Ta-Nehisi Coates has the diagnosis — but not the cure

With his new book The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates, a journalist who indelibly shaped the national conversation on race in America during the Obama years, turns his scrupulous attention toward yet another tinderbox of a problem: that of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His conclusions are highly provocative — and damning toward the Israeli government. 

Coates, a former writer for the Atlantic, skyrocketed to prominence with the 2014 publication of “The Case for Reparations,” a deeply researched essay on the history of racial housing discrimination in America that became a national sensation. The essay almost single-handedly turned reparations from a joke into a serious talking point in American politics, and in the process, it made Coates an intellectual celebrity. 

By 2018, Coates was a National Book Award winner, a Pulitzer finalist, and widely discussed as the next James Baldwin. Yet around that time, Coates took a step back from his perch as one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He got off Twitter. He stepped down from the Atlantic. He published a novel and wrote a Black Panther arc for Marvel. He started teaching journalism at Howard. The writer who set the conversation on race in America during the 2010s decided he had had enough halfway through the Trump years.

The Message is Coates getting back into political discourse for the first time in years, and characteristically, he’s not starting off with an easy problem. In his new book, Coates sets out to make the case that the treatment of Palestinians in Israel is analogous to the treatment of Black Americans in the Jim Crow South, and that as such, it is morally reprehensible — an incendiary argument but one that Coates imbues with the force of his own newly discovered conviction. “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger or more intense than it did in Israel,” Coates writes. 

In The Message, Coates makes it clear early on that he’ll be presenting his argument primarily from the perspective of Palestinians, whom he describes as “voiceless” and, as such, in need of the platform he can offer them. He declines to mention Hamas. He also declines to suggest potential solutions for the problem of Israel and Palestine, a move that is not unusual for him; he has always positioned himself as a diagnostician rather than a physician. 

That perspective has predictably earned Coates detractors who find his omissions disgraceful. In a widely seen interview with Coates on CBS Mornings, host Tony Dokoupil declared that Coates’s work would “not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” before pressing Coates on whether Israel should have a right to exist.

“The perspective that you just outlined, there is no shortage of that perspective in American media,” Coates replied. He added, “There’s nothing that offends me about a Jewish state. I am offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy, no matter where they are.”

What has always made Coates’s work most striking is not just his ability to muster a convincing argument. He’s also simply a beautiful prose stylist. Coates cares about the mechanics of a sentence, about its rhythms and imagery. He makes you want to read him, even if what he’s saying feels frightening or hard to take, because his voice is so astounding on the page. 

Coates writes that his aim in writing The Message is to “haunt” his readers, to give them images and ideas they cannot get out of their minds. In that, he succeeds. The Message is haunting. It gets under your skin. People who will not read other books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will read this one by dint of Coates’s unparalleled stature, and they will remember it. 

Coates is the rare writer who can turn his political writing into haunted houses. And he’s never more effective than when he transforms himself into the main character. 

Searching for a moment of ecstatic discovery

The Message is made up of four separate essays, of which the essay on Palestine is the last and longest. The book becomes a sort of travelogue, each essay taking place in a new town, where Coates tracks the different ways race has manifested itself there. 

The book is also framed as a letter to his Howard writing students, laced liberally with his philosophy on what writing should look like. Each new location prompts thoughts on what Coates’s duty is as a writer, or what the effects of writing properly done can be. 

He writes that he finds the most aesthetic pleasure in writing when he is able, through research and argument, to answer one of his own questions and convince himself of that answer.

“Through reading, through reporting, I begin to comprehend a truth. That moment of comprehension is ecstatic,” Coates writes. “Writing and rewriting is the attempt to communicate not just a truth but the ecstasy of a truth. It is not enough for me to convince the reader of my argument; I want them to feel that same private joy that I feel alone.”

Coates’s writing at its best is animated by that private joy, by the ecstasy he feels when he has reached a new understanding of the world. You can see his sheer grim delight in making these discoveries in “The Case for Reparations.” 

“To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy, to pretend that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of unregulated capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with the sin of national lying,” Coates writes in that essay, the rhythms of his sentences building and mounting as if he were a preacher at the pulpit. “The lie ignores the fact that reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same.” 

