My Review of The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Been awhile since I read something and been so angry—in a good way—at what was being written about. I felt so enraged about the crimes talked about in this book, but I think it is good to feel righteous anger at this. Well here is my Goodreads review/thoughts on this book.

  The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

All our work dealt with the kind of small particulars of being human that literature generally deals with. But when you live as we have, among a people whose humanity is ever in doubt, even the small and particular—especially the small and particular—becomes political.


What is the duty a writer holds to their audience, themselves, the process? James Baldwin wrote a book of essays trying to answer that in Nobody Knows My Name in 1961 while working on his novel Another Country and as his direct involvement in the Civil Rights Movement was deepening. Now in 2024 we have Ta-Nehisi Coates writing the same sort of book about being a writer and this being a mea culpa about a section of his landmark essay The Case for Reparations in which he listed West Germany paying reparations to the State of Israel which he received immediate blowback for. Coates travels to Senegal, South Carolina, and Israel/Palestine and writes what he sees and feels and it is a harrowing and deeply soul-searching travelogue. This book is 230+ pages, but it felt like it could've been 500 with the emotional weight it put on me. I am still taking in the information in the book, but I really was moved by this book and want to process it.

Senegal

No one has the right to erase my culture, because a community without a culture is a people without human beings" - Léopold Sédar Senghor

Étoile de Dakar - Titeur

Back in 2020-21, I lost quite a few of my family members while the COVID-19 pandemic was ongoing—chief among them my paternal grandmother. I hadn't seen her in person in years and she had been the one who kept so many stories of our family history. It dawned on me that with her gone I would be losing a lot of those stories so I decided to do some amateur genealogy and family history research to preserve the names and stories the best I could. When an African-American takes a consumer DNA test, what they are shown, among other things, is that they share ancestry not with one specific African ethnic group or tribe, but with multiple—sometimes over a dozen. One may share a plurality of ancestry with one ethnic group, but that still is not a lot. This makes claiming ancestry with one group based on biology a bit hallow given that you are related to a lot of different groups. Then you have to remember that most of your known history and culture only concretely begins in North America in 1619. Alex Haley has a lot to answer for. Still, it has always been for that reason that African-Americans have historically taken the lead when it comes to Pan-Africanism and countless figures from Alexander Crummell to W.E.B. Du Bois to Marcus Garvey (West Indian, but still important to African-American history) and so on have dreamed of a strong independent Africa and possibly a place to return to. Liberia and Sierra Leone were founded from such aspirations.

In 2022-23(?) (we are not told of when he went to Senegal, but it was before he went to the Middle East) Ta-Nehisi Coates makes his inaugural journey to Africa—specifically the Republic of Senegal and he spends his time there wrestling with the fact that he was physically in Africa, but it was not the mythical paradise his Black Panther father had told him about growing up nor was it the raging uncivilized hell-hole that white Americans have always told everyone it was. One feature of this book is that while he is telling us about his real-time experiences, he is also giving us background information and lessons on how and why he is experiencing things or what he is writing against. In this case it is hundreds of years of anti-Black racism distorting the history of Africa to justify slavery and colonialism. He is doing this while trying to reconcile if he and the Senegalese people he spends time with can truly close the gap with each other across cultures and histories. He is hopeful, but a bit uncertain. Ironically, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie expressed similar feelings in Americanah on interacting not just with African-Americans, but with other Africans in the novel. Blood ties can only bind people so much and one has to ask what else makes peoples, peoples. He comes to an understanding with himself about these things—what slavery and apartheid has done to him & colonialism and neo-colonialism has done to people in Senegal—and realizes that there has to be a little caution to being so hasty to want an imagined utopia so hastily....but we'll come back to that. There is hope here, as an Americanah, that a real connection in the African diaspora can be made on tangible ground, regardless of reality or myth. This Senegal section was the one that connected to me on the most personal record even if I don't have quite the naivete about Pan-Africanism that Coates has.

