he himself appreciated the Palestinian situation until he was there, on the ground. As attuned as he is to such injustice, he felt blindsided by the mainstream narrative:
"When you are erased from the argument and purged from the narrative, you do not exist. Thus the complex of curators is doing more than setting pub dates and greenlighting—they are establishing and monitoring a criterion for humanity."
Coates also points out that, unfortunately, people are motivated by self-interest above all else: "I doubt that anyone ever parts with power in the name of charity." This, too, is hard to argue with.
Again, Coates offers no easy answers. The power of this book is not in any game plan of what needs to happen, but in the honesty and personal pain of the author, his willingness to share his anguish and changing perceptions. Whatever one may think of Coates' insights, his self-reflection and interrogation of his own preconceptions is worthy of the critical thinking skills that our schools should be teaching, but so often do not.
Unlike Between the World and Me, The Message is more loosely focused. It reads somewhat like a writer's journal, as we hear the author working through new information and revelations, putting diverse experiences together to synthesize a new understanding, rather than arguing for one particular approach or resolution. This is not a criticism. It feels appropriate for the subject matters involved. As he suggests himself toward the end, this is an ongoing process both for the author and the readers: "I felt that I was still waking up, feel that I am still waking up, still searching for the right words."
The book reminded me of a triptych -- three separate panels that speak to one another but seem distinct until you look at them all side by side and begin to see the thematic connections. This approach was effective, though for me it took a little time and patience to figure out where the author was going with this book. The experiences he relates are difficult and messy and overwhelming, so his style makes sense.
The first 'panel' of the triptych is Coates' journey to Senegal. He shares all the powerful feelings this trip evoked, and ponders how a 'return to Africa' for African Americans is a potent but strange experience, looking for an ancestral home that may exist only as an ideal. He talks about how his own name Ta-Nehisi is meant to evoke a sense of connection with Egypt, which opens up all sorts of questions about how Egypt has been seen and appropriated over the eons, but his major revelation is that one can and must draw a distinction between having an ideal image of one's ancestral roots, without trying to physically find or reclaim them.
Coates says it better than I can, so it is worth quoting: "We have a right to our imagined traditions, to our imagined places, and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess that they are imagined. We have a right to imagine ourselves as pharaohs, and then again the responsibility to ask if a pharaoh is even worthy of our needs, our dreams, our imagination."
The second panel of the triptych covers Coates' experiences with the American education system, from his own upbringing to the recent furor over book bans in schools that often focus on his own books. Here, he finds cause for both hope and despair. He describes an educational system that is about the passive reception and regurgitation of information rather than the development of critical thinking skills. It is a system meant to create certain kinds of citizens, who buy into the national narrative, and deliberately downplays or erases points of view that do not serve that narrative: "Great canons angle toward great power, and the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it." And again: "History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates or justifies political order."
Perhaps most interesting to me was Coates' discussion of why books, in particular, are considered so dangerous to those who do not want the mainstream narrative challenged: "Film, music, the theater—all can be experienced amidst the whooping, clapping, and cheering of the crowd. But books work when no one else is looking, mind-melding author and audience, forging an imagined world that only the reader can see."
Books challenge and engage the mind, creating a new reality between writer and reader to which both contribute, and which belongs to both. This is what makes them dangerous and powerful. They offer not just another point of view, but the possibility of creating one's one point of view:
"The danger we present, as writers, is not that we will simply convince their children of a different dogma but that we will convince them that they have the power to form their own."
The final panel of the triptych is Coates' trip to the Palestinian Literary Festival and his first experiences in the Levant. Here the thematic connections of the entire book become clear. Coates experiences what is like to move through this ancient land with Palestinians, then with Israelis, and he finds the experience and the disparities both shocking and chillingly familiar. In the treatment of the Palestinian people, he sees a direct extension of the American system of racial oppression, which has been veiled in a noble narrative of enlightened democracy and progress. Even as a journalist himself, he feels a deep sense that he has been lied to by the media, deceived in a way that leaves him feeling horrified: "I felt a mix of astonishment, betrayal, and anger. The astonishment was for me—for my own ignorance, for my own incuriosity, for the limits of my sense of reparations. The betrayal was for my colleagues in journalism—betrayal for the way they reported, for the way they’d laundered open discrimination, for the voices they’d erased."
