In 2004, following George W. Bush’s re-election, Toni Morrison wrote that times of socio-political turmoil are the exact moments when artists must get to work, rejecting despair in favor of action and fear in favor of hope. “There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear,” she wrote in an essay published in The Nation. “We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” In the context of the current moment, marked by white supremacy’s pervasive forms—ongoing genocide and its manufactured consent in Palestine, Sudan, and Congo; deeply entrenched and racialized state-sanctioned violence and surveillance at home and abroad; a burgeoning climate crisis; and unabashed assaults on bodily autonomy across the US (all of which Donald Trump, now re-elected, has vowed to exacerbate during his term and beyond)—Morrison’s words feel as sharp as lightning, as haunting as a ghost.
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It is from a congruent philosophy that we can situate Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest entry, The Message—a book of three intertwining essays in which he takes readers to Dakar, Senegal, Columbia, South Carolina—where he writes about the banning of his book, Between the World and Me—and finally to Palestine. In the book, which is as much about the craft of writing as it is about the places he visited, Coates ushers his readers to the edge of a forest dense with trees and set on a vast, sprawling land:
But to write, to draw that map, to pull us into the wilderness, you cannot merely stand at the edge. You have to walk the land. You have to see the elevation for yourself, the color of the soil. You have to discover that the ravine is really a valley and that the stream is in fact a river winding south from a glacier in the mountains. You can’t know any of this beforehand.
As Morrison did before him, Coates calls on his readers—the young writers from Howard to whom he addresses The Message — to take action. He tasks them and young writers everywhere with “nothing less than doing their part to save the world.” That’s to say, it is on each writer, each journalist to do all that we can to carve out truth in ink and words—to bring forth a certain kind of lightning, a certain kind of ghost:
The goal is to haunt—to have them think about your words before bed, see them manifest in their dreams, tell their partner about them the next morning, to have them grab random people on the street, shake them and say, “Have you read this yet?”
More important than Coates’ ability to conjure beautiful prose, or to issue an evocative call to action, as Morrison did too, is the foundation of his politic—the question of how we should haunt, how we should walk the land. Throughout The Message, Coates defines this how through reflections on his travels, from Dakar to Columbia to Palestine, laying out a framework for a journalism that challenges the notion of objectivity, confronts the dangerous myths we are made to believe, and holds our own ignorance to task.
No matter how much one professes otherwise, no writing from the West—especially that which does not come from someone who themselves has walked the land and spoken to the people they write of— is without weight, without bias.
The American idea that journalists can be objective—as though words can exist in a vacuum apart from the socio-political contexts they arise from—is, as Coates wrote of it, a destructive “self-delusion.” Still today, in J-school lecture halls and inside university newsrooms, we are trained to view the likes of The New York Times as something akin to objectivity materialized. All the while, this is the same paper that has, to cite a recent example, downplayed the ongoing genocide of Palestinians with disproven reports and headlines that use passive language, eliding blame. Objectivity, as we have come to see it today, distorts and abstracts the experiences of those marginalized from the mainstream, allowing so-called papers of record to manufacture consent for state-sanctioned violence against Black and brown people globally—from Ferguson to Palestine. This is by design. “An inhumane system demands inhumans,” Coates goes on to write. “And so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television.”
As much as objectivity is entrenched as a pillar within the journalism industry, what Coates is calling on young writers to take up—that is, the confrontation of objectivity and the use of writing as “a powerful tool of politics”—is itself a long-held tradition, especially for Black writers. Coates reminds us that Frederick Douglass used words “to imagine the enslaved, the colonized, the conquered as human beings.” He reminds us of how Harriet Jacobs “exposed the violence and rape at the roots of chattell slavery.” Coates references Ida B. Wells, and how she dispelled “the grotesque myths of monstrous Black masculinity that undergirded lynching,” and W.E.B. Du Bois, who “debunked the Confederate hagiography historians employed to justify driving Black people from the polls.” Drawing on Audre Lorde as another of his touchstones, Coates argues that required in this tradition of writing rooted in humanity is the wielding of a clarifying light—a light to purge such an industry as ours, plagued by “dead language and dead stories” that serve only those intent on sustaining a “dead world.” Coates calls on journalists not just to stand as record-keepers, but to possess a “hunger for clarity” that works to expose that which has been deliberately obscured:
We require another standard—one that sees the sharpening of our writing as the sharpening of our quality of light. And with that light we are charged with examining the stories we have been told, and how they undergird the politics we have accepted, and then telling new stories ourselves.
