Ta-Nehisi Coates: the dangers of black-and-white moralising

Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of America’s most celebrated and controversial authors, has written a new book, The Message. To no one’s surprise, it became an immediate bestseller on its release last month. It claims to ‘explore… how our stories – our reporting, imaginative narratives and mythmaking – both expose and distort our realities’. But there is a glaring problem with this. It is the same that runs through some of his previous work – namely, that his vision of the world is exclusively in black and white.

The Message is a work of undeniable technical prowess. Yet it fashions a superficially plausible but ultimately unreliable narrative. It incorporates self-serving facts, discarding inconvenient ones and ignoring any plotlines deemed unworthy of examination. Coates has divided the world into victim (black) and oppressor (white). This is driven home with the metaphor of slavery and American racism that is ubiquitous in the book. Early on, there is an illustrative passage about slavery:

‘It was not just the conscience of the enslaver that had to be soothed but multiple consciences beyond his: the slave drivers and slave breakers, slave hunters and ship captains, lords and congressmen, kings and queens, priests, presidents and everyday people with no real love for the slave but with human eyes and human ears nonetheless. For such a grand system, a grand theory had to be created and an array of warrants produced, all of them rooted in a simple assertion of fact: The African was barely human at all.’

No one would dispute that slavery and Jim Crow were indeed evil. There is, however, one notable and problematic omission in Coates’s account. When he traces the entire network of slavery, one undeniably crucial link goes unmentioned: the people who first sold black slaves for profit were in fact the powerful black tribes and kingdoms of West Africa. African kings and merchants sold millions of slaves to Europe, South America, North Africa and the Middle East, as well as to North America. This does not absolve any of the villains mentioned in The Message, of course, but it does make the simple, black-and-white story he lays out more complicated.

The longest chapter is the book’s most controversial. It is about Coates’s visit to Israel and the West Bank, when he attended the Palestine Festival of Literature. Here, he also received a tour from Israeli progressives associated with an anti-occupation group called Breaking the Silence.

This chapter is a one-sided diatribe against Israel. Consistent with his Manichaean view of the world, Coates casts Israelis as white colonisers and Palestinians as the oppressed enslaved, drawing a parallel between Jim Crow in the United States and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. The terms ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ (which are not regarded as being part of Jim Crow in the US) appear frequently, as do comparisons between Israel and the Nazis. In a heated exchange after the book was published, a CBS interviewer – perhaps justifiably – said Coates’s book ‘would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist’.

French author and social critic Georges Bernanos once said that ‘the worst, the most corrupting lies are problems poorly stated’. So it is in The Message. Israel’s harassment of the West Bank Palestinians must certainly be addressed and ultimately ended. But an easy solution is not obvious, especially because so many Palestinians deny Israel’s right to exist (Coates appears to feel that way, too). Some even publicly celebrate every murderous attack on Israelis. Assuming Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state, the problem with the two-state solution advanced by many is how to guarantee the nascent Palestinian state would not become another terror proxy on Israel’s border, should it be taken over by radical Islamists, as happened with Hamas in Gaza.

Coates seems deliberately incurious about this dilemma. He writes: ‘The second half of my trip… was not an empty declaration to “hear both sides”. I had no interest in hearing defences of the occupation and what struck me then as segregation.’ This lack of concern is certainly his right, but it is reasonable to expect more from a MacArthur ‘genius grant’ recipient and award-winning author – especially one who writes and presents himself as a moral arbiter.

Some cursory research would reveal that Coates’s take on the conflict being between ‘black’ Palestinians and ‘white’ Israelis is demonstrably in error. Israel is not a ‘white country’. Half its citizens are from North Africa or the Middle East, or are black. Nor is there an Israeli ‘apartheid’ regime. Despite being a Jewish state, Israel’s population is roughly one-fifth Arab, which is well-represented in government and the justice system. Conversely, there are 49 predominantly Muslim countries with very few Jews living in any of them. This is because most Jewish communities were forced to flee these countries for Israel. This is one of the reasons Israel must exist.

Far from being colonialists, as Coates suggests, much of the territory Israel has acquired since its founding in 1948 was not due to colonisation, but the result of four wars that aimed to eradicate Israel. These were wars that Arab countries started and lost.

Israel is certainly not ‘genocidal’, either. There is no genocide in Gaza or the West Bank – the population growth rate in both areas is among the highest in the world.

Coates, of course, mentions none of this. Nor does he mention Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Islamism, grand mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini (who aligned with Hitler during the Second World War and Holocaust) and, most surprisingly, 7 October or Hamas. In Coates’s defence, The Message, was written before Hamas’s brutal attack on southern Israel last year. But that is not much of a defence. The book came out nearly a year after the attack and an author with Coates’s prestige would surely be able to have a chapter added about the attack before publication – if he so desired. It doesn’t appear that he did. In fact, in an interview upon the book’s release, while he acknowledged the ‘great horror’ of the 7 October, he also said he might not have been able to resist participating in it, if he had grown up in Gaza.

How does one tell the current Middle East story without even a mention of the 7 October attack? How does one portray the situation without mentioning the many actors in the region who make no secret of their desire to erase Israel from the map and kill all the Jews in the world? Coates attempts to elide all this by claiming he is only writing from the Palestinian point of view. But again, more should be expected from an author described by the New Yorker as ‘intellectually fearless… unshackled by political or racial ideology, humane in his judgments, respectful of facts, acutely aware of the difference between what is knowable and what is not’. The New Yorker should ask for a do-over on that one.

One final telling anecdote in The Message is Coates’s memory of hearing the story of former American football star Darryl Stingley. He was the New England Patriots wide receiver, and was paralysed in 1978 after being tackled by Jack Tatum of the Oakland Raiders. Coates was young and had an idealised view of football, until he read about Stingley. This, he said, made him more cynical: ‘What I felt then was that the story of Darryl Stingley broke some invisible law of justice… [Stingley’s story] illuminated a new idea: evil did win, sometimes – maybe most times.’ He refers back to the Stingley story in the context of evil several times in the book.

I have some personal history with Stingley. He was my contemporary in Chicago and our paths crossed several times. I followed his high-school football career closely. And I happened to be sitting near the Purdue (Stingley’s university) bench when his team nearly upset the vaunted Michigan Wolverines in a memorable football game before 100,000 fans in Michigan Stadium. After Stingley was paralysed, I briefly cared for him at the Rehabilitation Institute in Chicago. Years later, we sat near each other watching a Chicago Bulls game featuring Michael Jordan at the United Center – Stingley in his wheelchair – and we reminisced about the Michigan game and a clumsy, painful blood draw I did on him at the Rehabilitation Institute. He forgave me.

The story of Stingley is certainly tragic, in part because Jack Tatum never contacted him after the injury. But Coates’s readers are misled by his portrayal of it as about it being ‘evil’, or as Stingley harbouring a bitter pessimism. The truth is almost the exact opposite. Stingley’s is a heroic tale of inspiration, forgiveness, gratitude and strength. Before he died in 2007, Stingley said the following during an interview:

‘Human nature teaches us to hate. God teaches us to love… What happened to me 25 years ago will never be forgotten but you can’t hold on to bitterness… I’m one of God’s children. Jack Tatum is one of God’s children, too. We both have crosses to bear. For each of us there’s always a battle between the good side and the bad side. Sometimes the bad side wins. Sometimes the good. It’s up to us to make the choice. I choose to believe in God.’

Stingley was a remarkable person and his uplifting attitude is completely different from how Coates views his story. Perhaps Stingley’s message didn’t jibe with that of Coates’s. Or maybe Coates simply never bothered to look at Stingley’s autobiography or what he has said about redemption and forgiveness. Either way, it speaks volumes of how The Message parlays incomplete information into misleading conclusions.

For a book that aims to dissect ‘the destructive myths that shape our world’ and teach readers to embrace ‘even the most difficult truths’, The Message does neither. Coates’s simplistic, black-and-white narrative does a disservice to both his readers and the truth.

Cory Franklin’s new book, The Covid Diaries 2020-2024: Anatomy of a Contagion As It Happened, is now available on Amazon in Kindle and book form.

The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, is published by One World.