Coates does a good job humanizing the issues by sharing his personal encounters with both Israelis and Palestinians. He points out the uncomfortable truth that being oppressed does not automatically make one more enlightened, but can in fact blind one to the oppression of others: "Your oppression will not save you, that being a victim will not enlighten you, that it can just as easily deceive you." There is a grim observation here about human nature: That those who have suffered from terrible oppression should know better than to oppress others. They should recognize, empathize, and work to eliminate such systems. Zionism, in this view, is and was exactly the wrong corrective for the Holocaust. As Paulo Freire puts it, speaking generally about human societies: “The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors.” This also calls back to Coates' trip to Senegal, and the idea that a historical ideal of homeland cannot be expected to translate into an actual physical right of possession.
But Coates is also stunned to find how little he himself appreciated the Palestinian situation until he was there, on the ground. As attuned as he is to such injustice, he felt blindsided by the mainstream narrative:
"When you are erased from the argument and purged from the narrative, you do not exist. Thus the complex of curators is doing more than setting pub dates and greenlighting—they are establishing and monitoring a criterion for humanity."
Coates also points out that, unfortunately, people are motivated by self-interest above all else: "I doubt that anyone ever parts with power in the name of charity." This, too, is hard to argue with.
Again, Coates offers no easy answers. The power of this book is not in any game plan of what needs to happen, but in the honesty and personal pain of the author, his willingness to share his anguish and changing perceptions. Whatever one may think of Coates' insights, his self-reflection and interrogation of his own preconceptions is worthy of the critical thinking skills that our schools should be teaching, but so often do not.
October 8, 2024
A friend suggested I read this. It was strange in a way because I assumed from what she told me it would be about Palestine, and so I started and then it seemed it would never be about Palestine – and then it suddenly was. I’d read Eight Years in Power a while ago, but never got around to reviewing it. This one is much shorter, but I recommend it. Essentially, he compares Palestine with the Jim Crow era in the US. The same forms of apartheid, the same racist arguments on why two peoples need to remain separate and unequal. This is discussed in terms of his embodied experiences in Occupied Palestine – something he spends a lot of the start of the book explain he finds necessary if he is to write anything at all. His experiences are quite eye opening. We have been so conditioned to see Israelis as a democratic outpost and Palestinians as terrorists that books like this that shine a light on the ongoing reality of life under colonial occupation can prove challenging.
When I was growing up Northern Irish in Australia, with The Troubles nightly on the television, I also understood what it meant to be the outsider and even potential terrorist. I was raised on songs like The Men Behind the Wire – with lyrics like ‘Being Irish means your guilty, so we’re guilty one and all.’ Collective guilt, collective punishment, imprisonment without trial – the Palestinian struggle and my nation’s struggle have long been similar, and I guess this helps to explain Ireland’s support for Palestine.
There have been so many books written on this topic – but as the author says, he writes from embodied experience and this does give this short book a power some others might lack.
When I was growing up Northern Irish in Australia, with The Troubles nightly on the television, I also understood what it meant to be the outsider and even potential terrorist. I was raised on songs like The Men Behind the Wire – with lyrics like ‘Being Irish means your guilty, so we’re guilty one and all.’ Collective guilt, collective punishment, imprisonment without trial – the Palestinian struggle and my nation’s struggle have long been similar, and I guess this helps to explain Ireland’s support for Palestine.
There have been so many books written on this topic – but as the author says, he writes from embodied experience and this does give this short book a power some others might lack.
September 27, 2024
TNC is so incredibly talented. This book sings with his skill at crafting prose essays. The arguments are not as clear as I would have liked, but he’s grappling with so much it is extremely worthy of time and thought. It ends in an unexpected place which took me out of it but overall this is a big yes. It is bold and brave and provocative (but not for provocation’s sake). His thinking on Palestine is where I felt most connected to his own humanity and struggle. It is the centerpiece of the thing and maybe didn’t need the other essays, but they’re there and they’re good.