There’s a triumph to the way he writes here: I figured it out; they tried to hide it but I figured it out; I’m going to make you see exactly what I figured out. The thing he has figured out, put plainly, is that America is a rich country because it was built on stolen land, with stolen labor and stolen resources. That is the basis of the argument for reparations. 

By contrast, Coates’s 2015 essay “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” is probably one of the least-influential of his major features for the Atlantic. In his essay collection We Were Eight Years in Power, Coates describes it as “an end point for my inquiries,” and that sense of resignation bleeds into the writing. 

There, Coates doesn’t seem to make any major theoretical advances in his own understanding of the world. As such, even though the essay is well-researched and well-argued, it seems to lie inert on the page. It’s not a piece that haunts. 

The comfort of redemptive myths 

In The Message, Coates once again returns to his own ecstatic search for truth. 

Each of the three essays preceding the final one on Palestine serves to establish Coates as his own main character, a man whose understanding of the world will be fundamentally changed by what he sees in Palestine during a 10-day trip in 2023. What he finds out shocks him into a new state of knowledge. 

He begins at Howard, which he attended as a student and which he credits with teaching him that his writing must “be in service to a larger emancipatory project.” It’s here that he lays out his values as a writer, his passionate love for language, his belief that its pleasures must be harnessed for a greater political good. 

In his second essay, Coates travels to Senegal and grapples with his own discomfort with the “vindicationist tradition” of Black America that says that Black people were born to be royalty, the kings and queens of Africa. He understands that this redemptive myth is a response to centuries of oppressive pseudoscience and philosophy that sought to prove that Black people were naturally inferior to whites — but still, he’s suspicious of any story that relies so heavily on the idea that social hierarchies are good when your personal group is the one on top.

He visits Gorée, the island that is popularly held to have been the largest slave-trading center on the African coast. Coates is aware that historians now dispute that idea, but he finds himself still immensely moved by the experience of visiting it. For Coates, Gorée becomes a sort of personal Israel, a promised land, a mythic homeland he is aware does not truly belong to him.

“We have a right to our imagined places, and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess that they are imagined,” Coates concludes. “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.” 

Coates travels next to South Carolina, where a teacher had been forced to drop Between the World and Me from her curriculum because it made some of her white students uncomfortable. This essay serves as a kind of proof of the ideas Coates laid out at Howard: that beautiful language marshaled for a worthy political project can change people’s minds. 

He keeps meeting Southern white people who say that his writing has reshaped the way they look at the world, and that, Coates concludes, is why conservative governments are always trying to ban his books and the works of other Black writers. People in positions of power, he says, are threatened by narratives that question their natural superiority.

“It all works not simply to misinform but to miseducate; not just to assure the right answers are memorized but that the wrong questions are never asked,” Coates writes. 

Applying the lens of American racial caste politics 

When Coates reaches Israel in the final and longest essay of The Message, the arcs of the previous essays become foreshadowing for what he is on the precipice of learning. 

Coates reads Israel as a sort of twisted realization of the dream of the vindicationist tradition. He imagines Zionist Jews as people who, like the descendents of enslaved Africans, have been deprived of power for centuries and millennia, and who then find a way to claim strength and safety for themselves — only to brutally inflict that power on others. This is his reading of the founding of Israel: that the first Arab-Israeli war offered a chance for Israel’s founders to prove that they were not the Jews who had been so horribly killed in the Holocaust, that they were strong and that they could fight and conquer in their own name.

Coates spends 10 days in Israel over the summer of 2023, before the current war broke out, traveling between the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Once there, he struggles to understand how he could have been so unaware of how brutal life is for Palestinians in Israel and Israeli-occupied territories. He has always had the sense, he writes, that “Israel as a country … was doing something deeply unfair to the Palestinian people,” but “I was not clear on exactly what.” 

Moreover, his sense from American political coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict left him with a sense that the whole situation “was so fraught that a body of knowledge akin to computational mathematics was needed to comprehend it.” But the fact that a situation might be complex, he concludes, does not mean he cannot recognize brutality when he sees it.

After visiting Palestine, he’s astounded to realize how few reporters and editors claimed Palestinian heritage in American newsrooms. He comes to see this blind spot of American journalism as analogous to the way conservatives keep trying to censor his books in the South: “No other story, save one that enables theft, can be tolerated” by the powerful, he concludes.