South Carolina

Marvin Gaye - Save the Children

"If...we are going to use history for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego, and giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment, then we must give up the idea of history either as a science or as an art using the results of science, and admit frankly that we are using a version of historic fact in order to influence and educate the new generation along the way we wish." - W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Propaganda of History" Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

I remember the 2020 era of Black squares and everyone promising to do better with "The Blacks." What a time! Before the year was even out, the reaction had begun and the first wave of book banning laws were being drafted. Whether it was called "woke" or "CRT" or now "DEI". It was basically a ban on teaching about whoever you didn't like whether it be Black people or LGBT people. One of these places that passed book banning laws was the state of South Carolina a state that had implemented a particularly brutal form of slavery, had one of the most violent reactions to Reconstruction, and fought racial integration particularly hard. The state house in Colombia celebrates all kinds of the worst people in human history and in Chapin, South Carolina the Lexington-Rchland 5 School Board and high school teacher Mary Wood were entering a showdown over Between the World and Me. Coates' book along with works like The Complete Maus, The Bluest Eye, and The Diary of a Young Girl are favorite targets of the right-wing school censors. That particular school board is prone to extreme right-wing parents. This chapter really has Coates reflect on his own time as a student, as well as the history of South Carolina and a deeper meditation of who writes the histories and who decides what histories are read. TNC goes to the school board meeting with Mary Wood that ultimately decided her fate: that we she would be allowed to keep teaching BTW&M. A battle won, but a temporary victory as the forces of white supremacy don't stop working just because they suffer a loss. We would do well to remember that.

Israel/Palastine

"But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of “divide and rule” and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years. - James Baldwin "Open Letter To The Born Again" (September 29, 1979)

Marcel Khalife - My Mother

So here we are to the heart of the book. I tried to explain what parts 1 & 2 of this book were about because it is here in part 3 that the sum of both narratives reaches a dark conclusion. If part one ("On Pharohs") was about one of the most hated and wretched people of the world trying to connect to each other in a supposed homeland of paradise, but question if there can be such a thing as a utopian homeland; If part 2 ("Bearing the Flaming Cross") is about the fight to control the history, narrative, and basic information of this wretched people constantly; part 3 is a cautionary tale about another very despised people who manage to establish a homeland and promote their own narrative about it...at a terrible price. They make their land and their narrative according to the designs and whim of the very people who had spent thousands of years persecuting them. A freedom achieved not though good faith, but through the use of colonialism and apartheid against another group of people.

I'd known about this conflict between Israel and the Palestinians all my life, but it was witnessing the brutality against the Palestinians between 2009-2012 that made things clear to me on this issue. While for me it seemed clear, for others it as taken a lot longer to see and with genocide as the trigger. But this section is where Coates brings all of his journalistic efforts to bare as he goes through a very intimate look at how antisemitism and Zionism found a common goal with each other and the Holocaust became the perfect pretext to accomplish a two-fold goal:

1. Get the majority of Jewish people out of the West (something the Holocaust had two-thirds accomplished) and 2. Set-up a colonial state in the Middle East to keep the Arabs in-check. The natives (in this case the Palestinians) would be the only real losers so nobody would care.

Accomplishing this would see the United States as the main model (along with Apartheid South Africa after 1967). The genocide of Indigenous people in North America and the régime of racial segregation laws that spread throughout the United States of America and targeted only non-white people and effectively turned a quarter of the United States into an undemocratic totalitarian state. Imagine if Jim Crow-era South Carolina or Mississippi was transported to the Levant and funded by the United States and allies. The catalogue of atrocities, by which I mean not just the physical violence, but the violence of the state itself against through its laws and customs against all it deems outsiders or minorities that is so galling to comprehend. I currently live just across the highway from the former plantation that my family was enslaved on. I have talked with grandparents and a great-grandparent on their experiences living under the Jim Crow régime. I even found an old newspaper advertisement for the auctioning of one of my 3x great-grandparent and his siblings. It truly hits one to see such a legacy being alive and well today to be used against another people funded with my tax dollars (I had an antebellum-era newly-freed 4th great-grandfather who was taxed $5 a year for being a "free person of color" in Virginia. That money was used to fund the continued enslavement of his brother and family). It's made all the more tragic that the people doing it would by conventional-wisdom be the last folks to do this.

