Why we should listen to Ta-Nehisi Coates even if we may disagree with him
Coates’ ‘The Message’ warns against the dangers of mythologizing our past
Ta-Nehisi Coates in Atlanta, 2023. Photo by Getty
If there’s one message to take away from The Message — Ta-Nehisi Coates’ impassioned new book about race and writing — it’s how we tend to romanticize our origins and deny the unsavory aspects of our past.
The Message is a series of four personal essays — the first details his love story with writing and how, at a young age, he first became aware of the power of narrative, which sets up the the following chapters’ investigations into the dangers of ethnocentric myth building. He writes about his pilgrimage to Dakar, Senegal, and then he looks at how the movement to take Critical Race Theory out of schools put his book Between the World and Me at risk of being banned from classrooms. The book’s final essay — the longest and the most controversial — follows him on a personal trip to Israel and the occupied West Bank.
In each chapter, Coates emphasizes the role the written word plays in creating systemic oppression. Violence is how the privileged group in a society first gets their power; written justification is how they preserve it. Coates writes of 19th-century American slaveholder and anthropologist Josiah Nott, who worked extensively on a science he called “N—-rology,” which justified the enslavement of Africans on the basis of their supposed stupidity and barbarism. Coates finds similar arguments in Revisionist Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s “The Iron Wall” essay, his proposal for the formation of a Jewish state. Coates quotes Jabotinsky as saying that, culturally, Palestinians “are five hundred years behind” the Jews and do not have “our endurance nor our determination,” making them unfit to occupy the Holy Land.
Literature, Coates claims, can be used not only to uphold systemic oppression but also to shatter it. Which is why, he argues, there has been such a push by conservatives to ban books that decry the racist past of the United States. It is also why Coates’ new book has faced so much backlash.
What struck me the most is how at once personal and universal Coates’ stories felt. The chapter about his trip to Senegal dissects the relationship between a diasporic people and their homeland, arguing that their places and traditions of origin “are most powerful when imagined” and romanticized as opposed to when one witnesses them up-close. Despite the fact that this marked his first trip to Africa, he speaks of his experience as a Black American in Dakar as a sort of homecoming.
As a Black American Jew, I am familiar with this sort of imagining. Within the Black American psyche, there is a history of imagining the greatness of our ancestral Nubian Kings and Queens, of the powerful Mansa Musa, of ingenious Egyptian engineers, of an origin we can be proud of despite the attempts to strip us of our dignity.
The feeling of homecoming that Coates describes is one many diasporic Jews have, too, when coming to Israel, and it too is upheld by imaginings of our great ancestors, of the martyrs of Masada, of great Jewish warriors like Bar Kochba, of kings who embodied the Jewish strength that we almost lost in the diaspora.
Coates argues that the story of Jewish reclamation of Eretz Israel is also imbued with myths of what British Occupied Palestine looked like before 1948. There are many stories of Zionist leaders coming to a land without a people, of a savage desert needing to be tamed, of a barbaric, aimless people who needed civilizing.
And these myths persist in the present where Israel is portrayed as a land of Birthright parties, Jewish harmony, and democracy for all.
The truth behind these myths is inevitably more complicated. The innocent martyrs of Masada were actually fanatic Sicarii, hunted by the Romans not for being Jewish, but for being assassins who killed Romans and Jews alike. Viewed through another lens, Bar Kochba was less of a brave military leader, and more of a reckless narcissist who almost caused Jews to be wiped off the map. The land without a people or civilization was actually very much populated with communities with their own, developed ways of life. And the nation full of parties, harmony, and democracy has been grappling with injustice and internal divides for years.
While critics like journalist Jonathan S. Tobin have accused Coates of writing “woke propaganda” and making a one-to-one comparison between the Israeli-Palestinian situation and the American Black-White paradigm, Coates explicitly says this is not the case, and acknowledges that the story of Jews in Israel is much more complex. He relates to Jews both in his own experience of a Black American in Africa, as a people yearning for their homeland and a nation where they can truly feel like they belong. But he also shows the similarities between Jews who refuse to acknowledge anything but a picture-perfect history of Zionism and Israel and the white Americans who see any acknowledgment of the country’s prejudiced past as an attack on their identity.
While reading The Message, I kept being reminded of a meditation from the Kol Haneshama prayer book I studied this Yom Kippur. Attributed to the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, it asserts that neither a person nor a people can “be redeemed until it sees the flaws in its soul and tries to efface them. But whether a person or a people, whoever shuts out the realization of her/his flaws is shutting out redemption.”
Coates provides a number of statistics and laws that exemplify the injustice in our mythologized utopia: Jewish citizens of Israel who marry non-Jews from other countries can pass on their citizenship to their spouse; Palestinian citizens cannot. In the city of Hebron, Jewish settlers and Palestinian citizens are under the jurisdiction of different courts even when they commit identical offenses. Water consumption for Israelis is nearly four times that of Palestinians living in the West Bank.
Coates is persuasive when he warns of the dangers of buying into fabricated histories. When people in the Jewish community rush to defend a fictionalized perfect Jewish state instead of responding with calls to do better, it is a disservice not only to the Palestinians who have been displaced and killed by Israeli policy, but to ourselves. As the Kol Haneshama says: “There is a sense in which you can destroy yourself by not saying yes to the reality that actually exists.”
In his first essay, Coates argues the social function of great writing is to “make people feel all that is now at stake.” In one of the most tumultuous times in Jewish history, that is certainly necessary, even if the message comes from a writer with whom readers may disagree.
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