September 16, 2024
Prose is haunting. According to Mr. Coates this is what he was after, words that haunt, that make you remember, that force you to share. On this order he has delivered greatly. “Haunt. You’ve heard me say this word a lot. It is never enough for the reader of your words to be convinced. The goal is to haunt—to have them think about your words before bed, see them manifest in their dreams, tell their partner about them the next morning, to have them grab random people on the street, shake them and say, ‘Have you read this yet?’” Mr. Coates brings an unblinking honesty to the page as he renders up a message about writing and a writer’s responsibility.
And he does it wrapped in his travels to three different locations. Dakar, Senegal, Columbia, SC and most impressively Palestine. Mr. Coates is a courageous and erudite young Man sharing his thoughts without concern of any potential blowback. This type of honest writing makes for very compelling reading.
“I am trying to urge you towards something new—not simply against their myths of conquest, but against the urge to craft your own. But this is a negative proposition—a description of what should not be, but not what should be—and it creates an absence in the place of a myth. How do we fill the void? For even as I left the myth of utopic African origin, I still felt something—a sense that I could not die without going home.”
Readers, you will be challenged to reexamine some of the positions you hold concerning inequality, oppression, and the power of stories, and who gets to tell them. This book qualifies as a tour de force. Make this a certain purchase on October 1, 2024.
And he does it wrapped in his travels to three different locations. Dakar, Senegal, Columbia, SC and most impressively Palestine. Mr. Coates is a courageous and erudite young Man sharing his thoughts without concern of any potential blowback. This type of honest writing makes for very compelling reading.
“I am trying to urge you towards something new—not simply against their myths of conquest, but against the urge to craft your own. But this is a negative proposition—a description of what should not be, but not what should be—and it creates an absence in the place of a myth. How do we fill the void? For even as I left the myth of utopic African origin, I still felt something—a sense that I could not die without going home.”
Readers, you will be challenged to reexamine some of the positions you hold concerning inequality, oppression, and the power of stories, and who gets to tell them. This book qualifies as a tour de force. Make this a certain purchase on October 1, 2024.
October 6, 2024
It’s alarming that this will be some readers first and only introduction to the situation in israel - by his own admission, Coates omits important and undisputed critical episodes in the history, including decades of terror and hostility along Israel’s borders and numerous wars against Israel initiated by Israel’s enemies and neighbors. Instead of an accurate portrait of the existential threats faced by Israel, Coates falls back on inaccurate comparisons to slavery that will only incite hate against Jews at a time when misinformation and antisemitism is at a fever pitch. Reckless at best and antisemitic at worst to present this incomplete and misleading picture of the history and conflict. This would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous given Coates’s large audience.
September 8, 2024
Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a powerful, beautifully written ’message’ as he shares his thoughts on race, racism, racial equality, as well as some moments of his earlier years. This isn’t a happy story, per se, but it is a truthful one, a story of examining the lives of those who are diminished, or worse, because of the colour of their skin, or how or where they live. It’s a story of the have-nots vs. those who want to have it all, and control it all. It’s a story about all that and so much more. Of opening your eyes to recognize the truths or untruths in life, and the stories we tell, or are told.
Coates shares three essays, which are weaved together as he shares his thoughts and beliefs, disappointments, and hope for the future. A better future.
Pub Date: 01 Oct 2024
Many thanks for the ARC provided by Random House Publishing Group - Random House / One World
October 2, 2024
This book is awful. It is not based on history. It is a one-sided view that leaves out very important facts. It’s full of antisemitism, leaves out the story of Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews and it disrespects the reader.
September 29, 2024
One of the best books I’ve read about Palestine and how it connects to apartheid, colonialism, ethnic cleansing and the Western way of thinking in general. It compares it very eloquently to the US and other colonized parts of the world from the roots upwards. A must must read! Very well written 👏👏👏
September 25, 2024
I devoured The Message and didn’t expect to. This book of essays is also a book about the power of perspective, the political and humanizing power of writing. It inspired me to go back to Coates’ beautiful Atlantic piece, The Case for Reparations, because he also talks a bit about that journey and connects it to his visit to Israel and Palestine. I’ll be thinking about his points here for a good long time; they are worth turning over in one’s mind.
October 2, 2024
Sorry, I can also travel places and make uninformed acontextual snap judgments to further my career. People mistake sappy vague emotion for an actual deep understanding of why these places are the way they are. Oh but wait, that’s much harder and less pandering. There are just too many people milking too few cows these days.