I had always suspected this as my knowledge of world history expanded, but being a victim does not preclude you from being a victimizer. Kendrick Lamar said, "Hurt people, hurt people." Alas, he was more right than he knew. Coates realized that even the victims of the Holocaust could endorse apartheid and ultimately genocide. It is a tragedy that Coates lays out in magisterial detail from the moment he begins this section at Yed Vashem (the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem) to the ending with Palestinian-Americans in Chicago. This is as much a long-form journalistic narrative and history as it is an example of writing to haunt...speaking of which.

To Sum It Up

The book's stated goal was to show young writers how to write to haunt the reader as Rakim the MC haunted him as a listener. Like Between the World and Me, this book is written as an epistolary non-fiction essay. For all his atheism, Ta-Nehisi Coates is seemingly trying to make the case for being the successor to Saint Paul as far as the use of letter-writing to tell his stories. I am not a big fan of this format, but I still appreciated what he wrote here and I was definitely haunted by it.

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My Goodreads Review of Race and the American Idea: 155 Years of Writings From The Atlantic

Race and the American Idea: 155 Years of Writings From The Atlantic by Frederick Douglass
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I reviewed this book very differently from most books, this was a "rolling review." Since this ebook is of many different articles, I reviewed the articles as I read them. I originally wanted a book form of Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case For Reparations and ended up finding that and a lot more. This is a collection of over 150 years of The Atlantic's articles on race published by its many writers and guest writers. Some of these writers would republish these articles in much more famous works like The Souls of Black Folk and Letter from the Birmingham Jail. As it is, I did my best to write as short a blurb as possible on the pieces I read from this book (at least one from every decade available).


American Civilization and The President's Proclamation (both 1862) by Ralph Waldo Emerson: These first two articles are pushing for emancipation and hailing the news of The Emancipation Proclamation. While it did have some interesting points about it, a lot of it was, sad to say, rested heavily on the Romantic and post-Romantic stereotypes of Black people as "wonderfully savage." And it suffered from "Emerson prose." Worth a look for historical purposes; 3/5.

The Story of the Contract Buyers League (April 1972) by James Alan McPherson: I jumped far ahead to read this long story in order to prepare mysrlf to re-read Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case For Reparations (which is in this book) Since this long article is a spiritual predecessor to it and many of the people in McPherson's article are re-visited in Coates'. This story is about one of the most valiant, if bittersweet, effort to push back against years of housing discrimination. This is a must to understand why Chicago is in such a deplorable state today. 4.5/5

Liberty and Equality For All and An Appeal To Congress for Impartial Suffrage (1866 and 1867) by Frederick Douglass: Both of these articles are about the need to pass what is now the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It is amazing how well these articles hold-up as a defense for the importance of universal suffrage in the United States. It is sad to ponder in the post-Shelby County v. Holder years. 5/5.

The Reconstruction of the Southern States (January 1901) by Woodrow Wilson: This article, a short "Lost Cause" history of Reconstruction, shows why former Princeton University and United States president Woodrow Wilson is so "loved and revered" at his alma mater. His basic argument is that everything was fine when southerners had control, but crazy northerners gave Black people rights and this derailed everything until finally "brave" southern whites rose-up and put the Negros in their place and now everything is in its natural place. I wish I was exaggerating. 1/5.

A Negro Speaks for His People (March 1943) by J. Saunders Redding: This article from the middle of World War II gives a surprisingly frank update on the progress of civil rights for African-Americans and the efforts that Black people North and South were doing and the resistance that they were encountering. This article has some very timely quotes: "They mean what a Negro United Mine Workers official in West Virginia told me in 1940: 'Let me tell you, buddy. Waking up is a damn sight more harder than going to sleep, but we'll stay woke up longer.'" [Bold emphasis mine.] 4.5/5

The Angry South (April 1956) by Ralph McGill: Ahh yes. I was waiting for this type of article, Southern White Liberal admits that racism is wrong, but that the South has to be gradually and sensitively changed. This guy knows that there is a problem, but he certainly does not want to be the guy who proposes the solution. This was written in response to the South's opposition to school integration and is like a white response to the last article I read. 3/5.

