Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book The Message could just as easily have been called Between the World and Me had that title not been taken by his own 2015 bestseller. In The Message, Coates travels to Senegal, South Carolina and Palestine, offering reflections along the way on the African diaspora, US book bans and Israeli apartheid. The result is a work that both digs into the ways that the powerful seek to monopolize storytelling to preserve their privileges and charges writers with the duty to fight back by writing back.
With the enormous success of his previous books; his many awards, including a MacArthur fellowship and a National Book award; and his celebrated career in journalism, Coates is known as perhaps the most perceptive critic of American racism and an eloquent chronicler of Black life in the United States today. The Message contains the same moral authority that we are accustomed to from him, but the vision and geography of this book are wider than his past work.
At more than half the book’s length, the chapter on Palestine is clearly the beating heart of The Message. In the summer of 2023, Coates spent 10 days in the West Bank and Israel, five days with the Palestinian Festival of Literature and much of the rest of the time with Breaking the Silence, a group composed of former Israeli soldiers who now oppose the occupation. He witnessed first-hand the daily humiliations Palestinians endure traveling on segregated roads or walking through checkpoints. In Hebron, an Israeli soldier stopped him on the street, repeatedly pressing Coates to state his religion, only allowing him to proceed when he told the soldier his grandparents were Christian. He saw how Israel controls the distribution of resources: “Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and the fountains, but the water itself.”
“The Palestine I saw bore so little likeness to the stories I read, and so much resemblance to the systems I’ve known,” he writes. The intensity of his critique extends almost as much to American journalism as it does to Israel’s system of control.
Predictably, some American critics have pounced on Coates, faulting him for not speaking with more Israelis or, more bizarrely, questioning the value of a “celebrity writer” taking a moral stand on the question of Palestine. Recently, on CBS Mornings, he faced a particularly hostile interview in a segment that went viral and prompted the network to admonish the interviewer. The fallback position of Coates’s critics is that he doesn’t have the foreign policy expertise to weigh in on the question of Palestine, but what they fail to see is that he has enormous expertise on identifying racism.
“I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. After returning from the trip, Coates contacted the renowned Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi for a reading list, sought out Palestinian communities in the United States, and underwent an intense reckoning with the question: what can happen when victims become oppressors?
I caught up with Coates on a recent Friday afternoon to discuss his book, its reception and more.
MB: I’d like to ask you about that CBS Mornings interview, when Tony Dokoupil monopolized the segment and asked you hostile questions, and then the subsequent fallout at CBS. But I want to take the question in a slightly different direction.
One of the ways that white supremacy works in the United States is by keeping Black people out of global affairs as soon as they say anything internationalist in tone and critical of the USA. Paul Robeson had his passport revoked. WEB Du Bois’s anti-colonial politics resulted in his self-imposed exile to Ghana. Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted during the Vietnam war and lost his title. Do you think the system feels especially threatened when Black people seek and speak the truth about the world outside the United States and this country’s role in that world?
TNC: It’s possible. I don’t know whether it’s “especially”. It’s probably true. The thing that I’ve thought a lot more about is the fact that you have a class of low-information journalists, certainly when it comes to Palestine and Israel, and perhaps the world. And I say that as somebody who was among them. These people are not low-information because they’re bad people or even necessarily incurious people. But there is tremendous pressure not to have this conversation. And the pressure doesn’t even come in threats but by turning the terrain into a minefield and then telling people that they really aren’t qualified. And not only are you really not qualified; you shouldn’t bother to get qualified, whatever that would mean.
I think there’s appropriate sensitivity around the Holocaust. I think there is appropriate sensitivity around the lethal force and weight of antisemitism in western history. But that doesn’t give journalists a pass to not know (what is happening to the Palestinians). And to the extent that I’ve been bothered by this conversation, it’s because it has gone into a kind of meta-conversation about CBS News, ethics, who is woke and who is not, and tough interviews. And that’s bullshit.
The topic is apartheid. Apartheid is the topic. And people who don’t want to talk about apartheid, because it’s uncomfortable, much like they did with the protests last year at colleges, try to turn this into a conversation about manners.
It is amazing to me that the debate is not: “Ta-Nehisi said Israel is perpetrating apartheid, and that is not true and here’s why.” Or “Ta-Nehisi said Israel is not a democracy. It is a democracy and here’s why.” Or “Ta-Nehisi said half the population that Israel rules are second-class citizens or worse. That is not true. Here’s why.” I didn’t even get challenged in that interview. And the reason why I’m not challenged is that these are facts. There is a mountain of citations to back up those conclusions.
People don’t want to straightforwardly say: “I am defending apartheid because … ” Or “I think the apartheid is appropriate because … ” Or “I think a dictatorship over a group of people that began, conservatively, more than 50 years ago is appropriate because … ” Instead, you get this conversation about manners, man.
MB: Right. It becomes part of this almost enforced ignorance because we’re just misdirecting it over manners instead.
