Jehad Alshrafi/AP Photo
The largest section of Coates’s book covers the on-the-ground reality of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
This article appears in the December 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
One World
In the 1988 song “Lyrics of Fury,” hip-hop icons Eric B. and Rakim spend about four minutes performing an Olympic-caliber routine of verbal acrobatics, rapping a stream of incredibly dexterous rhymes, all about how incredibly dexterous their rhymes are.
Six years earlier, another legendary group, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, had released a song that was nearly the polar opposite, in terms of content. “The Message” was one of the first popular hip-hop tracks whose lyrics went beyond exhortations to enjoyment and clever boasts about one’s prowess as a wordsmith. It also tried to tell you something.
The song is a critique, a lament and a warning about inner-city poverty, touching on issues like education, inflation, mental health, drug abuse, and labor strife. The lyrics are delivered over a funky, infectious bass-synthesizer beat, and, at times, with a playful diction and cadence that produces a rhythmic gallows humor. (There are also some irresponsibly homophobic lines, especially considering the context.) It shot quickly to the top of the charts, and is still considered one of the greatest mainstream hip-hop records of all time.
The acclaimed author Ta-Nehisi Coates considers himself primarily a disciple of that second practice: art, not just for art’s sake, or for your simple enjoyment, but also for politics. Writing should be crafted to evoke beauty, pain, and other human experience—making people feel some way—as a means toward clarification and persuasion, according to Coates. His latest book, which quotes lines from “Lyrics of Fury,” and is titled The Message, is a success on both counts.
Coates delivers a timely, moving meditation through four interrelated essays, informed by several reporting trips: an “ancestral journey” to Dakar, Senegal; a visit to small-town South Carolina, where teachers are being pressured to stop teaching Coates’s earlier work because it made some students feel “ashamed to be Caucasian”; and a trip alongside other writers, editors, and artists to experience East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Coates begins to grapple with a few of the most pressing questions facing the Black radical tradition and pan-Africanism today, and some of the most troublingly persistent. He calls out what has been termed “vindicationism”—a tendency on the part of oppressed peoples to respond to dehumanizing myths with their own myths, about their own glory—and criticizes the notion, with a respectful empathy. And he strives for atonement for failing to abide by his own stated principles in The Case for Reparations, one of his most acclaimed essays. The through line is racial capitalism, a conceptual framework that reinterprets capitalism as systems designed to extract economic value from marginalized groups, partly by dehumanizing and rendering them disposable.
The book ties all these ideas together neatly, with freshly evocative language, and Coates’s stylish arguments are all the more forceful because of it.
OF COURSE, THE MESSAGE HAS GENERATED plenty of discourse since its release, virtually all surrounding the essay about the on-the-ground reality of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Some pro-Israel critics have implied that Coates’s description of Israel as a racist apartheid state reflects antisemitism. He was famously told that the book “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist” during an unusually confrontational television appearance.
The Israel-Palestine essay makes up the bulk of the book. And it’s remarkable for a number of reasons, not least of which is its timeliness and urgency, amid the events of October 7, 2023, and the consequent war in Gaza. The U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories recently described the siege as “the most extreme stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure of the native Palestinians.”
Coates makes a similar argument, based on material from before October 7. It bears powerful, eyewitness testimony to what is described as a sophisticated, segregationist apartheid state: the cutting edge of oppression and the future of Jim Crow, all sponsored by Uncle Sam, and as told to you by an American reporter. The essay, given Coates’s stature and its execution, is therefore firmly within what he refers to throughout the book simply as “the tradition”—the political ideology and intellectual work undertaken by abolitionists, anti-colonialists, and civil rights activists since the 19th century and beyond, which includes a significant strain of anti-war arguments.
Coates is surprised when he encounters the vestiges of colonialism and neocolonialism in Africa.
The Israel-Palestine essay draws links between the struggle of various “conquered peoples”: Palestinians, Black Americans, Native American tribes, Jews and Ukrainians under Hitler, and white serfs and peasants in medieval Europe (mentioned in the piece about book-banning). This approach has original revelatory power, even for a subject as aged and all-encompassing as racial capitalism.
Coates also makes a searing and important critique of Zionism that also goes to the heart of pan-Africanism and the Black radical tradition, although hardly any major media have even touched on those linkages. He points out that, in many respects, the grandest dreams of the most radical figures within that tradition, like Malcolm X or Martin Delany, have often imagined a mythic Black country that may not look much different from the Israel that he describes: a racial ethnostate whose people find discrimination against “others” to be almost unavoidable, perpetuating the very sin it was created to absolve.
“Israel felt like an alternative history, one where all our Garvey dreams were made manifest,” Coates writes, before commenting on the fact that those dreams, for Black folks at least, have never actually manifested. “I think it’s best that way—for should that mythic Africa have ever descended out of the imagination and into the real, I shudder at what we might lose in realizing and defending it.”
Coates also displays commendable humility in this piece. The essay is itself a mea culpa, a “bid for reparation” for committing “the sin of abstraction.” When he argued for reparations for Black Americans, he used as a model the reparations given to the Jewish state of Israel, rather than arguing for reparations to people, survivors and victims.
Nonetheless, the overwhelming focus on the Israel-Palestine essay has done readers and the audience a disservice, even as it may have done the author quite a favor, by way of publicity and book sales. There’s a lot more to be said about the other three essays, and the collective as a whole.
