Ta-Nehisi Coates's prophetic vision

Reviewing the non-Israel parts of "The Message"

I was a Ta-Nehisi Coates fan before it was cool. So much so that back when I worked at The Atlantic and he was a not-that-well-known freelancer, I booked him for an unpaid guest-blogging gig while I was on vacation. Later, when I somewhat impulsively quit that job, he was hired as my de facto replacement, so as it turns out, my leaving The Atlantic was a major contribution to American intellectual life.

I’ve always admired him as a writer, even though we’ve always had very different approaches not just to specific topics, but to our roles as authors.

If I were somehow assigned to write an article on “The Case for Reparations,” for example, I would probably state directly that Black Americans were subject to a lot of mistreatment over a long period of time, mistreatment that was generally backed by official policy and inscribed into law. I would say that it is good that this official policy of mistreatment has ended, and that the notion of recompense seems pretty typical of how we think about injustice and settlement. The meat of the article would then ask what a reparations program might look like, what structure might decide it. I would try to ask some tough questions about what it might mean to aim for a political settlement of slavery and Jim Crow. The Navajo Nation has a corporate existence, a formal membership, and an elected government, such that if the State of Arizona or the US Department of the Interior wants to resolve a dispute, there is a canonical entity with which to bargain. That isn’t the case for Black America, so it’s not totally clear who the counterparty to the transaction would be.

This is boring, but I think important. I’ve followed reparations debates on and off since Randall Robinson’s book-length argument for reparations, “The Debt,” came out in 2001, and this question of counterparties and authoritative institutions is one that I haven’t seen properly argued. And this is what I’m interested in as a writer: raising points that are relevant to the discourse but that are largely neglected. Gentrification was a hot topic during the aughts, but the role of land use regulation and housing scarcity was very much not, and that inspired a lot of my related writing.

To a large extent, the conversation around Coates’s new book, “The Message” has focused on its final (and longest) section, the one about Israel and Palestine. This subject tends to generate ungenerous readings, and the reaction to Coates has been no exception.

But the book itself is structured as a missive to Coates’ undergraduate writing students, which is to say it’s a book about writing, one that encapsulates many of the differences in the ways he and I approach the task. And I think the best way to explore that is to ignore the Israel/Palestine section and focus on the rest of the book, which includes the provocative suggestion that the right-wing maniacs in South Carolina trying to ban his books are on to something.