TNC: Yeah. Instead of “Hey, why don’t you read the Amnesty International report (finding Israel imposes a system of apartheid against all the Palestinians under its control)?” “Why don’t you go read the B’Tselem report (which found the same)?” “Why don’t you talk to some Palestinians?” “Why don’t you put more Palestinians on the air?” These are questions of power. Those of us who have fought this battle against white supremacy and racism, we understand, as Toni Morrison put it, that distraction is one (of racism’s) greatest weapons. And this is a distraction.
MB: If distraction is a weapon, silencing is another weapon. And we saw Palestinians silenced during the Democratic national convention (DNC).
TNC: Yes, although I would dispute that they were silenced. I actually think their voices were very well heard. Much to the chagrin of the conveners of the DNC and not through the help of the DNC. But I think they did a really good job of occupying the moral center out there and animating the moral energy. They were well covered in the media. That’s not a small thing.
MB: I see that, but I came back recently from a national conference of Arab Americans and there was palpable hatred toward the Democratic party for their support of genocide in Gaza. What hope do you have for a Black president being able to disrupt the colonial system that the book so eloquently describes?
TNC: I don’t have much hope for a Harris presidency. I think more about systems. Abe Lincoln did not come into office wanting to smash slavery. Events dictated that that was what happened in politics. And not the least was the politics of Black people pushing in that direction.
So when I say I don’t really have hope for a Harris presidency disrupting that colonial system, it is not like I have hope for some other Democratic president doing it. I think these things are deeply, deeply entrenched.
Should Kamala Harris win this year and in 2028 run again and there’d be no change in the US’s Israel policy at all, the calculus will be roughly something like this: “I will continue to fund and support Israel’s right to apartheid. I will continue to be the arms provider for that. And that is the price of maintaining a woman’s right to choose.” Or something roughly like that. That’s a depressing prospect because Black people have been in that role that Palestinians would be in or are in right now. The New Deal was passed on our back, right? In order for it to happen, we had to be cut out of it.
My hope for Black politics is that it wouldn’t just mean someone (else) taking up the seat that we once occupied, without even questioning the seat itself. I feel the anti-apartheid cause is increasingly vibrant and that it matters in terms of political impact. I don’t think it will matter less in 2028. It’s not so much hope, but I do think something needs to change.
MB: There’s a role for writers here.
TNC: Yes, there very much is. Writing is part of raising consciousness. And one of the good things about (the book’s reception) is that it’s forced some ideas on to people or into the world of people that maybe they did not know before. That’s what we do. Our job is to expand the political imagination.
MB: You said you’ve felt “lied to” about Israel. How would you characterize this lie and how does this happen?
TNC: Part of it might be the makeup of the press corps. There are very few, if any, major media organizations where Palestinians, Palestinian Americans or maybe even Arab Americans have much power in terms of determining what the coverage looks like. Maybe this goes to your point, that there probably aren’t many Black journalists, either, doing that coverage. And I think that is important because a Black person whose paychecks don’t depend on it would have a hard time walking through Hebron (a West Bank city where Israeli controls on Palestinian life are particularly severe) and not seeing something that they know really well.
Here you have a state created to protect one of the most persecuted classes in western history that has now gone on to persecute, as a state. I just think that’s difficult. I don’t think that’s difficult because there’s something particular about being Jewish. This is not a particularly Jewish error. You look out in the world and you can see various versions of the oppressed becoming oppressors in different circumstances. It makes you question some of the underlying logic of our lives.
For instance, the idea that oppression is ennobling, that oppression begets wisdom, that there was some sort of natural alliance among oppressed peoples that just exists and doesn’t have to be tended or crafted or created or articulated. You can throw all of that out the window. I start the essay with the story that Yad Vashem (Israel’s Holocaust museum) tells, from the attempted destruction of a people to having their own state. Like, that is a nice bedtime story. You have to be a particular kind of motherfucker to want to disrupt that.
MB: Anyone who writes on Palestine knows the risks. And by risk, we usually mean the risk of losing something. But it strikes me that this book is mostly about gaining something.
TNC: Yes! People think they’re going to lose something by talking about Palestine. But they should think about what they lose by not talking about Palestine. For me it was a tremendous opportunity to understand the world. As a writer, I don’t know what I would be doing by ignoring this.
MB: Has it opened up new worlds to you?
TNC: Yes. Very much. When I think about it, this epic really began with Columbus stumbling upon these two continents and the associated islands, and the subsequent movement to wipe out large swaths of peoples, and then populate the islands with African slaves and European colonists, and Europe’s subsequent movements to colonize and plunder much of the world. You can see that all right there in Palestine. You can really see ghosts of it. And in some cases, not the ghosts of it. You can see it in the present, you know?
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Moustafa Bayoumi is the co-editor, with Andrew Rubin, of The Selected Works of Edward Said: 1996-2006. He will be delivering the annual Edward Said memorial lecture at the Jerusalem Fund later this year.