IN THE PALESTINE ESSAY, COATES is simply adding his account to arguments that Palestinians themselves, their allies, and the international human rights community have been making for decades. The scholar Noura Erakat, who is quoted in the epigraph to the essay, wrote in The Nation in 2014 that Israel “dehumanizes Palestinians, deprives them even of their victimhood and legitimizes egregious human rights and legal violations.” The piece ends with what is essentially a prediction of today’s situation in Gaza and beyond. And as Coates himself points out, leading international human rights organizations have also declared Israel an apartheid state. Amnesty International said the Israeli government is committing apartheid in 2022, for example.
This raises a question, even if we take for granted the fortuitous timing of the book’s release: Why has all the attention, and criticism, focused on this particular essay, which largely retreads old arguments?
As it happens, Coates’s book itself offers an answer. Journalists wield the power to decide “which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame,” Coates writes. That authority “is an extension of the power of other curators of the culture—network execs, producers, publishers—whose core job is deciding which stories get told and which do not.”
It’s an astute point, and it’s well illustrated in the reception to The Message.
The first essay of the book, which is about writing, opens with epigraphs by George Orwell about feeling compelled to write because of the high stakes of the politics of his day; and by James Baldwin on the importance of “the interior life” and imagination, as a necessary precursor to change in the real world.
The essay is short, but thoroughly broad, seamlessly weaving autobiography, reporting, and polemic, exhorting writers—and especially young Black journalists—to write for the express purpose of politics, to explain and to compel people. It’s a lovely meditation on the art and politics of writing.
CHERISS MAY/SIPA USA VIA AP
Coates’s belief that journalists wield the power to decide what stories get told is illustrated by the reception to his book.
Coates talks of finding inspiration in rappers and Shakespeare, spoken-word poets, and Sports Illustrated articles, discovering how language could be deployed, artfully, to open whole new worlds in the mind, and to move people. He centers what he calls the “larger emancipatory mandate,” arguing that writers who belong to oppressed minority communities cannot separate their art, or work, from politics, and must instead “make people feel all that is now at stake.” And he leans into the moral underpinnings implied by his argument.
The second essay, “On Pharaohs,” about Coates’s ancestral pilgrimage back to Africa by way of Senegal, is in fact the most remarkable part of the book. And it makes significant contributions to the canon of “emancipatory” Black intellectual work that Coates aspires to.
The very notion of the journey “back to Africa”—wanting to make it, avoiding it, the feeling of arriving, of being there—is a universal, felt experience among the global African diaspora. Yet it’s a subject that remains underexplored within Coates’s “tradition”; that, and Coates’s vivid, evocative language, makes “On Pharaohs” a significant work.
Coates tells the story of a trip to a former slave fort in wrenching, thoughtfully beautiful passages—the anticipation, the mild but pleasant shocks, the surprising, vague pangs of loss, and the beauty of it all. “And now, approaching Gorée, I was a pilgrim on an ancestral journey, back to the beginning of time, not just to my own birth but to the birth of the modern world,” he writes, beginning to describe his feelings in a “moment I never thought I even needed.”
Like many of his fellow pilgrims, Coates is surprised when he encounters the vestiges of colonialism and neocolonialism in Africa, finding out that African Americans’ lighter skin tones—undeniable markers of the mass rape attendant to slavery—are treasured even across the Atlantic.
One of the masters of Coates’s “tradition,” W.E.B. Du Bois, expounded on that same subject in 1925, shortly after visiting Sierra Leone. “Everything that America has done crudely and shamelessly to suppress the Negro, England in Sierra Leone has done legally and suavely so that the Negroes themselves sometimes doubt the evidence of their own senses: segregation, disfranchisement, trial without jury, over-taxation, ‘Jim Crow’ cars, neglect of education, economic serfdom,” Du Bois wrote. “Yet all this can be and is technically denied,” both by colonial officials and often by Black colonized people themselves.
Coates’s surprise at colorism in Africa, then, is a bit unexpected. Still, he notes that the idea isn’t new to him, as a Black American. It’s the fact of encountering this variety of anti-Blackness “back home,” in Africa itself, that “was chilling.” That, too, has something to do with certain stories remaining out of the frame, due to the choices of writers, network execs, producers, and the like.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Coates’s back-to-Africa essay is his confrontation with, and apparent rejection of, vindicationism, a movement that gave him his African name. The term was coined by the historian and anthropologist St. Clair Drake, who explained that “a special genre of intellectual activity emerged among literate Blacks in the eighteenth-century,” geared explicitly toward constructing an intellectual defense and counternarrative to the racist myths of white supremacy. This included both legitimate science, history, and other scholarship, as well as quackery and myths.
“That explains our veneration of Black pharaohs and African kingdoms,” Coates writes. “The point was to tell a different story than the one imposed on us—an understandable response, but one that I’ve never made peace with.”
Coates’s implication here is clear, and striking: The focus on countering a white supremacist narrative about being uncivilized can easily distract from other, potentially crucial considerations, like the inequality and tyranny that built most ancient kingdoms in Africa, as in Europe or any other continent.
Here, Coates grapples thoughtfully with an urgent and little-examined question about Black life and the lives of the marginalized in general. “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,” he writes.
Coates’s piece about book-banning hits on many of the same themes and threads that tie the whole of The Message together. He draws connections, from “the book banners,” to the movement to protect Confederate monuments, to derogatory literature and film about Jews, and to European peasants under the forced labor of feudalism. The whole point, Coates argues, is to tell certain stories, and not others. All that is necessary prologue before Coates tells a final story about Israel, which is yet again something that mainstream guardians of the discourse would rather keep outside of the frame. And the mainstream reaction to the book, in large part, illustrates the author’s arguments.
The Message is a haunting, beautifully written little book about writing, and about truth-telling. It’s a timely and well-argued anti-war tract. And one of its greatest achievements is in threading together these seemingly disparate peoples, stories, and struggles so seamlessly.