October 6, 2024
Completely fictional, inaccurate, dangerous, and antisemitic account of the Israel-Palestine conflict in which Jews are “white aggressors” and ironically there is no mention of the violent intifidahs carried out by Palestinians, the “martyrs funds where Mahmoud Abbas pays the families of suicide bombers to kill Jews, or even the fact that the ARABS STARTED THE WAR IN 1948! So many convenient omissions in what Ta Nehisi pretends is a historically accurate account. Do not recommend this one sided revisionist history that is meant to brainwash those who don’t know better. Shame on Ta-Nehisi.
October 6, 2024
In this book, one side is violent and the other side is a victim.
One side has rights and one side does not.
One side deserves humanity and one side doesn’t deserve empathy.
In this book there is occupation but there is no terror.
In this book the Jews are white supremacies at time when global antisemitism is at its peak.
This book is labeled as political journalism. It’s nothing but ignorant propaganda.
One side has rights and one side does not.
One side deserves humanity and one side doesn’t deserve empathy.
In this book there is occupation but there is no terror.
In this book the Jews are white supremacies at time when global antisemitism is at its peak.
This book is labeled as political journalism. It’s nothing but ignorant propaganda.
September 29, 2024
No secret that Coates is a good writer obviously, and all of this is interesting, but I was definitely reading it primarily for the section on Palestine. For someone like myself who's really in the weeds on that issue, there's nothing there that I didn't already know, but as a persuasive essay I think it's terrific. I think it is very valuable to show how a strong and coherent solidaristic moral position can be taken without needing to study the issue for a lifetime, contrary to the insistence of the mainstream media nuance-mongers.
November 15, 2024
A world made clear….
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Message takes us with him on four stops of his journey. He uses words and language to create stories. Stories that examine our lives, our truths, and our lies.
We meet him first as a young boy meeting violence and seeking to understand, to clarify. Clarification is something he needs as a person and as a journalist and with this I totally agree because that is what I seek as well, to clarify, to simplify, to boil down what I’m seeing into a clarified whole.
Then we go with him to Senegal, where he goes to examine his slavery past. He is sort of seeking to close the circle by going to the beginning. However, he finds that the circle has kept on turning, and it has now turned him back to America.
Our third stop is back home in America. He examines education in America and what book banning really means. How it is an attack on education because education is seeding the future. So, when you try to control education, you seek to control the future narrative.
Our last and longest stop is in Palestine – Israel. Here, we meet violence once again. It’s a sort of examining ‘slavery present’. Here, Coates sees his American past in Palestine’s present. He sees how the violence done to the Jews (pogroms and Holocaust) has now been transferred to the Palestinians (occupation and apartheid). The hurt ones become the ones who hurt. Because the circle has not closed – the story continues……………the Occupation continues, the violence continues, the loss of life continues, the loss of freedom continues, the loss of homes continues……………………
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Message takes us with him on four stops of his journey. He uses words and language to create stories. Stories that examine our lives, our truths, and our lies.
We meet him first as a young boy meeting violence and seeking to understand, to clarify. Clarification is something he needs as a person and as a journalist and with this I totally agree because that is what I seek as well, to clarify, to simplify, to boil down what I’m seeing into a clarified whole.
Then we go with him to Senegal, where he goes to examine his slavery past. He is sort of seeking to close the circle by going to the beginning. However, he finds that the circle has kept on turning, and it has now turned him back to America.
Our third stop is back home in America. He examines education in America and what book banning really means. How it is an attack on education because education is seeding the future. So, when you try to control education, you seek to control the future narrative.
Our last and longest stop is in Palestine – Israel. Here, we meet violence once again. It’s a sort of examining ‘slavery present’. Here, Coates sees his American past in Palestine’s present. He sees how the violence done to the Jews (pogroms and Holocaust) has now been transferred to the Palestinians (occupation and apartheid). The hurt ones become the ones who hurt. Because the circle has not closed – the story continues……………the Occupation continues, the violence continues, the loss of life continues, the loss of freedom continues, the loss of homes continues……………………
October 3, 2024
I knew nothing about Coates going into this book. It sounded like The Message could be a perfect companion book to Clint Smith's How the Word is Passed. Both authors wrote about traveling to Goree, off the coast of Senegal. The island was used to load Africans onto ships bound for slavery for over 300 years.
