Ta-Nehisi Coates’s not-so-radical departure

Not long after I finished reading The Message, New York magazine ran a cover story on the book’s author headlined “The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates.” This raised the question: Had he gone missing? It had been nearly a decade since the publication of his searing and prize-winning Between the World and Me. In the years since, Coates had published a bestselling novel and written comics and screenplays. Still, it appears media pooh-bahs were wondering when he was going to be done with such foolishness and return to serious journalism.

Even in his most heavily reported work, Coates can’t help but draw outside the lines. The Message is no different. The book comprises three separate journeys: a trip to Senegal, another to South Carolina, and, lastly, a 10-day visit to Israel and the occupied West Bank just before October 7, 2023. New York focused largely on this last essay, portraying Coates as a David taking on the Goliath of a media establishment that, in all the ink spilled on the conflict in the Middle East over the past 76 years, has rarely allowed Palestinians to weigh in on their tragic lot, preferring to rely on foreign-policy experts with heavily stamped passports. The same establishment, in other words that had enabled Coates’s rise, opening doors in Hollywood and putting out a welcome mat to congressional hearing rooms and the White House.

Coates’s writing voice is sui generis. He combines a poet’s metaphors with the scepticism of the autodidact. His sentences slip down unpredictable paths only to double back, weaving together memory, reportage, personal testimony, recent scholarship, and meditations on history until they are nearly indistinguishable. There is nothing flashy or self-important about him; he is as likely to confess his confusions and failures as share his insights, as likely to portray himself as hapless as well-informed.

Yet, from his earliest blog posts, there was no mistaking his moral seriousness. He makes a practice of habitually revisiting his earlier writings and misperceptions. For all these reasons, his voice beguiles and carries. I’ve found it revelatory, as a white reader, to be consigned to the status of interloper—peering through the window of his first book, The Beautiful Struggle, for example, to overhear what it was like for him to grow up as a Black boy in West Baltimore without the usual reassurances that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.

Similarly, The Message is addressed to Coates’s writing students at Howard University, stand-ins for the 14-year-old son he spoke to in his 2015 book, Between the World and Me. He teaches them that the way the American story is told implicates the country’s present politics and foreign-policy stance.

And so it is with the American Revolution and the founding of a great republic, or the Greatest Generation who did not fight to defend merely the homeland but the entire world. If you believe that history, then you are primed to believe that the American state is a force for good, that it is the world’s oldest democracy, and that those who hate America hate it for its freedoms. And if you believe that, then you can believe that these inexplicable haters of freedom are worthy of our drones. But a different history, one that finds its starting point in genocide and slavery, argues for a much darker present and the possibility that here, too, are haters of freedom, unworthy of the power they wield.

Like New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones’s “The 1619 Project,” Coates’s ambition is to create a new canon “in service of that larger emancipatory mandate,” as yet unrealised and only dimly perceived, for the US political imagination to draw from. If politics is the art of the possible, he writes, “art creates the possible of politics.” He is counting on his college students, and young writers generally, to contribute to this reconstructed national narrative and do their part to “save the world.”

If the future of the United States is to be found in its beginnings, Africa provides the requisite starting point—not simply as part of Coates’s personal quest for an ancestral home, “that glorious Eden we conjured up as exiles,” but because the New World arose from the stolen labour of Africans.

Yet from the moment his plane touches down in Dakar, Senegal, Coates’s feelings race wildly: anticipation, sadness, homesickness, and the anxious self-consciousness familiar to many travellers. “I was trying very hard to hide the wonder behind my eyes because I knew that would mark me as a tourist, and tourists were targets,” he writes. “I failed.” Warm encounters with Senegalese people are shadowed by the worry of how much of their assumed kinship is real and how much an unrealised hope. His trip to the island of Gorée’s much-mythologised Door of No Return, which memorialises the forcible removal of people from Africa, leaves him undone for reasons he is unable to fully account for.

Although Coates guards himself against all such mythologies, in weaker moments, he admits he is susceptible. Still, he manages to sustain the tension between unwieldy expectations of what he hoped to find in Africa and an honest account of what he did: a solidarity born of the twin traumas of colonialism and enslavement.

Coates’s second journey to the small town of Chapin, South Carolina, is both a work of reportage and a meditation on his journey as a writer and how his classroom education hampered him. Coates remains haunted by the humiliations of his bookish and daydreaming youth; vivid scenes from the schools and streets of his Baltimore childhood reappear again and again in his books. Only upon reaching the “safe space” of Howard as an undergraduate did he begin to assemble the tools he needed to tackle the subjects he was most curious about.

At the heart of his visit to South Carolina is an encounter with a white high school teacher. She is among the many educators pilloried and threatened with dismissal for teaching Between the World and Me and similar works that endeavour to challenge the dogmas of American exceptionalism. Attending a school board meeting alongside her, Coates encounters not the far-right Moms for Liberty in full-blown moral panic but a white, middle-class community of teachers, parents, students, and members of church book groups pushing back.

It is worth recalling that the 2015 release of Between the World and Me coincided with Dylann Roof's massacre of Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina. Coates was among those who challenged Gov. Nikki Haley to remove the Confederate battle flag from the state capitol in the aftermath of the shooting. Five years later, then-President Donald Trump signed an executive order directed at all federal contractors, including educational institutions. The order outlawed diversity and equity employment initiatives as well as the teaching or dissemination of "divisive concepts" that might provoke "discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress."