Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates (file photo)
"There is still one place on the planet—under American patronage—that resembled the world that my parents were born into.” With this staggering sentence, Ta-Nehisi Coates draws a bloodline between Jim Crow America—a system of racial apartheid in the United States that enforced segregation and second-class citizenship for Black Americans until the 1960s—and the occupied Palestinian territories. In The Message, his first nonfiction book in nearly a decade, Coates maps this moral and political continuity with unnerving clarity. Structured as a letter to his students at Howard University, the book is a global meditation on race, empire, and the power—and peril—of storytelling. It is both a return and a reckoning.
Once praised by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison as a voice as vital as any in America, Ta-Nehisi Coates has long been regarded as one of the most influential Black intellectuals of his generation. In The Message, he steps away from the role of commentator and embraces that of a seeker—less prophet, more pilgrim. Journeying through Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine, Coates explores how nations and communities use stories to justify power, erase history, and silence dissent. At its core, the book is a call to writers and readers alike to confront injustice by challenging the stories that sustain it.
In Dakar, Senegal, Coates confronts the gap between the romanticized ancestral past and the complex, often harsh, realities of postcolonial life. He is initially moved by the sight of what he thinks are historic ruins—only to realize they are rusting exercise equipment. This moment of self-correction becomes emblematic of a larger insight. “When we root our worth in castes and kingdoms, in ‘civilisation,’ we have accepted the precepts of those whose entire legacy is the burning and flooding of a planet,” he writes. For Coates, real dignity lies not in ancient glory or mythic narratives, but in the everyday struggles of living, breathing people. Readers in India—and especially Kerala, where histories of caste, colonialism, and anti-colonial thought remain central—will find this tension deeply familiar.
This reflection anchors the central argument of The Message: the seductive danger of mythmaking, even for those who think they stand against it. “Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics,” Coates writes, suggesting that writers and storytellers bear not only the burden of truth-telling but the responsibility of expanding the realm of what justice can look like.
In South Carolina, Coates visits Mary Wood, a white teacher who faced professional risk for assigning his book Between the World and Me. Her struggle reflects a wider movement in the United States to ban books that confront racism and inequality. “They are not trying to prevent discomfort,” Coates writes of those behind these bans. “They are trying to prevent enlightenment.” It’s a reminder that censorship, whether in classrooms in South Carolina or campuses in India, often reveals fear—fear of ideas that question power and challenge privilege.
But it is in his final section—his ten-day journey through the occupied West Bank—that Coates’s voice sharpens with moral urgency. “I walked the land and I saw water denied, checkpoints imposed, villages razed, and olive trees torched,” he writes. He compares what he sees to “a more sophisticated form of Jim Crow.” His language is deliberate, drawing parallels between historical injustice in the U.S. and ongoing oppression in Palestine.
Coates admits that, for much of his career, he remained silent on Palestine. “Even my words here… are a stranger’s story—one told by a man still dazzled by knafeh and Arabic coffee,” he confesses. Yet his candour is not an evasion; it is part of his reckoning. “Palestine is not my home. 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.” It’s a profound act of humility that speaks to anyone—whether a journalist, teacher, or activist—who has grappled with how to use their platform ethically.
This humility is earned. Coates revisits his earlier work, particularly his influential essay “The Case for Reparations,” and admits that citing German reparations to Israel without acknowledging the mass displacement of Palestinians was a moral oversight. “I had not yet grappled with Israel,” he writes. “My whole project suffers from a kind of bias.”
Of course, The Message is not without flaws. Critics like Parul Sehgal have pointed out that Coates sometimes allows his personal reflections to overshadow the people and places he visits. His account of Palestine, for instance, could have included more voices from the ground. But to expect detached journalism is to misunderstand the book’s purpose. This is not objective reporting—it is a deeply personal reckoning.
“I am a writer and a bearer of a tradition, a writer and a steward,” Coates declares. That tradition—rooted in the moral witness of Black writers like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison—is not about neutrality. It is about moral clarity. For readers in India, where struggles against casteism, communalism, and settler colonialism are part of living memory, Coates’s message resonates deeply.
Indeed, The Message reads like a dispatch from a world on fire. And Coates, who once kept his distance from activism, now steps fully into the role of chronicler and challenger. He begins the book with a quote from George Orwell: “In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books… As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.”
There is power in that transformation. “There are some stories that are not mine to tell,” Coates writes. “But silence is also a kind of complicity.” In breaking his silence—particularly on Palestine—he offers what may be his most morally forceful work yet.
For writers, teachers, and students who believe in truth, justice, and the ethics of storytelling, The Message is more than a book. It is a challenge. It is courageous reminder that the duty to speak is strongest when silence feels safest. And that, in the end, the most powerful stories are the ones that refuse to look away.
(Faisal Kutty is a Toronto-based lawyer and regular contributor to The Toronto Star. His articles also appear in Newsweek, Aljazeera, Zeteo, and Middle East Eye. You can follow him on X @faisalkutty)