Ta-Nehisi Coates Corrects the Record

Despite his extraordinary success, Ta-Nehisi Coates still carries the habits of the blogger in his writerly DNA. Although he got his start as a journalist at the Washington City Paper in the 1990s under the tutelage of David Carr while still an undergraduate at Howard University, Coates came into his own when he joined The Atlantic as a blogger and reporter in 2008. This was six years before his landmark article “The Case for Reparations” crashed The Atlantic’s website and changed the national conversation about the debt owed to Black Americans harmed by decades of discriminatory government policy, and seven years before Between the World and Me—his moving and insightful meditation on America’s fictions of race, delivered as a letter to his son—launched him into a level of international renown and ubiquity that spurred some to shorten his name to its capitalized consonants: TNC.

In The Message, his new work of nonfiction reportage, Coates repeatedly attests to his good fortune in landing at The Atlantic when he did, when the rise of Barack Obama forced an insular legacy media to employ writers capable of reporting stories that reflected the concerns of the coalition assembled by the first Black president. This contemplative and confessional strain recurs throughout The Message because, although his writing has carried him to heights few could have anticipated, Coates remains committed to conducting a kind of public interrogation of his intellectual self, to not simply sharing the conclusions he has reached through his years of reporting and research but also revealing to his readers just how he arrived at those conclusions. Coates embraces this journalistic transparency because, as he states in The Message:

I trace myself back to a line of autodidact writers, men and women who felt themselves in possession of some essential truth but were forced to testify to that truth without fact checkers, copy editors, and access to distant archives and expensive databases to perfect that testimony.

Coates, who now has access to all of that and more, willingly shoulders the responsibility to honor the traditions that produced him, and it is this desire to live up to the example set by those who came before that powers his writing here. 

As an autodidact, Coates’s instinct is to scrutinize carefully what’s on the record, which is to say the official accounting of an event or a group of people. After all, the record once held that Black people lived in slums because they were incapable of properly maintaining their neighborhoods, until reporting by Coates (and many others) made this fiction untenable. This skepticism powers the voracious questing that animates Coates’s best writing but exists alongside blind spots that lead to some unfortunate errors. Coates’s desire to correct some of these mistakes lies at the heart of The Message, an effort that takes him across three continents to contested territory and important sites of memory.

Coates’s latest opens with his account of a trip to Dakar, Senegal, his first visit to the continent of Africa. Perhaps unsurprisingly, what Coates once imagined as a rapturous homecoming becomes a struggle with his own preconceived notions of Africa, particularly when he visits Gorée Island and the Door of No Return—a place through which thousands of slaves passed at the beginning of the Middle Passage. Coates grapples openly with a tension between the romantic notions of his youth—inculcated by his Afrocentric father—that Africa held the keys to redeeming if not global society then at least the peoples stolen away from its shores and his discomfort with nationalism of all stripes. “Human dignity is in the mind and body and not in stone,” he writes. “And I think the moment we root our worth in castes and kingdoms, in ‘civilization,’ we have accepted the precepts of those whose entire legacy is the burning and flooding of a planet.”

As Coates rejects the legacy of empire, he reflects on the continuing power that the fictions of race maintain in both West Africa and the diaspora. He and his Senegalese companions speak frankly about which celebrities they see as Black and who they see as “mixed”: “Beyoncé was mixed, despite having two Black parents by the American definition. Her husband, Jay-Z, was Black because he was a ‘rapper’ and not a ‘singer.’” While Coates understands the historical forces that lead his friends to make these judgments, it does not prevent him from feeling a somewhat melancholic disappointment about this state of affairs: “The ‘mixed’ look they treasure here,” he notes, “is itself a marker of the ordeal, an inheritance of the mass rape” of enslaved people. While it may seem odd for Coates to present this thought as a recent realization, given what we know about the legacies of both colonialism and race science, he establishes a willingness to examine his own preconceptions that pays off later in the book.  

The second section of The Message concerns the travails of Mary Wood, who came under fire by the Lexington-Richland School District Five in Chapin, South Carolina, for having the audacity to teach Between the World and Me in her A.P. English class. Here Coates hits his stride, celebrating the fact that—when done with honesty and clarity—both the writing he produces and the reporting he admires can serve to force a society to reflect upon realities that they would rather not consider. He notes that while politics “is the art of the possible … art creates the possible of politics,” describing those attempting to ban works that call attention to flaws in the nation—the legacy of racial plunder chief among them—as “killing a future” where repair and reconciliation might be possible. Coates has always believed that writing offers a way out of this bind, and he is heartened to discover fellow travelers like Mary Wood who also place their faith in the persuasive power of the word.   

These meditations take up the first half of The Message, with the balance of the text focusing on Coates’s May 2023 journey to Palestine and Israel to participate in the Palestine Festival of Literature. But Coates has decided to wade into the question of Palestine and Israel for a more personal reason: He is seeking to correct the record, to right a wrong he feels that he has committed in his own writing. Toward the conclusion of “The Case for Reparations,” Coates suggested that Germany’s payments to Israel might serve as a possible model for the U.S. to follow, both in what reparation payments might look like as well as in what such a disbursement might make possible for their recipients. In that article, Coates notes that the monies paid to Israel launched “Germany’s reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name.” And it is true that denazification in Germany, buttressed by that nation’s commitment to financial recompense, has mostly held for more than three generations and is only now beginning to fail.