I was disappointed. Smith's book was genuine, honest, and inspiring. The Message was not. It had the potential to be powerful and impactful, but it was so obviously one-sided and dishonest.
Coates simplified the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into his personal and narrow view that everything is racism, when it is far more nuanced and complicated. He took a devastating conflict and made it about himself.
I was disappointed. Smith's book was genuine, honest, and inspiring. The Message was not. It had the potential to be powerful and impactful, but it was so obviously one-sided and dishonest.
Coates simplified the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into his personal and narrow view that everything is racism, when it is far more nuanced and complicated. He took a devastating conflict and made it about himself.
November 5, 2024
It has been a long time since I read Ta-Nehisi Coates but almost right away I thought, "Oh yes, I forgot how good he is at this." And he is.
I truly appreciate his willingness to consider his own flaws and weaknesses, both in his earlier work and in his ongoing efforts to understand the world. There is a lot of willingness here to say "I was wrong and I'm sorry," which was very striking as I can't remember the last time I heard a writer say something like it with as much sincerity.
I truly appreciate his willingness to consider his own flaws and weaknesses, both in his earlier work and in his ongoing efforts to understand the world. There is a lot of willingness here to say "I was wrong and I'm sorry," which was very striking as I can't remember the last time I heard a writer say something like it with as much sincerity.
October 4, 2024
I hate this guy so much I find it hard to compose words about him, but I will just note this:
He goes to a small Southern town where his book is being banned from a high school. Of course one should never ban a book, but could the kids who were correctly ooged out by Coates’ book speak honestly about it? The teacher, a Te-nehisi simp who loves playing the role of the righteous blue person in a red state, probably did not allow such things. These poor little rednecks just couldn’t get over their white fragility!
In looking at the crowd that comes to a school board meeting about his book, Coates sees people afraid of trans kids and “sons dressed as kings of Wakanda.” (So the kids were in blackface?) And he says they should be scared, because these other-ly kids are an avatar of a future where whites will no longer be able to assume a plush, happy life as a matter of course.
Okay. So he is saying he, too, is an enemy of these people, an avatar of their demise, and the only right course of action for them is to become a simpering, self-loathing creature like the teacher who loves Te-nehisi.
One realizes that Coates is no different from dummies like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DeAngelo. He has no particular message for whites other than “You must atone! Cast down your gaze! Take up less space! In general, BE less!”
He tells that when he began writing, he had to “reduce whites in my mind.”
That’s what he’s still doing.
Whites who are susceptible to shaming, to feeling they must be beaten for the sum of the world’s ills, love this stuff. It’s painful to watch Jon Stewart or Chris Hayes bleating before Coates as a higher life form.
Coates has found a scam. Though he appears to have read little but Marvel comics, he speaks in the oratorical style of the great Baldwin, places his hand on his sternum and speaks of the Middle Passage. He may even quote a Negro spiritual in context. He has no shame.
We get the prophets we deserve.
He goes to a small Southern town where his book is being banned from a high school. Of course one should never ban a book, but could the kids who were correctly ooged out by Coates’ book speak honestly about it? The teacher, a Te-nehisi simp who loves playing the role of the righteous blue person in a red state, probably did not allow such things. These poor little rednecks just couldn’t get over their white fragility!
In looking at the crowd that comes to a school board meeting about his book, Coates sees people afraid of trans kids and “sons dressed as kings of Wakanda.” (So the kids were in blackface?) And he says they should be scared, because these other-ly kids are an avatar of a future where whites will no longer be able to assume a plush, happy life as a matter of course.
Okay. So he is saying he, too, is an enemy of these people, an avatar of their demise, and the only right course of action for them is to become a simpering, self-loathing creature like the teacher who loves Te-nehisi.
One realizes that Coates is no different from dummies like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DeAngelo. He has no particular message for whites other than “You must atone! Cast down your gaze! Take up less space! In general, BE less!”
He tells that when he began writing, he had to “reduce whites in my mind.”
That’s what he’s still doing.
Whites who are susceptible to shaming, to feeling they must be beaten for the sum of the world’s ills, love this stuff. It’s painful to watch Jon Stewart or Chris Hayes bleating before Coates as a higher life form.
