Rarely has a book been so lavishly applauded as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me was in 2015. The book fetched gushing reviews and admiring interviews in prestigious media, won eminent literary prizes, and almost instantly landed on high school and college required reading lists all over the country.
The book’s rapturous reception, as I can’t be the first to note, rather undermined its central assertion that white Americans are natural-born racists and that the United States is and always has been rooted in white supremacy. A nation so constituted would have ignored Coates’s book, or suppressed it. I wondered at the time if he was made uncomfortable by all the praise or if he secretly hoped America’s cultural arbiters would denounce him and demand that bookstores and libraries remove his book from their shelves.
Evidently I was onto something. In The Message, the 49-year-old’s third memoir, Coates recalls hearing about a high school teacher named Mary Wood in Chapin, S.C., who had been sharply criticized by parents for having her students read Coates’s Between the World and Me. Plainly he had been waiting for such a moment: He recounts traveling to Chapin in order to attend the school board meeting in which Wood’s case would receive a hearing. At a previous meeting of this school board, parents had lined up to demand her firing, some claiming that her assignment violated a state budget proviso forbidding Critical Race Theory.
At the meeting, Coates no doubt hoped to witness a string of fat Southern ignoramuses denouncing his book. In the event, he’s obliged to say, all the speakers expressed support for the embattled teacher and her use of Between the World and Me. "No one, not a single speaker, stood up to support the book’s banning," he writes. He explains this oddity by noting that "school board meetings, and local politics, are small affairs, easily dominated by an organized faction, and that night the faction was Mary’s." Uh-huh.
A less jaundiced person than Coates might have regarded the controversy as a boon and ignored it, or at least not feigned victimization. Public school teachers from shore to shore compel their unsuspecting pupils to read his malign and preposterous book, and he is a wealthy man as a result. In fact, in a high school about 30 miles away from the one in Chapin—in Columbia, S.C., which Coates predictably represents as a citadel of Confederate nostalgia—two of my daughters were made to read Between the World and Me, their paperback copies purchased by taxpayers. Nobody, as far as I know, complained to the school board about it.
Although maybe somebody should have—on grounds of the book’s abysmal prose. Ms. Wood had her students read Coates’s earlier book, he tells us, in order "to show them the craft of writing an essay," which suggests to me that maybe she should have been fired. A work less suited to that end would be hard to fathom. Coates’s writing is consistently muddled, sometimes barely comprehensible, and full of cryptic turns of phrase amounting to truisms.
What’s clear from The Message, however, is that Coates considers himself a supremely gifted writer. He discourses again and again on the craft of writing, referring to the "shape and rhythm of words," "the discipline of voice," and so on, sounding like a bespectacled, turtleneck-wearing professor of creative writing. "It is never enough for the reader of your words to be convinced," he instructs us. "The goal is to haunt—to have them think about your words before bed, see them manifest in their dreams, tell their partner about them the next morning, to have them grab random people on the street, shake them and say, ‘Have you read this yet?’"
The latter sentence includes seven instances of the plural third-person pronouns "them" and "their," four of which refer to the singular "reader," two of which refer to "words," and one to "people." All for the purpose of conveying the commonplace thought that words should "haunt." Also, who, other than a person experiencing psychosis, grabs "random people on the street" to ask if they’ve read some essay or book?
One further instance. Coates travels to Israel (on which more in a moment) and says it "was a journey backward toward that instinct I’d lost, an ancestral gift I’d forgotten." Ancestral gift? He explains: "The gift is not in the blood but in the stories, the axioms, the experiences garnered from centuries of living on the outskirts of a dubious democracy." By now I am completely lost. Then this: "When I went off to become a professional writer, I was brimming with my own skepticism—not of the country but of the gift, which seemed so diffuse and random, a kind of folk wisdom that stood in abeyance of the empirical."
That the author of these idiotic hieroglyphs has achieved so immense an influence over American life is a gloomy indictment of the liberal intellectuals and journalists who, in 2015 and since, promoted him as a prophet.
The newsmaking part of The Message, as most readers will know, is its chapter on Israel—or "Palestine," as he calls it. Coates is a savvy self-marketer; he was smart enough to see that his primary audience of guilt-laden white liberals has moved on from the anti-police hysteria that gripped them from 2012 (Trayvon Martin) to 2020 (George Floyd). The 2020 riots went too far and now seem like a lockdown-fueled tantrum, which is what they were. Joe Biden was elected. And the bulk of Coates’s fans, sensing the imperative to pretend all is well on the home front, would rather not dwell on the racial strife and domestic social breakdown that plague America in the 2020s (though that could instantly change on November 5). Better, for the moment, to fixate on the evils of, let’s say, some foreign source of turmoil. Israel works nicely.
Coates is comically ill-equipped to talk about Israel and its conflicts with Palestinian terror groups and Arab states, and you quickly get the sense that he knows he has no idea what he’s talking about and doesn’t care. His authority to write on the subject derives from a 10-day visit to Israel in which, as an invited guest of the "Palestine Festival of Literature," he was plied with Palestinian propaganda. A more enthusiastic imbiber of agitprop the festival’s organizers, I imagine, could not have hoped for.
The Message contains many fictions. But cataloguing them all—he claims, for instance, that "Palestinians are barred from the Western Wall," when he must know this to be false—is beside the point. Coates boasts of his refusal to study the conflict’s complexities and learn. "I don’t really care much for hearing ‘both sides’ or ‘opposing points of view,’" he writes. And again: "I had no interest in hearing defenses of the occupation and what struck me then as segregation." He came to Israel with the intention of portraying it as the Jim Crow South, and he wasn’t going to let any countervailing facts get in his way.
Mainly, in both South Carolina and Israel, he finds memorials and other inanimate symbols. In South Carolina, having not seen any screaming Moms for Liberty at the school board meeting, he has to visit the statehouse in Columbia to find evidence of white supremacy: statues of onetime segregationist Strom Thurmond and avowed racist Ben Tillman, both politicians of some renown. Coates might have asked the state’s many black legislators why these statues remain and heard interesting answers, but maybe he had a plane to catch.
In Israel, he visits a park named for Meir Kahane, an American-born Israeli rabbi and Arab-hating terrorist. In the park lies the tomb of a Kahane acolyte, Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Palestinian Muslims in a mosque. (The park name and tomb are widely regretted in Israel, as is the statue of Tillman in Columbia.) But statues, tombs, park names—it’s all pretty dull stuff for a guy hoping to see Mississippi Burning in the Middle East.
At last, walking through the Old City of Jerusalem with some of his fellow litterateurs, he finds what he’s been hoping for. Before they pass through the Lions Gate in the Muslim Quarter, Israeli soldiers stop them for "forty-five minutes or so." The soldiers offer no explanation. Then he notes that "no one visibly Muslim passed through the Lion’s Gate in all the time we were made to wait."
Aha—segregation!
"I could not quite put words to what I was seeing," he continues, "but watching those soldiers stand there and steal our time, the sun glinting off their shades like Georgia sheriffs, I could feel the lens of my mind curving to refract the blur of new and strange events." (The writing is almost as offensive as the sentiment: the lens of his mind refracting blur? And why would Georgia "sheriffs," the heads of different counties’ police forces, be standing together in the sun?)
The scandal of the book—and the reason Tony Dokoupil of CBS wasn’t simply justified in challenging Coates in a recent interview but had a duty to challenge him—is that Coates never mentions Palestinian terrorism. An unobservant or gullible person could read The Message and have no idea that the Israeli soldiers’ vigilance is a consequence of Palestinians’ notable tendency to lunge at Jews with knives, self-detonate in crowded areas, and otherwise maim and murder innocents. Coates doesn’t mention the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, or any other act of Palestinian terrorism. Nor does he wonder why, although more than two million Arabs are citizens of Israel, few if any Jews are citizens of Arab countries.
With The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates has become a clownish, postmodern Walter Duranty. Duranty, recall, was the prize-winning Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times who deliberately misled the American public about Soviet crimes. Only Coates isn’t misleading anybody. And Duranty, for all his sins, could write.
The Message
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
One World, 256 pp., $30
Barton Swaim is an editorial page writer for the Wall Street Journal.