Opinion Why you should read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book
“Two products of Howard University will spend this month traveling across the country and talking about politics. But while Vice President Kamala Harris (Class of 1986) is being circumspect, trying to assure moderate and conservative voters that she isn’t too liberal for them, Ta-Nehisi Coates (who attended Howard from 1993-1999 and teaches there now but didn’t earn a degree) is giving an unvarnished account of America and the world in 2024.
We should all be listening to him, too.
Coates’s latest book, “The Message,” was published this week. An author putting out another book is being treated by the media as a major event — with write-ups and profiles of Coates all over. But the hype is justified. Coates’s work, particularly his essays in the Atlantic “The Case for Reparations” and “The First White President” (Donald Trump), were not only some of the best pieces of journalism of the past few decades but also the most influential. They helped push the Democratic Party, the mainstream media and other institutions to focus more on enduring racial disparities and racism in the United States and move beyond the mistaken belief that the country had become post-racial because Barack Obama was elected president.
Coates left the Atlantic in 2018 and shifted to fiction and graphic novel writing. So “The Message” is his first big foray into politics since Joe Biden became president. Like Coates’s prior work, the writing in this book is lyrical, the reporting richly detailed, and almost every page offers a new and important insight or articulates an idea you had in your head but hadn’t fully put together.
Following Perry Bacon Jr.
I’m not going to formally review the book, nor do I want to summarize “The Message,” which I highly encourage you to read yourself. But as someone who studies politics, policy and racial issues, I want to highlight some of the intellectual contributions of the book. In the 2010s, Coates changed the way I and many others (including Obama, I suspect) thought about the country. “The Message” isn’t as groundbreaking as Coates’s reparations essay, but it contains some important ideas.
1. A case for Black internationalism
The book is made up of essays from reporting trips Coates took to Senegal; Israel and the Palestinian territories; and Chapin, a town near Columbia, S.C., where there was an effort to ban a teacher from using his book “Between the World and Me” in one of her writing classes.
Coates passionately argues that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is an abomination. He rightly criticizes the media for its “elevation of complexity over justice” in coverage of the conflict between the two groups. It’s important that Coates, one of the country’s most prominent writers, is making these arguments, as leaders in both parties continue to defend essentially whatever Israel does.
That said, if you’ve read commentators who are skeptical of Israel, Coates is making a familiar case — even if it’s enhanced by his excellent writing and reporting. What’s particularly notable is Coates’s connection of the Palestinians’ struggles to those of Black people in the United States and in Africa.
Writing about other countries wasn’t previously a major part of Coates’s work. During the 2010s, publications such at the Atlantic and The Post were more willing to let their staffers, particularly African American ones, detail America’s past and present anti-Black policies. But much of that writing, my own included, was very focused on the United States. Coates is now telling a global story of how racism at home and colonialism and White supremacy abroad are intertwined.
“Those who claimed Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East were just as likely to claim that America was the oldest democracy in the world. And both claims relied on excluding whole swaths of the population,” Coates writes.
2. A case for a bit of racial optimism
In the past four years, we’ve seen huge backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement and George Floyd protests. Republican-controlled states passed numerous laws to prevent schools and universities from teaching books and academic doctrines that highlight racism. Centrist Democrats didn’t go that far, but they adopted language (“wokeness”) and unsubstantiated political theories (claiming Democrats’ use of phrases such as “systemic racism” is a major reason the party isn’t doing better in elections) that underscored their discomfort with this new civil rights activism.
I’ve been disheartened. What if all the protests and writing of the 2010s ultimately won’t lead to anything? Coates agrees that policy momentum has stalled. But as he tells the story of a woman risking her career to keep his book in her classroom, Coates is surprisingly optimistic.
“Policy change is an end point, not an origin,” he writes. “The cradle of material change is in our imagination and ideas. … We have the burden of crafting new language and stories that allow people to imagine that new policies are possible. And now, even here in Chapin, some people, not most (it is hardly ever most), had, through the work of Black writers, begun the work of imagining.”
