Book Review :: The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Review by Kevin Brown

Ta-Nehisi Coates addresses his most recent book, The Message, to a group of students enrolled in his writing class in 2022, calling them “comrades,” as he believes they all have an obligation to tell the truth through journalism. His first, brief essay—almost an introduction—provides his background and why he became interested in journalism, drawing on a Sports Illustrated story, as well as references to Shakespeare, Rakim, Audre Lorde, and Frederick Douglass. His father also helped point him in the direction of using research to understand important questions.

The rest of the book centers around three trips Coates took: to Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine. In Senegal, he visits places important in the sale of enslaved people, coming to understand that part of that story is myth—not the inhumanity, unfortunately, but the idea that there is a particular place that encapsulates all of that inhumanity, or that the inhumanity came only through colonization. He visits South Carolina to support a teacher who had allegedly violated a state law passed against teaching “critical race theory”; during a school board meeting he learns there are allies, as well as opponents.

The trip to Palestine is the longest section of the book, as Coates spends five days in Palestine for a literary festival and five days on the Israeli side. It is this section where Coates has his most dramatic epiphany, as he once compared the plight of the Israelis to formerly enslaved African Americans when he was making the argument for reparations. He sees, though, that Israel has now become an apartheid state, that those whom Germany once oppressed have now become the oppressor of others. Coates goes even further to show readers how Germany took the idea of race-based oppression from the United States and how Israel ultimately aligned themselves with South Africa.

Behind each of his trips, though, is the idea of what stories don’t get told. Whether that’s what he didn’t know about Senegal, what lawmakers in South Carolina were trying to keep students from learning, or how the media covers the oppression in Palestine—especially telling is that almost no major news outlet publishes work by people of Palestinian descent—Coates wants readers to dig deeper and find out what they’re not hearing.

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates. One World, October 2024.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrite