The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates
September 23, 2024 at 10:19PMOnce among the most prolific political and social commentators in the US, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been relatively quiet for the last decade. (Emphasis on the relatively: Coates has written a best-selling novel and several comic books; guest-edited an issue of Vanity Fair about race, violence, and protest; and dipped his toe into screenwriting.) Next week, he’s turning up the volume once again with the release of his new book, The Message. According to the publisher’s description, Coates’s book “is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.” Central among those truths is Israel’s violent, decades-long subjugation of Palestinians, and US institutions’ complicity in sustaining what Coates sees as a system akin to the Jim Crow South. As Ryu Spaeth explains in this wise, probing profile, many of those same institutions have championed Coates, which positions The Message as a professional risk. But Coates is more concerned with morality than he is with power, something that far too few people in media can rightfully claim to be:
In August, at the exuberant apex of Kamala Harris’s campaign for the presidency, Coates attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as a reporter for Vanity Fair. He was impressed by the diversity of the speakers. “We’re dying, having a ball,” he said of his friends on the group chat. “And Steve Kerr comes up and somebody’s like, ‘Oh, this convention is so Black they had to get a basketball coach to be the white dude!’” He went on, “Everybody’s getting a chance,” referring to the Native Americans and Latino Americans and Jewish Americans and gay Americans who stood up to speak. “I mean, everybody’s there, right?” But by the end of the first day, he learned that the Uncommitted movement, named after people who voted “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary in protest of the Biden administration’s support of the war in Gaza and the Israeli regime, couldn’t get a Palestinian American added to the program. DNC organizers had rejected a substantial list of names of potential speakers. “I saw people invoke Fannie Lou Hamer, and I saw people invoke Shirley Chisholm, and I saw a tribute to Jesse Jackson,” he said. “And then I would be outside, with these Palestinian Americans and sympathizers to Palestinian Americans, and I would see that they had no place.”
In his dispatch for Vanity Fair, Coates drew attention to this failing, referring for the first time in writing to the current military assault in Gaza as a “genocide.” Among the hundreds of journalists in attendance, he was virtually alone in urging people to remember that there was a war going on, and for a moment his words changed the tenor of what had been a raucous party. (“He has a habit of doing that,” Stossel said.) But it was not enough for the Democratic Party to agree to bring a Palestinian American onstage. For Coates, the issue was not just where a Harris administration would stand on Palestinian rights. It was what a President Harris, who would be the first graduate of Howard to occupy the Oval Office, would mean for people like Coates, who were raised to believe that their struggle for freedom lies on the side of the powerless.
“I have a deep-seated fear,” he told me, “that the Black struggle will ultimately, at its root, really just be about narrow Black interest. And I don’t think that is in the tradition of what our most celebrated thinkers have told the world. I don’t think that’s how Martin Luther King thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Du Bois thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Baldwin thought about the Black struggle. Should it turn out that we have our first Black woman president, and our first South Asian president, and we continue to export 2,000-pound bombs to perpetrate a genocide, in defense of a state that is practicing apartheid, I won’t be able to just sit here and shake my head and say, ‘Well, that is unfortunate.’ I’m going to do what I can in the time that remains, and the writing that I have, to not allow that to be, because that is existential death for the Black struggle, and for Black people, as far as I’m concerned.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/09/23/the-return-of-ta-nehisi-coates/
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