It felt good and reassuring to read that. I’m still pessimistic, though. Colleges in liberal areas are restricting protests and even language that is critical of Israel, in some ways mirroring the red-state crackdown on the works of writers such as Coates. I worry that the 2020s will be an era not of policies catching up to ideas, but instead of ideas being warped or suppressed to align with existing policies. For example, centrist Democrats and Republicans have made it seem as if calls to “defund the police” mean that activists want to take all cops off the street immediately and let murderers and rapists roam free.
I often question my choice of profession these days. Harris and Trump are dueling to be the favorite candidate of the cryptocurrency industry, even though so much journalism over the past decade has shown the problems caused by speculative finance and worship of new technology. Journalists all but begged Republicans to nominate anyone but the man who tried to overturn the election results after he lost. GOP voters still chose Trump.
Does journalism no longer matter? More broadly, in a world of podcasts and TikTok, is the written word irrelevant?
It’s not surprising that Coates, who writes books and teaches journalism at a college, still thinks that written journalism is useful. But I was struck by how empathic he was on this point. The book is written as a kind of letter to his students at Howard. Coates spends little time detailing the news industry’s challenges, from the declining number of jobs to shrinking audiences.
His audience for the book, Coates writes, “is young writers everywhere whose task is nothing less than doing their part to save the world.”
Coates made his trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories before the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 last year and Israel’s military offensive in response. He doesn’t address the past year there. The book also doesn’t focus on Biden or Trump and was likely finalized before Harris became the Democratic nominee.
In some ways, that lack of currentness makes “The Message” an even better read, particularly right now. Harris is trying to win an election over the next few weeks, which to her necessitates rarely talking about racism, proposing ideas to make it harder for people desperately seeking a better life to enter the United States and supporting Israel even as it kills thousands of civilians in Gaza.
Coates is trying to change America and the world years and even decades from now, which to him means laying out ideas and theories that aren’t achievable today.
I hope one Howard alum is successful in the short run — and the other in the long run.
Opinion Why you should read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book
Two products of Howard University will spend this month traveling across the country and talking about politics. But while Vice President Kamala Harris (Class of 1986) is being circumspect, trying to assure moderate and conservative voters that she isn’t too liberal for them, Ta-Nehisi Coates (who attended Howard from 1993-1999 and teaches there now but didn’t earn a degree) is giving an unvarnished account of America and the world in 2024.
We should all be listening to him, too.
Coates’s latest book, “The Message,” was published this week. An author putting out another book is being treated by the media as a major event — with write-ups and profiles of Coates all over. But the hype is justified. Coates’s work, particularly his essays in the Atlantic “The Case for Reparations” and “The First White President” (Donald Trump), were not only some of the best pieces of journalism of the past few decades but also the most influential. They helped push the Democratic Party, the mainstream media and other institutions to focus more on enduring racial disparities and racism in the United States and move beyond the mistaken belief that the country had become post-racial because Barack Obama was elected president.
Coates left the Atlantic in 2018 and shifted to fiction and graphic novel writing. So “The Message” is his first big foray into politics since Joe Biden became president. Like Coates’s prior work, the writing in this book is lyrical, the reporting richly detailed, and almost every page offers a new and important insight or articulates an idea you had in your head but hadn’t fully put together.
Following Perry Bacon Jr.
I’m not going to formally review the book, nor do I want to summarize “The Message,” which I highly encourage you to read yourself. But as someone who studies politics, policy and racial issues, I want to highlight some of the intellectual contributions of the book. In the 2010s, Coates changed the way I and many others (including Obama, I suspect) thought about the country. “The Message” isn’t as groundbreaking as Coates’s reparations essay, but it contains some important ideas.
1. A case for Black internationalism
The book is made up of essays from reporting trips Coates took to Senegal; Israel and the Palestinian territories; and Chapin, a town near Columbia, S.C., where there was an effort to ban a teacher from using his book “Between the World and Me” in one of her writing classes.