Letter from the Birmingham Jail (April 1963) by Martin Luther King Jr.: When I finally review this, I will link to it here.

W.E.B. Du Bois (November 1965) by Ralph McGill: Once again, our liberal Southern apologist is back and this time he is recounting his interview with Dr. Du Bois 6 months before his death in 1963. It is mainly about his leaving the NAACP and becoming a socialist, as well as a lengthy final thought on Booker T. Washington, his intellectual rival. While McGill's apologist sentiment for Washington and obsession with
Du Bois' Marxism is annoying, I found his recounting of Du Bois' own feelings, especially on Booker T. Washington, to be amazing (Du Bois gives one of the most amazing breakdowns of why Washington's accomidationalism was so damning). I will give McGill credit for this statement as well: "Six months later in faraway Ghana W. E. B. DuBois died. It was August 28, 1963, the eve of the march on Washington, the largest demonstration for civil rights ever held. One could not help experiencing a feeling of destiny linking both events. The man who for many years had spoken with the loudest and most articulate voice was now silent while his objectives were being realized." 4/5.

Where Ghetto Schools Fail (October 1967) by Jonathan Kozol: This was the second of a two-part series from Kozol on his year teaching in a mostly Black elementary school in Boston. This article reads like an intro to Lies My Teacher Told Me : Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong and much of what would later be described in Loewen's book was on active display here to particularly dis-heartening effect. This article shows why integration is just as needed in New England as it is in the South. 5/5.

Indivisible Man (December 1970) by Ralph Ellison and James Alan McPherson: This article was another personal treat for me to read as it is a snapshot of Ralph Ellison and his reaction to the Black Power movement. This article also has Ellison compare his experiences as a writer pre- and post-Invisible Man. It uses not only notes and quotes from McPherson's live interviews with Ellison, but also their long letter correspondences. It was interesting to see how young Black social consciousness was going counter to Ellison's more integrationist tone. Ellison's peer James Baldwin was having similar trouble around this time. I liked Ellison's insight on the centrality of African-Americans to American culture and history. I wish he wasn't so arrogant when it came to both the work of young Black writers at that time and his own debt that he owed to older Black writers that proceeded him. 5/5.

A Question of Fairness (February 1987) by Juan Williams: This article details the rise of one Clarence Thomas, the archtype of self-hating Black American conservatives during the 1990s when I was growing up. This article details his life and career up to the beginning of his second term as head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and his attempts to cripple it. I did not learn anything new from this, but nice to know how long he has been this way. 2.8/5.

Race (May 1991) by Thomas Byrne Edsall & Mary D. Edsall: This study from 1991 presents a then-landmark, but now confirmed fact that racial identity plays a disproportionate impact in American political life and the growing polarization of American politics since 1968 can be traced to the impact of the Civil Rights Movement. I felt that though certain points and research in this report were a bit dated, it non-the-less laid bare how much both parties had begun to shape their policies to appeal to white working class voters exclusively. 3.5/5 .

The New Intellectuals (March 1995) by Robert S. Boynton: This interesting article is an overview of the Black "public intellectuals" that emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth-century. These are people like Cornel West, bell hooks, Michael Eric Dyson, Stanley Crouch, Juan Williams, Toni Morrison, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and many more. This book compares the emergence of this group to the Jewish-American intellectuals who emerged in the pre-WWII era and the African-American intellectuals (e.g. Ralph Ellison & James Baldwin) who came to prominence post-WWII. This was a very comprehensive introduction and comparison of this group in 1995 and I would not mind seeing a follow-up to it how this intellectual "class" has faired twenty one years later. 5/5.

A Just Cause (February 2000) by Jack Beatty: This is a book review of The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks by Randall Robinson. The review details Robinson's successful campaign to get Harvard University to divest from Apartheid South Africa and how his book wants to use similar methods to pursue restitution for African-Americans. This is the first article in this anthology to address this topic head-on, but a much more comprehensive one awaits. 4/5.

