The Message

Published in 2024, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message is a collection of four essays built around his travels to Dakar, Senegal; Chapin, South Carolina; Israel; and Palestine. Coates is a celebrated writer whose work on race, history, and writing has garnered him a National Book Award for Nonfiction, a MacArthur Genius Grant, and nominations for excellence in journalism and fiction. In The Message, Coates’s central thesis is that power interests construct historical narratives that encourage compliance with the existing order. He asserts that writers have a responsibility to reveal those narratives and construct counternarratives that encourage liberation. In discussing the moral obligations that come with writing, Coates explores themes including The Power of Storytelling, The Relationship Between Place and Identity, and The Political Impact of Historical Narratives. 

This guide refers to the Penguin Random House Kindle edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss racism, racist violence, colonialism, enslavement, and the Holocaust and mention sexual violence and the murder of George Floyd. They also discuss the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict; views expressed here are Coates’s alone.

Summary

“Journalism Is Not a Luxury” is addressed to Coates’s young, Black students at Howard University. Coates discusses the intertwined nature of writing and politics for Black writers.

He next shares insights about his own development as a writer. A Sports Illustrated article about a football player who was paralyzed after a hard hit led him to question the glorification of violence in a sport that he once enjoyed uncritically. Coates began to explore how stories could reveal truths about violence and oppression.

Coates became a journalist who values specifics and clarity. Writing with clarity means confronting the official narratives that underwrite oppression. Coates concludes this essay by telling his students that this book is the long-promised work that he was supposed to submit to them for critique during the class. The work is also for the young writers tasked with saving the world.

In “On Pharaohs,” Coates recounts his trip to Dakar, Senegal. Coates knows that Black intellectuals in the mid-20th century claimed African civilizations like that of ancient Egypt to counter colonialist narratives that denigrated Africans and their descendants. Coates critiques this tradition as a mythologization of Africa. Despite his suspicion of these myths, Coates felt compelled to visit Africa, so he went to Dakar. Once there, he was surprised by how lonely and disconnected he felt. Determined to experience Dakar directly, he explored the city.

Coates visited Gorée Island, famous for the Door of No Return, a site that many mistakenly believe was the entrance into the transatlantic slave trade for most enslaved people. Although Coates knew that the narrative about the Door of No Return isn’t accurate, he was still moved by its symbolic importance. Coates wrapped up his trip by socializing with other writers and artists, but he still couldn’t clearly articulate his connection to them.

In “Bearing the Flaming Cross,” Coates explores his own educational journey, his current educational models, and the influence of these models on how and what students learn about history. He questions the purpose and quality of the education he received as a child, the goal of which he now believes was to teach students not to question oppressive power structures.

Coates connects this critique of education to broader societal issues, particularly the protests that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020. These protests were a mass rejection of the dominant historical narratives that law enforcement and the nation are benevolent forces. Although the protests didn’t yield the policy changes that protestors demanded, one positive outcome was the flurry of books about race, racism, and American history that appeared in the year after the protests.

Unsurprisingly, this moment was followed by backlash. The backlash extended to a surge in book banning and legislative efforts aimed at restricting what could be taught in schools. Opponents framed their interventions in classrooms as a defense of parental rights. Coates kept out of these debates until parents in a Chapin, South Carolina, school district targeted AP English teacher Mary Wood for teaching Coates’s book Between the World and Me. Wood, a white woman brought up in this conservative community, rejected reactionary perspectives on race and history.

The effort to prevent Wood from teaching the text was part of a broader national movement spurred by Executive Order 13950, which President Donald Trump signed to prohibit the teaching of so-called divisive concepts related to race and gender. Although this executive order was voided by the Biden administration, the damage was done. In South Carolina, a budget proviso further restricted the teaching of materials that could make students feel uncomfortable due to their race or sex. Coates dismisses these efforts as misguided, arguing that literature should provoke discomfort by challenging deeply held beliefs. To Coates’s surprise, the meeting in Chapin revealed significant support for Wood. Many parents viewed the attempt to censor the book as a threat to educational quality and intellectual freedom. They also feared that banning the book would reinforce negative stereotypes of Southerners.