Coates has found a scam. Though he appears to have read little but Marvel comics, he speaks in the oratorical style of the great Baldwin, places his hand on his sternum and speaks of the Middle Passage. He may even quote a Negro spiritual in context. He has no shame.
We get the prophets we deserve.
October 6, 2024
This book is a horrible, antisemitic rant. I’m so disappointed in this author who I previously loved.
I can not believe that Penguin actually published this book.
I can not believe that Penguin actually published this book.
October 31, 2024
I really appreciate the way Ta-Nehisi Coates weaves these disparate essays together. This is a collection most concerned with discussing the stories that get told and the ones that don’t, the people who are allowed to speak and those who aren’t.
He does this by taking you through a few different places he’s gone and experiences he’s had. A trip to Senegal prompts him to reflect on the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade and its legacy, as well as how his perspective on the country changes the longer he is there. He breaks to discuss book banning in the United States, and personal experiences he’s had with his books being banned in the American South. And in the longest chapter and the most timely, he travels to Palestine, and witnesses firsthand the apartheid brought about by Israel’s colonization and occupation of Palestine.
If those topics feel scattered, it comes together fairly seamlessly. He never veers too far from the central discussion of storytelling, and how oppression of both people and ideas impacts journalism today.
This book reminds me most of Freedom Is A Constant Struggle by Angela Davis. That book features more essays and interviews and is told through the lens of political activism and reform. This book is much shorter and told through a journalistic lens. But I think the comparison stands.
Anyway, I am more appreciative than ever of good nonfiction that discusses those in power’s desire to suppress uncomfortable truth — whether that be in the form of book banning, pro-Israel media coverage, or whitewashing of the history of slavery in America.
Highly recommend!
He does this by taking you through a few different places he’s gone and experiences he’s had. A trip to Senegal prompts him to reflect on the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade and its legacy, as well as how his perspective on the country changes the longer he is there. He breaks to discuss book banning in the United States, and personal experiences he’s had with his books being banned in the American South. And in the longest chapter and the most timely, he travels to Palestine, and witnesses firsthand the apartheid brought about by Israel’s colonization and occupation of Palestine.
If those topics feel scattered, it comes together fairly seamlessly. He never veers too far from the central discussion of storytelling, and how oppression of both people and ideas impacts journalism today.
This book reminds me most of Freedom Is A Constant Struggle by Angela Davis. That book features more essays and interviews and is told through the lens of political activism and reform. This book is much shorter and told through a journalistic lens. But I think the comparison stands.
Anyway, I am more appreciative than ever of good nonfiction that discusses those in power’s desire to suppress uncomfortable truth — whether that be in the form of book banning, pro-Israel media coverage, or whitewashing of the history of slavery in America.
Highly recommend!
October 7, 2024
This should be required reading.
October 4, 2024
Please read Coleman Hughes review in the Free Press
October 21, 2024
I think a lot of errors have been made my MSM trying to review this small book. They fear the last essay, but they lose the context of what he's saying in the essays before. This book works together. Essay 1: Is about the power of the word, of journalism, etc. Essay 2: Is essentially how Senegal, in the mind of Coates, his father, and other African Americans is a fantasy (the reality is not the dream that is held by many in the US). Essay 3 uses this framing to talk about 1) how the fact that MSM seldom lets Palestinians tell their own story fails all of us. We hear stories and myths about Palestine and Israel in narratives that are created by the MSM, by Israel, but almost never by the Palestinians themselves. Coates uses his own perspectives as a child of Jim Crowe era America to draw parallels with the Apartheid State that is Israel.
He also recognizes that even using that framing is limited, because despite the parallels, the Palestinian story told by him is still being framed by an outsider (a sympathetic outsider, but an outsider nonetheless. I think he mostly delivers what he's trying to deliver. That message, however, gets lost because a lot of Zionists aren't ready to hear the reality of what the state of Israel is doing and a lot of the old colonial nations aren't ready to hear it either, because what is happening now in Israel and Palestine is a reflection of what colonial powers have always done: take land that belonged to someone else and dehumanize those that were living there before.
