The Message

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Message” is an exploration of, indictment of, and challenge to the powers that be; specifically in how they have distorted the literal message history has tried to teach us. Coates starts off by establishing that to communicate a history or idea is to virtue-signal, and virtue-signaling is to set a target on your back for those in power to aim at. “The Message” is loud and clear on this premise. Coates challenges us to be brave enough to wear that target because the fight is just. The proof of the righteousness of that cause is laid out in his essays from one to the next. From Jim Crow South to the pervasive anti-intellectualism in current times to “democracies” far away that specialize in suppression. It is particularly disturbing when the oppressed turn into oppressors. Coates uses these connections to show that the language of evil is effective at blinding us to “The Message” of truth. That any reality built on the subjugation, oppression, and manipulation of any part of humanity is a crime against all of it and a non-starter in any intellectual or moral debate. Conversely, Coates explores how the written word, when used for good, can frame a truer picture of reality, invoke critical thinking, and set us free. Free minds are better at spotting intellectual dishonesty, moral inconsistencies, and the mental gymnastics employed by those who seek to control. The perverted word and history starts to resemble a grotesque simulation of reality as to make you want to lose all hope. The universality of the effort to control history becomes apparent and underscores the banality of evil that Hannah Arendt expounded on. Ta-Nehisi Coates is the James Baldwin of our time. Unapologetic in his truth-telling and uncompromising in his appeal to humanity. His essays extol the promise of humanity and the perpetual atrocities that suppress that bright future. There is a resonant power in his gift for painting experience with language, shaping argument with metaphors and facts, while also lacing in hope where you least expect it. “The Message” may be his magnum opus. Warning, this may radicalize you. But that would be the point.

I was blown away by this book. The depth of his thinking about race has layers and nuance. He speaks about several cultures and how the complexities of oppression impact those communities. His language is so rich. There is a reason his works have received so many accolades.

Excellent! Author is a literary genius and visionary

“I imagine my books to be my children, each with its own profile and way of walking through the world. My eldest, The Beautiful Struggle, is the honorable, hardworking son…My second son, Between the World and Me, is the ‘gifted’ one…I see We Were Eight Years in Power as the insecure one, born in the shadow of my ‘gifted’ son…my daughter, my baby girl, The Water Dancer, is…the one that is most like me if a little better, more confident, and more self-assured.” Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Message “is another story about writing, about power, about settling accounts, a story not of redemption but of reparation.” “I've been traveling Senegal, South Carolina, Palestine. But I'm home now, and with me I bring my belated assignment–notes on language and politics, on the forest, on writing…There are a lot of writers who believe they have access to a kind of artistic magic that allows them to inhabit any community in the world and write about it as if it is their own. I think those writers overestimate the power of their talent and intelligence, and underestimate how wisdom accrues over time, among nations and peoples, across ancestry. Even my words here, this bid for reparation, is a stranger's story—one told by a man still dazzled by knafeh and Arabic coffee, still at the start of a journey that others have walked since birth.” “I see that land, its peoples, and its struggles through a kind of translation--through analogy and the haze of my own experience and that is not enough. If Palestinians are to be truly seen, it will be through stories woven by their own hands—not by their plunderers, not even by their comrades…It was a whole other corpus truly complex, jagged, profound, in defiance of any perfect arc or circle. The corpus resists my analogies. It escapes my words. It demands new messengers, tasked, as are we all, with nothing less than saving the world.”