Segregation Now... (May 2014) by Nikole Hannah-Jones: This long-form article is a devastatingly powerful look at the re-segregation of the American public school system. Mrs. Hannah-Jones has written on this topic for most of her career and this article is one of her crowning achievements. It shows how the stalwart resistance by white-Americans as a whole (no matter what ideology) doomed Brown vs Board of Education from the word go. The Federal government, through the courts, did all it could to implement "Brown," culminating in 1988 being the most integrated year in U.S. public school life. But by then, the reaction against "Brown" was already in full effect and now American schools are nearly as segregated in 2016 as they were in 1956. This hit home (or should I say school) with me because most of my grade school life was spent in these re-segregated schools (which means my mom and her siblings will be the only generation in my family to go to integrated schools for their entire grade school career). According to Hannah-Jones, Jefferson County, Kentucky remains the only school district in the country to voluntarily continue integration. This, of course, has had a devastating impact on the state of education for my generation and the generations after us. Beyond this work, Mrs. Hannah-Jones has also won a Peabody Award for a radio broadcast examining this phenomenon in the St. Louis area after the death of Mike Brown and an article in the New York Times Magazine detailing her struggle in choosing a primary school for her daughter in New York City (2nd most segregated school system in the country). 5/5.

Fear of a Black President & The Emancipation of Barack Obama (September 2012/March 2013) by Ta-Nehisi Coates: What a timely reflection of days gone by. These two articles by Ta-Nehisi Coates begins his current intellectual-run that he is still going in. These two articles look at the end of Barack Obama's first term and the beginning of his second. It seems, now, a lifetime ago, but it was real. Coates catalogues the particular struggles that President Obama had to endure and the tightrope that he walked as the luster of being the first Black president quickly gave way to the reality of that distinction in a country built on white supremacy. These articles display the expert journalistic efficiency that made me first come to admire Mr. Coates. Despite his protest of the very concept, the second article shows Coates seeming to be cautiously hopeful of the second Obama term. Given that he was to follow these articles up with the "magnum opus" of his journalistic work, these two articles serve as a good warm-up. This also marked when I first heard of the man. Both 4/5. Update: Here is Coates' interview with Obama himself which I will throw in for good measure: My President Was Black

The Case for Reparations & The Black Family In The Age of Mass Incarceration (June 2014/October 2015) by Ta-Nehisi Coates: These two journal articles are widely regarded as Ta-Nehisi Coates' finest work of journalistic non-fiction. The former is regarded as his best work for the Atlantic and its sequel is an amazing follow-up/supplement that picks-up where TCFR left off and fills in gaps of small things simply touched on in the former. TCFR starts off as an update of James Alan McPherson's story for The Atlantic: The Story of the Contract Buyers League. It then goes into its thesis that white supremacy in the United States is so prevalent that African-Americans do not need to go back to slavery or the last 50 years to seek restitution for crimes perpetrated by the state.

"The federal government is premised on equal fealty from all its citizens, who in return are to receive equal treatment. But as late as the mid-20th century, this bargain was not granted to black people, who repeatedly paid a higher price for citizenship and received less in return. Plunder had been the essential feature of slavery...But practically a full century after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the plunder—quiet, systemic, submerged—continued even amidst the aims and achievements of New Deal liberals."

This quote is just one small sample from what is one of the greatest journal articles I have ever read and what made me a fan of the brother and fellow Maryland native. The follow-up is sort of a stealth response to The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, but in the context of the career of policy-maker Daniel Patrick Moyniham who became the spearhead of Black Mass-incarceration and worked with multiple Presidents from LBJ and Nixon to Clinton to give us this problem with mass incarceration we have today. It also shows how the criminal justice systems in the American North and South dealt with African-Americans using the courts and prisons (and to the surprise of few who have done the homework, the North already had proto-mass incarceration while the South relied on terrorism). Both 5/5


I stumbled on this ebook anthology by accident, but this is one of those good accidents that I do not have very often. I have only reviewed a sample of all the articles actually in this ebook. If you use an e-reader of any kind, please pick this book up and soak-up all the knowledge and history within it.

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