Describing the project of Israel as one of theft is classic Coates. What he brings to his descriptions of Palestine is his bone-deep knowledge of American racial caste politics, for which he developed his specialized and distinctive vocabulary. At the Atlantic, Coates described the state policies that strip wealth and resources from Black Americans as “plunder,” and he uses the same words to describe Israel’s policies governing Palestinians.

“It is not just the cops shooting your son, though that happens,” Coates writes. “It is not just a racist carceral project, though that is here too. And it is not just inequality before the law, though that was everywhere I looked. It is the thing that each of those devices served—a plunder of your home, a plunder both near and perpetual.” What Israel wants, Coates argues, is Palestinian land, minus the Palestinians who live on it. Any policy in service of that larger aim is what he describes as plunder. 

Coates describes being accosted on the street by an armed soldier who demands he identify his religion. He writes about being held at a checkpoint for hours because his guides are Palestinians. He marvels at Israeli law, which he says “clearly and directly calls for a two-tier society,” with its arcane sub-citizen hierarchies for Palestinian residents, its stinginess in allowing Palestinian citizens to pass their Israeli citizenship on to their descendents. 

Learning that in Israel, any structure designed for gathering water requires a government permit and that such permits are rarely granted to Palestinians, he cracks that “Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself.”

It’s this learning that powers The Message forward. The whole book is lit up by his outrage at his old inferior understanding of Palestine and his palpable pleasure in forging the new. “My sense of the world was stunted,” he writes, “and never did I feel it expand in the way I felt it expanding in Palestine.” 

There’s that sense of triumph again: I figured it out; they tried to hide it but I figured it out; I’m going to make you see exactly what I figured out.

Has he actually figured it out? It’s a fair question. Critics more nuanced than Dokoupil have already taken issue with Coates’s decision not to discuss the fact that, for instance, Israel is surrounded by states committed to destroying it, or to mention the horrific attack carried out by Hamas on October 7 last year and all that came after. It would be reasonable to argue that not only has Coates failed to figure it out, but that he neglected to even try to wrap his mind around the bigger picture of what’s happening in Israel and Gaza.

I think that would be a misreading of his project. What Coates is trying to capture, more than anything, is the experience of being an ordinary Palestinian living in Israel under the vicious disdain of the state. He is interested largely in the physical experience of oppression. He succeeds in capturing that specific reality as completely as anyone could. If what he’s figuring out is how to write convincingly about the horrors of apartheid through a lens of America’s own racial caste system, he’s got it.

If what he’s figuring out is how to write a book on Israel and Palestine that will be as paradigm shifting as “The Case for Reparations,” he’s failed.

The problem of a diagnosis with no solution 

Coates’s great weakness here is, probably, his old insistence that he doesn’t offer solutions, just describes problems. 

While “Reparations” characteristically and pointedly declined to engage with the question of what reparations should look like, there was an inherent action point. The United States government has repeatedly stolen wealth from its Black citizens, and so it should pay reparations for that theft. Coates even pointed to a congressional bill introduced every year since 1989 and never taken up in the full House or Senate that would create a federal commission to study the issue. 

The problem of Israel and Palestine is very different, however, from the problem of reparations. Finding a solution to the conflict has been a locus of geopolitics for decades and has yielded few tangible results, especially in the conditions for Palestinians under Israeli occupation.  

It is not Coates’s job to create peace in the region with The Message. Yet this weakness does mean that his book lacks the one-two punch of “Reparations:” problem, solution. Coates is not the first person to say that the situation of the Palestinians is unconscionable. He is simply one of the most famous to do so, and probably the most beautiful writer. 

Beauty here is a driving force for Coates. Part of his philosophy is that only truthful writing is really beautiful, and he says that he wrote The Message in an attempt to live up to that idea.

Notably, in “The Case for Reparations,” Coates offers what he saw then as a successful example of governments making financial reparations for their sins: Germany, which paid reparations to the Israeli government. 

“I was seeking a world beyond plunder,” Coates says of writing “The Case for Reparations,” “but my proof of concept was just more plunder.” Once he reaches Palestine, he writes, he feels astonishment “for my own ignorance, for my own incuriosity, for the limits of my sense of Reparations.” 

The Message is Coates’s attempt to make his own reparations to Palestine: using the fame and the goodwill and the platform he acquired from writing “The Case for Reparations” to bring awareness to the suffering he has managed to elide for so long.