Ta-Nehisi Coates in the city of Lydd. “The site of a horrific massacre,” he said, “where, among other things, grenades were tossed into a mosque.”
Sept. 23, 2024
By Ryu Spaeth, a features editor at New York
It was mid-August, roughly a month and a half before his new book, The Message, was set to be published, and Ta-Nehisi Coates was in my face, on my level, his eyes wide and aflame and his hands swallowing his scalp as he clutched it in disbelief and wonder and rage. At the Gramercy Park restaurant where we’d met for breakfast, Coates, now 48, looked noticeably older than the fruit-cheeked polemicist whose visage had been everywhere nearly a decade before, when he released Between the World and Me, his era-defining book on race during the Obama presidency, and the stubble of his beard was now frosted with white. But he was possessed still with the conviction and anxiety of a young man: deeply certain that he is right and yet almost desperate to be confirmed. He spoke most of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, a central subject of his book. “I knew it was wrong from day one,” he said. “Day one — you know what I mean?”
The Message — a return to nonfiction after years of writing comics, screenplays, and a novel — begins with an epigraph from Orwell: “In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.” Our own age of strife takes Coates to three places: Dakar, Senegal, where he makes a pilgrimage to Gorée Island and the Door of No Return; Chapin, South Carolina, where a teacher has been pressured to stop teaching Between the World and Me because it made some students feel “ashamed to be Caucasian”; and the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It is in the last of these long, interconnected essays that Coates aims for the sort of paradigm shift that first earned him renown when he published “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic in 2014, in which he staked a claim for what is owed the American descendants of enslaved Africans. This time, he lays forth the case that the Israeli occupation is a moral crime, one that has been all but covered up by the West. He writes, “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel.”
At a checkpoint in the old city of Hebron. “I get sad every time I look at this photo,” Coates said. “This was the second day of the trip and the moment I realized how similar what I was seeing was to the world my parents and grandparents were born into.”
Coates is hardly the first person to attempt to elucidate the plight of the Palestinians. Then again, he was not the first person to tackle the subject of reparations, a staple of classroom discussions and political debate. “I remember when he told me he was writing ‘The Case for Reparations,’” said Chris Jackson, the editor of The Message and Coates’s other books. “I was like, ‘Ta-Nehisi, you can’t Columbus reparations.’” Even within The Atlantic, there was skepticism. “My first reaction was, This sounds nuts,” said Scott Stossel, Coates’s editor at the magazine. “This is a nonstarter.”
A moment of respite in the West Bank. “Up until this point, we’d seen all of this pain and suffering. And on the last day, we were in this moment, which was quite beautiful,” Coates said.
The first inkling that Coates might want to write about Israel came around the time he was leaving The Atlantic. He was partly spurred by criticism he’d received over a passage in “The Case for Reparations” in which he cited reparations paid by the German government to the State of Israel after the Holocaust as a potential model. “We did an event when ‘Case for Reparations’ came out, at a synagogue in D.C., and I remember there was a woman who got on the mic and yelled about the role of Palestinians in that article,” he told me. “And I couldn’t quite understand what she was saying. I mean, I heard her, but I literally could not understand it. She got shouted down. And I’ve thought about that a lot, man. I’ve thought about that a lot.” It hadn’t occurred to him that Israel might itself be in the debt of a population that it had oppressed, a blind spot that remains a source of regret to this day. “I should have asked more questions,” he told me. “I should have done more. I should have looked around and said, ‘Do we have anybody Palestinian who’s going to read this before we print it?’”
Coates is interested in patterns of domination, in how oppression replicates itself in different contexts, and in the “related traumas of colonialism and enslavement,” as he writes in his essay on Dakar, a beautiful, searching examination of how his racial consciousness has evolved over time and across space. “I knew slavery and Jim Crow, and they knew conquest and colonialism,” he writes of the Senegalese. The kinship he feels with the Palestinians has similar origins: “I felt the warmth of solidarity of ‘conquered peoples,’ as one of my comrades put it, finding each other across the chasm of oceans and experience,” he writes.
Jackson told me that Coates’s obsession with Palestine, like his obsession with the Civil War, “is in large part driven by the feeling of having been lied to.” When I met Coates in Gramercy Park, he was still clearly in the throes of that obsession, his eyes boring into me, demanding affirmation for his feelings of shock and outrage, almost as if he were accusing me of something, which in a way he was — of complicity, of ignorance. His disillusionment with the press, in other words, can feel personal. When I asked him about the role of The Atlantic, which I told him struck me as the mainstream magazine most supportive of the Israeli state and most scornful of the campus protests that erupted in response to the siege of Gaza, he replied, “A lot of people there who I love, who I really, really love. But I can’t avoid the fact that they’re part of it. They’re part of it.” He added, “I wish they did better.”
When I told Ewing that Coates struck me as “a very intense guy” and asked her whether he was like that at Howard, where he and Ewing taught a writing workshop together in the summer of 2022, she laughed and said, “Oh my gosh, not at all. If anything, the students were a lot more deferential to me and treated him like the uncle that you relentlessly make fun of for being old and dorky.” The students I spoke to confirmed that Coates cut a more relaxed and contented figure on campus, which Coates famously depicted in Between the World and Me as drawing together from all corners of the country the whole parade of Black life. Howard remains his spiritual home; one of his students, Selam Getu, told me he introduced their class to his parents, his wife, his son. “He saw us as part of the family a little bit,” she said.