He also recognizes that even using that framing is limited, because despite the parallels, the Palestinian story told by him is still being framed by an outsider (a sympathetic outsider, but an outsider nonetheless. I think he mostly delivers what he's trying to deliver. That message, however, gets lost because a lot of Zionists aren't ready to hear the reality of what the state of Israel is doing and a lot of the old colonial nations aren't ready to hear it either, because what is happening now in Israel and Palestine is a reflection of what colonial powers have always done: take land that belonged to someone else and dehumanize those that were living there before.
October 3, 2024
I listened to the audiobook on Spotify, read by the author. Hearing Coates’ words from his own voice made them even more powerful. This is a beautifully written, very informative and compelling read. Would recommend to all!
October 4, 2024
Coates thinks he can use the same western lens of race on an incredibly complicated relationship that goes back to biblical times which is incredibly dangerous and in and of itself a form of colonization.
October 7, 2024
“This simplistic telling of the Israel-Palestinian conflict omits so much complicating history that it’s no different than a lie. It would be like writing a book about the Civil War that blames the war on the Union without ever mentioning slavery.” Coleman Hughes and the Free Press say it better than I ever could
September 18, 2024
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in such a way that makes it easy to read about painful topics, a skill on display in The Message. As he described it near the end of this book, Coates wrote these essays in "the way my people speak when no white people are around." Travelogues that wax poetic about a location while hinting at its darker elements are the Little Golden Books training wheels for these essays. My apologies for the slightly off-topic comparison: I loved Anthony Bourdain's shows, but anyone who enjoyed his travel commentary should move on and read this book. How often do you hear of an author attending a public hearing that was being held, even if only in part, because his book was being banned? Coates saves the heaviest hits for the last essay on Palestine, which will probably haunt me for a while. (I received an ARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest opinion.)
October 9, 2024
Antisemitic screed from a pseudointellectual who spent 10 days in a country he believes shouldn't exist. Very poorly written and bereft of any facts. I found it challenging to finish Coates’ latest book. From the beginning, it was clear that he struggled to simplify the complexities of the Middle East, resulting in a lack of intellectual integrity and understanding. As I continued reading, the book only deteriorated further. Considering that many in this generation form their opinions based on TikTok feeds, I hope no one has the patience to wade through this pseudo-intellectual revisionist history. I regret spending my time and money on what turned out to be sensationalistic drivel, lacking any semblance of intellectual honesty.
September 15, 2024
Digital ARC from NetGalley
Ta-Nehisi Coates is so good at writing complex ideas in simple, beautiful language. The Message is about writing, the importance of story, and the political power of narrative. In using second person, Coates addresses the reader (although, practically, I assume he’s talking to his students?) bringing us into a conversation. The third, and longest, section of the book is about Coates’s trip to Israel and although the text was likely finished before 10/7, it’s hard not to feel like the text should address what’s current. I’m going to dive into a re-read immediately because I feel like having the full picture of where he goes in his argument will make the first sections richer.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is so good at writing complex ideas in simple, beautiful language. The Message is about writing, the importance of story, and the political power of narrative. In using second person, Coates addresses the reader (although, practically, I assume he’s talking to his students?) bringing us into a conversation. The third, and longest, section of the book is about Coates’s trip to Israel and although the text was likely finished before 10/7, it’s hard not to feel like the text should address what’s current. I’m going to dive into a re-read immediately because I feel like having the full picture of where he goes in his argument will make the first sections richer.
October 4, 2024
Incredibly thought provoking and a fantastic read.
I have to point out how crazy it is that this author didn’t set out to write about the apartheid that Israel is upholding, but he just went to Israel for 10 days and couldn’t not write about it. The fact that he was there for 10 days and had his perspective change this much shows the reality of the apartheid apparatus that the United States supports in Palestine. Mind-boggling that the author got this much pushback for such a small realization.
I have to point out how crazy it is that this author didn’t set out to write about the apartheid that Israel is upholding, but he just went to Israel for 10 days and couldn’t not write about it. The fact that he was there for 10 days and had his perspective change this much shows the reality of the apartheid apparatus that the United States supports in Palestine. Mind-boggling that the author got this much pushback for such a small realization.
October 4, 2024
I loved this book so much. Coates is so brave to speak honestly about what Israel is. Someone in his position could have just kept their mouth shut and toed the lied to stay in the popular circles but he is standing on his morals and fighting back.
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