Throughout his essays, Coates focuses on the work of re-examination—of society but also of ourselves. In his second section, “On Pharaohs,” Coates writes that during his trip to Dakar, he noticed that “there was no disrepair or abandonment.” His preconceived notions of the city made him feel surprise at seeing, for instance, “Africans jogging on the beach.”
“This is about the forest again,” Coates writes. No matter how much one professes otherwise, no writing from the West—especially that which does not come from someone who themselves has walked the land and spoken to the people they write of— is without weight, without bias:
There are dimensions in your words—rhyme, content, shape, feeling. And so too with the world outside. The accretion of imperfect, discomforting life must be seen and felt so that the space in your mind, gray, automatic, and square, fills with angle, color, and curve—the potholes, the dented fenders, the fried bread, the walls of fabric, the heaping plate of rice and fish. But the color is not just in the physical world you observe but in the unique interaction between the world and your consciousness—in your interpretation, your subjectivity, the things you notice in yourself.
In the fourth section of The Message, “The Gigantic Dream,” Coates recounts his time in Palestine witnessing Israel’s occupation firsthand in attempts to not only grow new roots—the forest again—but cut off a dead one that he had planted nine years prior. “Within days of publishing ‘The Case for Reparations,’ I began to feel the mistake,” Coates wrote in this section, regarding his widely discussed 2014 essay. “But it took years for the depth of that mistake, and thus my own debt, to compound.” It was within this essay that Coates analogized restitution for Black American descendents of enslavement to West Germany’s reparations to the state of Israel. “It was from West Germany to the state of Israel — and I need to be very specific about that — not to Holocaust survivors, but to the state of Israel itself,” Coates said in an interview with Democracy Now. “And that part of that essay came under quite a bit of critique — and what became clear to me was, deservedly so.”
Though Coates’ intentions were to disrupt the legacy of enslavement, he writes that his “proof of concept was just more plunder.” He had attempted to draw part of a map without himself walking the land—admitting only having “a vague notion of Israel” at the time—and where he drew a ravine was not a ravine at all. In course-correcting an essay years past, as is central to his politic, Coates clarifies, wielding that sharpened “quality of light” throughout his journey around the occupied territories of Palestine. In doing so, he discovers that the ravine was not a valley, but segregated roads and highways, and the stream was not a river headed due south from the mountains, but Israeli settlements that mirrored American subdivisions built on top of Palestinian land. He witnesses Israel’s weapons of control against Palestinians—drones, observation towers, enclosing gates, heavily armed soldiers, checkpoints, and guard dogs.
These canons do not only disappear the way that great power subjugates and domineers; they disappear the people entirely. Again, “an inhumane system demands inhumans.”
The contours of this map had been drawn by Western media long before Coates wrote his essay. Outlets like The Atlantic and The New York Times describe Israel’s occupation of Palestine as a complex “conflict” wherein “the only democracy in the Middle East” has the “right to defend itself” through colonialism. In this chapter, Coates makes reference to an article published by The Atlantic in 1967, where Barbara Tuchman romanticized Israeli soldiers as noble like “lions [who] fought with tears.” Almost six decades later, the narrative is the same. In May of this year, Graeme Wood argued in The Atlantic that for those same Israeli soldiers, “it is possible to kill children legally, if for example one is being attacked by an enemy who hides behind them.” It then follows that such a magazine would not hesitate to uphold the myth of Israel as a nation grounded in moral, mighty causes, as a myth cannot sustain itself without its makers:
Journalists claim to be hearing “both sides” as though a binary opposition had been set down by some disinterested god. But it is the journalists themselves who are playing god—it is the journalists who decide which sides are legitimate and which are not, which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame. And this power is an extension of the power of other curators of the culture—network execs, producers, publishers—whose core job is deciding which stories get old and which do not. When you are erased from the argument and purged from the narrative, you do not exist.
