The Message: How Palestine changed Ta-Nehisi Coates's view of justice

Two powerful themes emerged for me from Ta-Nehisi Coates's latest book, The Message.

The first pertains to Coates's intellectual journey, as this book, in my view, marks his first public step towards internationalism.

It is a leap on the path that Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee forged before him to connect the political, historical, and emotional threads that run through points of oppression and supremacist ideologies.

The second emerges from his observations, ideas, and meditations - namely, the centrality of the "origin story" in what grounds both the personal and collective sense of self, and in what animates both empathetic solidarity and genocidal violence.

Coates offers a piercing critique of colonial mythologies and assumptions from Senegal to South Carolina to Palestine.

The latter is the part that has provoked intense scrutiny because it upends popular perceptions surrounding Israel. It is an analysis that springs from a 10-day trip to occupied Palestine, clearly followed by significant research and rumination.

Internationalism in context

Americans scarcely grasp the role of internationalism in advancing the civil rights movement in the United States.

The national narrative of this era is defined by localism, whereby Black Americans, together with some white allies, altered the law and the behaviour of the ruling elites entirely through internal mechanisms of economic boycotts, direct actions, and protests.

Coates offers a piercing critique of colonial mythologies and assumptions from Senegal to South Carolina to Palestine

Popular narrative imagines that the changes in law and social arrangements towards greater equity were the result of a mass pressure campaign that reoriented the moral compass of ruling echelons.

While all the internal or local mechanisms of popular mobilisation undoubtedly played a significant role, the official narrative ignores almost entirely the equally substantial pressures on the US in the international arena.

Even those who speak of internationalism in the civil rights movement tend to focus more on the impact of global solidarity on the movement itself, not the effect it had on those in power.

During this era, the US was embroiled in the Vietnam and Cambodia wars, hot extensions of the so-called Cold War, a world order-defining global competition against the Soviet Union.

While these were ostensibly military confrontations, American victory relied heavily on wielding its soft power to win the "hearts and minds" of the global masses, particularly in a world of recently independent African and Asian nations that were trying to find their post-colonial footing.

Although the tide was shifting at that time, the US was still largely viewed as a beacon of democracy.

It was a world we all dreamed about, where individuals were born equal, where only the law, not privilege or prestige, reigned supreme; where justice was blind - blind to skin colour, gender, social or economic status; and where everyone had a fair chance.

To bolster this soft power, America subsidised, deployed, and dispersed arsenals of cultural productions - from Hollywood films, books, music, and journalism to political think tanks, local broadcast stations, and cheap fast food - transmitting an image of democracy, egalitarianism, prosperity, glamour, possibility, and, above all, the attainability of it all - through capitalism, of course.

Glamorous Black musicians and actors performing on the screen and abroad were instrumental in projecting this image.

The appeal was undeniable and far-reaching, capturing the imaginations of youth worldwide, who happily traded in their traditional clothing and food for blue jeans, hamburgers, and cigarettes.

"Mixed race" light-skinned Black Americans became the standards of beauty in African nations (which Coates himself encountered on his trip to Senegal).

The slick Marlboro Man became the epitome of cool, brave, and free. Everyone wanted to transform their countries into a "land of the free and home of the brave".

American hypocrisy

The Vietnam War, and simultaneously the movement for civil rights, powerfully stripped away the veneer of America's glossy image, revealing a reality of racism, disillusionment, and questionable morality.

Images of young soldiers, both fodder and fomenters of violent intervention, along with images of brutal suppression of peaceful protestors at home, stood in stark juxtaposition to America's claim of championing liberty.

Worst of all were images of Black America's realities. The civil rights era laid bare America's terrible underbelly - apartheid, Jim Crow, lynchings, and the many other iterations of white supremacist terror.

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It was perhaps the first visual exposé of America's core on the world stage, and it cast a long shadow over the nation's global reputation, made darker in contrast to the moral clarity of leading Black revolutionaries, from Malcolm X and Fred Hampton to Fannie Lou Hamer and Mohammad Ali.

The hypocrisy of peddling liberty while disenfranchising its own citizens began to crack the walls of the American narrative, illuminating a chasm between rhetoric and reality, which led to profound international embarrassment among allies and adversaries alike, who were now scrutinising America's moral standing.

Simultaneously, and for entirely different reasons, the dangers of Jim Crow were crystallising to the ruling class. Segregation had put young Black minds out of white supremacist reach, which they could see had given rise to powerful Black voices in the radical traditions of liberation movements.

Segregation had inadvertently nurtured self-love among Black Americans, from which community institutions were formed; the wheels of grassroots activism and civil rights organisations had rooted within Black society and spilt into white society.

It ushered a cultural renaissance that blossomed with such glory that Black creative expression came to dominate and even define American music, art, fashion, and beyond.

