Why Ta-Nehisi Coates Writes

The examination Coates refers to here, I imagine, is his own personal awakening about the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel. In the book’s chapter on the plight of the Palestinians, he writes about seeing cisterns to collect rainwater on the roofs of Palestinian homes. “And in those West Bank settlements which I once took as mere outposts,” he writes, “you can find country clubs furnished with large swimming pools. On seeing these cisterns, it occurred to me that Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself. And more, it occurred to me that there was still one place on the planet—­under American patronage—that resembled the world that my parents were born into.” For the next hundred pages, Coates continually returns to “The Case for Reparations,” the 2src14 essay in The Atlantic that made him famous, and the guilt he feels over a passage in which he argued that just as Israel had received reparations from the Germans, so, too, should Black Americans receive reparations from the country that enslaved them.

But I also felt that I was attempting to display the truth and gravity
of the debt of white supremacy for people who did not understand
intuitively, and who would have great difficulty ever imagining that
debt being repaid. And so to make the case, I reached for the same
story invoked by Yad Vashem—the perfect circle, from Holocaust to
state—and Germany’s efforts to pay off its own inconceivable debt by
making reparations to the state of Israel.

Coates writes that he began to “feel the mistake” of writing approvingly of Israel “within days” of publishing “The Case for Reparations,” but the scope of what he sees as his betrayal did not become fully clear to him for years. “The Message,” in his words, is “not of redemption but of reparation.” He is trying to make up for his earlier ignorance, which he says came out of his own desire to follow the dominant mode of rhetoric set out by mostly white magazine writers. At the end of the book, in an effort to bear witness to his new truth, he travels to Chicago to meet with a ninety-one-year-old Palestinian man who tells Coates about his life, which then leads Coates to his conclusion that there needs to be more Palestinian representation in American media.

Throughout the past two weeks, much of the talk of “The Message” has centered on the book’s media tour—in particular, a recent appearance that Coates made on “CBS Mornings.” Referencing the book’s lengthy chapter about the West Bank, Tony Dokoupil, one of the show’s hosts, said, “If you took your name out of it, took away the awards and the acclaim, took the cover off the book, the publishing house goes away—the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.” Dokoupil then went on to name some political and historical facts that he felt Coates had left out of his book and then asked if the elisions had come out of a belief that Israel did not have a right to exist. Coates, for his part, said that people who agreed with Dokoupil’s perspective had plenty of space in the media and that his concern would always be with “those who don’t have a voice.” Repeating his claim about the need for more stories and more representation, Coates said, “What I saw in Palestine, what I saw on the West Bank, what I saw in Haifa, in Israel, what I saw in the South Hebron Hills, those were the stories that I have not heard.”

As he did on “Democracy Now!,” Coates is living the advice he gives to his students in his book. He is casting off what he sees as the white standards of writing and its addiction to “complexity” and stating, instead, his version of moral clarity: Palestinians and Black Americans share a profound connection, and it is the duty of people of conscience who would oppose Jim Crow to oppose the oppression of Palestinians. The struggles cannot be disentangled and written off as foreign or complicated. But, as I watched him on TV, I wondered how much of the response to Coates’s book would ultimately come from these television appearances, which, in turn, feed into the information ecosystem of highly polarized short-form video. Within that context, does the prose of the celebrity writer—especially one tasked with such moral weight—actually matter? Or does he simply become part of an unofficial ledger that notes which famous person has officially come out on either side of the conflict?

None of this, of course, is Coates’s fault. He did not build this short-video machine. But if we are to think about the writing itself, and not just what it signifies, that Coates has marked himself so forcefully on the side of the Palestinians, I am not exactly sure what to make of “The Message,” which, more than anything, is about the moral conversion of a famous writer. Before publishing “Between the World and Me,” Coates was mostly known for his blogging at The Atlantic, where he led a discursive conversation about race, history, and pop culture that opened up the parameters for what a minority writer could do. My career, for example, would not have had the same freedom if not for Coates, and I owe him a debt of gratitude, one that makes it difficult to criticize his work. But I do not think it is the job of writers to “save the world,” nor do I think they should set out to do so—not out of any objection about the sanctity of art for its own sake but, rather, because the pressure to always be political, significant, or weighty leads to leaden, predictable prose.

Many of Coates’s fans and detractors will not separate the symbolic importance of “The Message” and its attendant viral moments from the text itself, but I am talking here about his prose because I believe Coates is very serious about the act of writing, which means that any respectful evaluation should start with the words he commits to the page. Part of the appeal of Coates’s old blogging days was that we, the readers, felt like we were learning history with him, which, in turn, made for studious comment sections and conversations that felt alive with all the newfound democratic power of the Internet. He was accessible, forthright about what he didn’t know, and willing to admit his faults. Coates is still a courageous and important figure, but, on a formal, stylistic level, it’s hard to reconcile the humility required for critical writing with the grandiosity of his recent prose, which too often feels turgid and sanctified. The blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates would have read ten books about Israel and Palestine and reflected on each in his inimitably brilliant way. The oracular Ta-Nehisi Coates would have you believe that there is some great truth to be gleaned from a writer discovering late in life what so many others, including countless Black activists and thinkers, already knew.

The war in Gaza is not about Coates’s epiphanies or the guilt he feels about what he wrote in 2src14. Writers, I believe, should be given the grace to change their minds and certainly shouldn’t be so obsessed with their signalled stances that they feel the need to atone for bad takes, especially when the act of repentance ends with an unsatisfying, American-centric call for more representation in U.S. media. Do the hiring practices of a handful of élite outlets really measure up to the stakes and moral seriousness of the decades of conflict that Coates describes? There are times when American journalists and prestige outlets are the least of our concerns, when our words do not matter, much less why we write them. The “Reflections on Gandhi” Orwell was correct: all saints, especially those claiming moral clarity, should be presumed guilty before they are found innocent. ♦