Coates’ observations of the occupation are not particularly revelatory, nor do they pretend to be. He’s a novice to this occupation, seeing its teeth up-close for the first time—but as he does, he notices that the teeth, sharp and white, look all too familiar:
At the boundary of this settlement, every thirty feet or so, I would see a guard dog, rise, growl, and loudly bark. I looked closer and saw a leash attached to each of these dogs. The leashes extended perhaps ten feet up, where they met, at a perpendicular angle, a master cord stretched across the space. The effect was a kind of fencing, a wall made of guard dogs. I felt myself in the presence of a terrible chimera—a wall of hell hounds that seemed to me drawn from my Montgomery nightmares.
There was something insecure about that chimera too, about whoever had engineered it. To construct what amounts to a wall of devouring, you must be really afraid of something. Maybe that’s what happens when annihilation is no longer speculative but a fact of national and personal history. That’s the easy answer. The more disturbing one is that this wall represented nothing new, that it was no more spectacular than the rituals of lynching, that the mob too was insecure, that its rituals too spoke to white men’s violent impotence.
Halted at a checkpoint, Coates noticed Israeli soldiers who, armed with enormous guns, wore sunglasses that reflected the hot sun like “Georgia sheriffs.” In this separate and unequal society, Coates saw and felt Jim Crow: “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.”
It is here that Coates exemplifies to us how to continue the tradition laid out by the likes of Douglass and Jacobs, Wells and Du Bois.“Great canons angle toward great power,” he writes. “And the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it.” The mainstream way—the notion of objectivity, that map laid out by Western media—is what creates these great canons. It is through these canons that American colonels are seen as justified in their pillaging of Indigenous communities, that monuments to enslavers are lauded as war heroes throughout the States, and that Israeli forces are legitimized in their seizing of Palestinian land and homes to create archeological tourist sites. These canons do not only disappear the way that great power subjugates and domineers; they disappear the people entirely. Again, “an inhumane system demands inhumans.”
In this way, within the framework of mainstream journalism, no other story, “save one that enables theft,” is told or tolerated. But, as Coates shows us—through his essay and by way of his journalistic politic, “there are other stories.” And those are stories told directly by people who experience them:
Even my words here, this bid for reparations, is a stranger’s story—one told by a man still dazzled by knafeh and Arabic coffee, still at the start of a journey that others have walked since birth. Palestine is not my home. I see that land, its peoples, and its struggles through a kind of translation—through analogy and the haze of my own experience—and that is not enough. If Palestinians are to be truly seen, it will be through stories woven by their own hands—not by their plunderers, not even by their comrades.
Early on in the book, while reflecting on Lorde’s idea of a clarifying “quality of light,” Coates notes that “you cannot act upon what you cannot see.” If we are then to glean just one lesson from The Message, might it be that the moment we do see what we hadn’t before, it is on us—as journalists, as writers, as humans—to act. This is how we haunt, and how we embody Morrison’s ethos, which urges us to use words not as tools of power, but as pathways to truth. Coates’ reflections are raw and at times self-critical, pushing readers to examine the stories we tell ourselves, those which have been inherited from histories of colonialism and enslavement. In sharing his own limitations, he extends an invitation for all of us who write to confront our own blind spots and misconceptions, and to see “the color of the soil” up close. Might this be, as Morrison once wrote, how civilizations heal. As Coates stands among ghosts—both from his own lineage and from the histories of others—he offers not just a collection of essays of his travels, but a blueprint for a journalism that dares to clarify, unsettle, and reimagine the world as it might be.