Most of all, Black intellectuals and revolutionaries were increasingly making connections with global liberation movements, finding common cause with resistance around the world, and presaging a threat from within the empire.

The established order was thus vulnerable.

The dangers of leaving young Black minds in the nurturing hands of Black teachers and Black elders were echoed in the words of J Edgar Hoover, who infamously said that it was not the guns but the Black Panther's free children's breakfast programme that was the "greatest threat to the internal security of the United States of America".

In this way, integration of American schools and society could be seen not as the result of moral advancement but as a white supremacist strategy to co-opt Black minds and the Black radical tradition as much as possible.

Coates's localism vs internationalism

Black liberation movements in the spirit of that which sprang from the civil rights era have struggled to emerge in the modern world.

The radical promise of the Black Lives Matter movement has yet to realise its full potential of internationalist emancipatory motion in a national milieu of identity politics, where high-profile Black faces have been enlisted into the service of empire - Lloyd J Austin III, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Cory Booker, Barack Obama, Robert Wood, Kamala Harris, and on the list goes.

Simultaneously, America's ruling class was careful to advance and celebrate only those Black intellectuals who focused on the internal debates that kept Americans at each other's throats.

White publishers, editors, and media moguls love Black thinkers who spend their time manoeuvring the maze of identity politics and "wokeness" for which "conflicts" abroad are peripheral or irrelevant to the "struggles at home".

Powerful public access - the sort that hinges on funding and institutional backing - for Black writers is almost always predicated on localism.

Until his most recent book, Coates belonged in this category of Black intellectuals whose work remained local, grounded in identity reductionism

The Black Agenda Report refers to this as "identity reductionism", a reactionary appeal to identities devoid of class and structural analysis or historical materialism.

African American Studies scholar Charisse Burden-Stelly provides the example of the dispute between Audre Lorde and June Jordan, whereby Lorde, backed by a "feminist" cohort, used "Black and Jewish identity to bludgeon Jordan's righteous critique of the colonial entity [Israel]".

Burden-Stelly also introduces the relevant twin concept of "intersectional imperialism", which describes the ways in which imperialism is "rationalised, legitimated, and continued by employing the language of intersectionality, appointing racialised and minoritised people to strategic positions, and foregrounding marginalised individuals as mouthpieces of empire".

Until his most recent book, Coates belonged in this category of Black intellectuals whose work remained local, grounded in identity reductionism, epitomised in his book We Were Eight Years in Power, wherein Coates praised former President Obama as, among other things, a "deeply moral human being”.

I believe Coates to be a moral human being, awakened to the ways in which mass media and the gatekeepers of information conspired to manipulate the very knowledge infrastructure upon which his own analyses could be based.

The result was a natural brilliance dimmed by decontextualisation from American and Zionist imperialism.

For Coates to have identified with Obama means that he had to be blinded to the president's unprecedented drone slaughter around the world.

He had to be blinded to the bitter irony that Obama oversaw the dismantling and utter devastation of Libya, turning it from one of the most prosperous, self-sufficient, independent African nations - with free healthcare and free education, zero national debt, electricity and housing enshrined as human rights, and a burgeoning pan-African cultural scene - into a destabilised Nato outpost marked by western looting and a veritable slave market of kidnapped and impoverished Africans.

Obama and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton engineered the murder of Muammar Gaddafi, whose plan to unite Africa under a currency backed by the continent's vast gold reserves would have made Africa an undeniable superpower.

It was fellow Black thinkers and Palestinians and the vigour of Black intellectual discourse that pushed back publicly and privately made appeals to Coates to reconsider his positions, particularly vis-a-vis European holocaust reparations to a settler colony built on the genocide and dislocation of indigenous Palestinians.

Enter 'The Message'

Coates's new book marks his departure from localism, identity fetishes, partisan politics, and the kind of racialism that is dislocated from imperial adventures and internationalist dynamics.

He begins with a tentative trip to Dakar, Senegal.

To me, this was the most poignant part of the book and the most beautifully written. I teared up and, at times, found myself marvelling at his translucent assemblage of words.

As a Palestinian writer, I understood the personal and collective wound from which such creativity springs. Coates's narration of his trip was simultaneously intimate and general, ancient and contemporary, hesitant and sure, emotional and intellectual, local and international, familiar and alien.  

This section of the book reminded me of something a Black elder said at the 2000 Right of Return march in Washington, DC.

Speaking on the struggle to liberate and return to Palestine, he said: "At least you know where you come from. We don't know what country or what tribe they snatched us from. We don't know where we belong. We don't know where our home is."

His words hit me hard then, and his voice echoed in my mind as I read Coates's description of his trip to Africa - his first attempt to inhabit and wander the origin story.