Coates passionately argues that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is an abomination. He rightly criticizes the media for its “elevation of complexity over justice” in coverage of the conflict between the two groups. It’s important that Coates, one of the country’s most prominent writers, is making these arguments, as leaders in both parties continue to defend essentially whatever Israel does.
That said, if you’ve read commentators who are skeptical of Israel, Coates is making a familiar case — even if it’s enhanced by his excellent writing and reporting. What’s particularly notable is Coates’s connection of the Palestinians’ struggles to those of Black people in the United States and in Africa.
Writing about other countries wasn’t previously a major part of Coates’s work. During the 2010s, publications such at the Atlantic and The Post were more willing to let their staffers, particularly African American ones, detail America’s past and present anti-Black policies. But much of that writing, my own included, was very focused on the United States. Coates is now telling a global story of how racism at home and colonialism and White supremacy abroad are intertwined.
“Those who claimed Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East were just as likely to claim that America was the oldest democracy in the world. And both claims relied on excluding whole swaths of the population,” Coates writes.
2. A case for a bit of racial optimism
In the past four years, we’ve seen huge backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement and George Floyd protests. Republican-controlled states passed numerous laws to prevent schools and universities from teaching books and academic doctrines that highlight racism. Centrist Democrats didn’t go that far, but they adopted language (“wokeness”) and unsubstantiated political theories (claiming Democrats’ use of phrases such as “systemic racism” is a major reason the party isn’t doing better in elections) that underscored their discomfort with this new civil rights activism.
I’ve been disheartened. What if all the protests and writing of the 2010s ultimately won’t lead to anything? Coates agrees that policy momentum has stalled. But as he tells the story of a woman risking her career to keep his book in her classroom, Coates is surprisingly optimistic.
“Policy change is an end point, not an origin,” he writes. “The cradle of material change is in our imagination and ideas. … We have the burden of crafting new language and stories that allow people to imagine that new policies are possible. And now, even here in Chapin, some people, not most (it is hardly ever most), had, through the work of Black writers, begun the work of imagining.”
It felt good and reassuring to read that. I’m still pessimistic, though. Colleges in liberal areas are restricting protests and even language that is critical of Israel, in some ways mirroring the red-state crackdown on the works of writers such as Coates. I worry that the 2020s will be an era not of policies catching up to ideas, but instead of ideas being warped or suppressed to align with existing policies. For example, centrist Democrats and Republicans have made it seem as if calls to “defund the police” mean that activists want to take all cops off the street immediately and let murderers and rapists roam free.
I often question my choice of profession these days. Harris and Trump are dueling to be the favorite candidate of the cryptocurrency industry, even though so much journalism over the past decade has shown the problems caused by speculative finance and worship of new technology. Journalists all but begged Republicans to nominate anyone but the man who tried to overturn the election results after he lost. GOP voters still chose Trump.
Does journalism no longer matter? More broadly, in a world of podcasts and TikTok, is the written word irrelevant?
It’s not surprising that Coates, who writes books and teaches journalism at a college, still thinks that written journalism is useful. But I was struck by how empathic he was on this point. The book is written as a kind of letter to his students at Howard. Coates spends little time detailing the news industry’s challenges, from the declining number of jobs to shrinking audiences.
His audience for the book, Coates writes, “is young writers everywhere whose task is nothing less than doing their part to save the world.”
Coates made his trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories before the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 last year and Israel’s military offensive in response. He doesn’t address the past year there. The book also doesn’t focus on Biden or Trump and was likely finalized before Harris became the Democratic nominee.
In some ways, that lack of currentness makes “The Message” an even better read, particularly right now. Harris is trying to win an election over the next few weeks, which to her necessitates rarely talking about racism, proposing ideas to make it harder for people desperately seeking a better life to enter the United States and supporting Israel even as it kills thousands of civilians in Gaza.
Coates is trying to change America and the world years and even decades from now, which to him means laying out ideas and theories that aren’t achievable today.
I hope one Howard alum is successful in the short run — and the other in the long run.“
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