Ultimately, Coates argues that the battle over books is a contest over historical narratives. In South Carolina, Confederate monuments still stand at the state capitol grounds just down the road from Chapin. Coates concludes that those who seek to suppress historical counternarratives are correct in their fear: Teaching young people to question the narratives that uphold oppressive power structures threatens to produce future thinkers and teachers who will challenge those narratives and the structures that underwrite them.

In “The Gigantic Dream,” Coates describes a trip to Palestine and Israel. He started his journey at the Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel. Coates was struck by the horror of the Holocaust memorial, a horror relieved only by occasional stories of individuals who protected Jews. However, the sight of young Israeli soldiers chatting casually while guarding the museum unsettled him, reminding him of the power that Israel has gained since its establishment in the aftermath of the Holocaust and how that power now influences its relations with Palestinians.

As Coates toured holy sites in Jerusalem, he confronted the control that Israel exerts over Palestinians, particularly in restricting their movement. At some sites, only Israelis are allowed to enter. Coates reflects on how this situation scrambled his understanding of racial dynamics. Israel was founded by one of the most oppressed groups in history—the European Jews who survived the Holocaust. Coates likens them to formerly enslaved Black people and their descendants. As such, he does not understand how they can participate in the oppression of another group—the Palestinians. Because of what he has seen, Coates reconsiders his earlier work, particularly his landmark essay “The Case for Reparations,” in which he holds up Israel’s reparations from Germany as a model for how the US might approach reparations for slavery. He now recognizes that he ignored the reality of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, despite having been aware that something was not right in Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

During a tour, Coates learned about a massacre of Palestinians in 1948. A (presumably Israeli) man glared at the tour guide telling the story. Just talking about anything that contradicts Israel’s narrative about itself is enough to cause such tension. This encounter reinforced Coates’s belief that storytelling can challenge the narratives of the powerful, a role he now feels compelled to take on in relation to the Palestinian people. Speaking with members of the anti-occupation group Breaking the Silence, composed of former Israeli Defense Forces soldiers, Coates heard horrifying stories of soldiers mistreating Palestinian civilians. The tools of Israeli control—intelligence apparatuses, checkpoints, and settlements—reveal an intent to dominate, not coexist, with Palestinians.

The erasure of Palestinians from historical and contemporary narratives is familiar to Coates. Zionist literature reflects colonialist rhetoric like that used against African peoples by 19th-century pseudoscientists. Coates examines works like Leon Uris’s Exodus, which mythologizes Israel’s founding and perpetuates the notion of “Purity of Arms,” where Israelis are portrayed as righteous warriors. This narrative captivated the West, particularly in the decades after the Six-Day War in 1967, overshadowing the parallels between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and apartheid regimes like South Africa’s.

Coates began to see the situation in Israel as a slow but ongoing process of ethnic cleansing. He notes that Israeli tourist attractions, like the City of David National Park, sanitize history and send a message to Palestinians that they do not belong. Palestinians, in Coates’s view, are a plundered people, and this realization filled him with a sense of complicity. He returned to the Yad Vashem alone, now aware of a nearby site at which Palestinians were massacred during Israel’s founding. The contrast complicated his view of the museum’s role in shaping Israel’s self-image.

Coates concludes that his mission as a journalist is to break the silence surrounding Palestinians, a silence perpetuated by journalism’s gatekeepers. He can amplify the Palestinian story, but Palestinians are crucial to representing the Palestinian experience. Back in the US after his trip, Coates spent time with a young Palestinian journalist who could not find a venue for her writing and with a patriarch who told stories of why he left Palestine. Coates acknowledges that factual complexity should not be used to obscure moral clarity about Palestine. Ultimately, The Message is a work about what’s at stake in the construction of historical narratives, the power of storytelling, and the link between place and identity.