Even so, in The Message, Coates confesses that “within days of publishing ‘The Case for Reparations,’ I began to feel the mistake.” While writing approvingly of how Germany sought to make amends for its violent persecution of the Jewish people who lived there, Coates had glossed over the fact that the nation-state erected to protect the survivors of these atrocities was, when it received its first payments in 1953, in the process of dispossessing another group with a legitimate claim to dwell on that land. When Coates crafted “The Case for Reparations” he was attempting to articulate “a world beyond plunder,” but his demonstration of that case rested upon the example of Israel, a nation that—as he confesses in The Message—he did not understand at all. Coates is a writer in the mold of de Tocqueville in that he feels the need to spend time conducting an examination on the ground before drawing conclusions, and he violated this instinct by heaping praise on Israel without having been there, without grappling directly with its shortcomings and contradictions.

Coates opens his account by writing about the overawed melancholy he experiences when visiting the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem: “Every time I visit a space of memory dedicated to this particular catastrophe, what I always come away thinking is that it was worse than I thought, worse than I could ever imagine.” But Coates’s obvious sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust and their descendants, expressed throughout the final section of The Message and in “The Case for Reparations,” does not prevent him from criticizing the state of Israel, from realizing that the question of Palestine has come “to embody the West and its contradictions, its claims of democracy, its foundations in exploitation.” Indeed, for Coates, of “all the worlds I have ever explored, I don’t think any shone so bright, so intense, so immediately as Palestine” in making clear precisely how far we happen to be from a world beyond plunder.

Coates divides his trip equally between Palestine and Israel, and it is here that his sheepish invocations of unexpected privilege in the first section of the book bear fruit. He travels with Palestinians like Sahar Qawasmi, the director of an ecological project in the West Bank, and Israelis like the former IDF soldier Avner Gavarhyu, who is now a fierce critic of the nation he once served. These encounters grant Coates access to perspectives that he lacked in 2014, and allow him to appreciate how thoroughly the state of Israel’s evocations of democracy serve as cover for a program of displacement and dispossession. In this way, Coates finds the evasions employed by the state of Israel—which he is only now coming to understand—remarkably similar to those embraced by the U.S.—which he understands all too well.

The state project of the U.S. and the state project of Israel are both, Coates reflects, based on ethnic hierarchy, a “system of supremacy [that] justifies itself through illusion, so that those moments when the illusion can no longer hold always come as a great shock.” The maintenance of this hierarchy, this system of inequality written into the law, has been carried out in Israel for the last 50 years with “the specific imprimatur of the United States of America. Which means that it had my imprimatur. This was not just another evil done by another state, but an evil done in my name.” This Coates finds intolerable. And by the end of The Message he hopes that you will too.

Occasionally the parallels he discovers between the U.S. and Israel are astonishing, as when Coates visits Kiryat Arba, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank outside of Hebron with a fractious history. Although this settlement is viewed as illegal by many in the international community, Coates finds that “settlements like Kiryat Arba are not the work of rogue pioneers; much like our own redlined suburbs, they are state projects. In the settlements, first-time homebuyers are eligible for subsidized mortgages at low interest rates to build houses on land they lease at discounted rates—a discount made possible on account of the land being stolen.” Incredibly, even Coates’s evocation of redlining—another echo that carries over from “The Case for Reparations”—does not adequately capture the lunacy of this arrangement. Kiryat Arba resembles nothing so much as a community established in the 1870s in America’s Western frontier, where settlers knew that their presence would invalidate treaties that allocated land to someone else. 

Coates turns to the archive after returning from his trip, and the result is a masterful reading of the long history of American, British, French, South African, and Israeli politicians working to shore up the legitimacy of the state of Israel by denying the rights of Palestinians. But these passages—while powerful in their logic—are less affecting than when Coates simply contrasts his experiences of entering the Old City of Jerusalem through the Lion’s Gate accompanied by Arabs (where a “phalanx of soldiers” pores over his documents and inexplicably make him wait) and “through the Jaffa Gate” with his Jewish guides (where he is greeted by “a crush of happy tourists” and the sounds of “joyous bar mitzvah parties”). Although Jerusalem is an important historical and religious site for Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike, Coates makes clear who is actually made to feel welcome there.

Critics of Coates’s approach might note that he did not meet with any of the various settler groups or members of Netanyahu’s government to get their perspective on things. To this Coates offers a stinging reply:

Journalists claim to be hearing “both sides” as though a binary opposition had been set down by some disinterested god. But it is the journalists themselves who are playing god—it is the journalists who decide what sides are legitimate and which are not, which views shall be considered and which pushed out the frame.… Thus the complex of curators is doing more than setting pub dates and greenlighting—they are establishing and monitoring a criterion for humanity.

Coates, the product of a community of people whose humanity has remained up for debate for centuries, has no patience for this kind of sophistry.

This passage late in the text makes clear the message that Coates is painstakingly constructing—about owning your mistakes and correcting the record, about reporting honestly and forthrightly in order to push past the clichés and evasions that prevent a writer from communicating the truth as they see it to their audience. In The Message, the author rejects the comforts of literary celebrity in order to understand how writing might illuminate one of the signal outrages of this world. Throughout this book—which contains Coates’s strongest sustained writing since Between the World and Me—Coates asserts that writing must provide a way toward justice. A writer worthy of the title must conquer their fear and shape their account to the facts as they are, not as a partisan might wish them to be. And here he offers a powerful model of what that kind of writing must look like.