How Palestine changed Ta-Nehisi Coates's view of justiceSusan Abulhawa
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
Author Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks alongside Palestinian writers Isabella Hammad and Mohammed el-Kurd at the PalFest 2023 closing event at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center on 25 May 2023 in Ramallah, Palestine (Rob Stothard/The Palestine Festival of Literature)
") rgba(220, 220, 220, 0.5); top: -15px; left: 0px;">His initial footings in Senegal felt unsure, fraught with homesickness and an unspoken sense of being a tourist in a place one expects to call home. His experience was similar to that of all exiles who can straddle the world but are never whole in one place.
In Dakar, he was not black enough to be considered Black. He is hustled by residents accustomed to Black American visitors in search of an irretrievable past.
He arrived with American eyes that cast judgement on what appeared to be a decrepit outdoor gym as a sign of "collective dysfunction".
But his vision quickly adjusted under the African sun to see the well-worn infrastructure of the community and a "beautiful example of civic spirit".
He writes: "The African in me was emerging, and it took the form of comprehension of the virtues of shade and moving slow."
His writing is luminous, especially where he describes standing on the shores of Gorée Island, once a slave trading centre:
"I felt that I had somehow beaten history itself. I thought of all my exponential grandmothers taken from this side of the world and into the vast ocean. I thought of their frustrated dreams of getting back home. I thought of all the homes they tried to make on the other side, despite it all. I carried a part of all of them with me, every one of them. And I had come back."
The profundity of what stirred in him was ultimately private.
As a Palestinian, I understand well the personal and collective ache that meanders in your heart everywhere you go for all your life, never finding repose
The world carried on around him, unaware and unconcerned for the ineffable weight of the unredeemed history he had lugged across the ocean - of centuries of anguish, toil, and terror, which to this day remains abstracted in America's national narrative.
An expansive and inexplicable sadness on those African shores framed a sense of homecoming, which feels precarious to the reader. Then he speaks to what I understood as the logic of displacement, well known to exiles, for which language is ultimately inadequate to capture.
He writes: "… and there I was, on this boat from Gorée, my eyes welling up, grieving for something, in the grips of some feelings I am still, even as I write this, struggling to name".
I try to imagine the experience, and I hear the words of the elder: "We don't know what country or what tribe they snatched us from."
I cannot ever fully understand what it means to be of a lost tribe, pulled from the roots and forced to make a life and home under another people whose lives and economic engines were powered by your generational pain, so deep that it has lodged in your DNA - the more you suffered, the more your body was violated, and the more your heart broke meant the more they profited and the better they lived.
As a Palestinian, I understand well the personal and collective ache that meanders in your heart everywhere you go for all your life, never finding repose. It is especially so now - acute and aflame - as we watch the high-definition horrors and depravity of Israel's ongoing holocaust.
But at least I know where I'm fighting for.
I know my precise origin place, my home, and the people who populate the story of my lineage. I know the distinctive culture and heritage bequeathed to me by those who manufactured it over millennia. That's something.
It occurs to me that Black Americans are the only people on earth who do not, and perhaps cannot, know where they come from. I imagine this psychic injury - made all the more painful for a thinking, emotional, and moral person like Coates - and I suspect it never fully goes away.
Origin stories
At the core of this book is a critique of colonial mythology and, more importantly, the institutions that breathe life into the imagined, or at least incomplete, historical narratives that are conveniently fashioned in the service of the state and empire.
He reflects:
"…the American Revolution and the founding of a great republic, or the Greatest Generation who did not fight to defend merely the homeland but the entire world. If you believe that history, then you are primed to think that the American state is a force for good, that it is the world's oldest democracy, and that those who hate America hate it for its freedoms. And if you believe that, then you can believe that these inexplicable haters of freedom are worthy of drones".
But, he asks, what if there was a different story, "one that finds its starting point in genocide and slavery, and argues for a much darker present"?
Likewise, while Coates examines the mendacity of the Zionist narrative, his focus is on the media machine that promulgated a fantastical, ahistorical, and uncomplicated story of an ethnically, linguistically, racially, and geographically disparate group of people miraculously returning to their place of origin after a whopping 3000-year of absence.
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So powerfully disseminated has been this utterly impossible story - a bona fide fairy tale - that even someone with an incisive mind like Coates's didn't think to question that this group of Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, English, Moroccan, Ethiopian, Iraqi, German, and French Jews had always considered themselves a single people who had collectively pined and yearned to unite in a Jewish Palestine.
Yet for more than 3000 years, there was never a concerted move to do so, despite Palestine, like all Muslim-majority countries, having been open to Jewish immigration for at least 12 centuries, barring the period of the western Crusader occupation.
Coates aptly connects the dots between Birth of a Nation and Exodus, two major Hollywood films, each in the service of genocidal supremacist beliefs, half a century and thousands of miles apart.
He writes: "In Exodus, the image of marauding Arabs, cowardly and prone to rape, will be familiar to anyone who has seen the depiction of Black people in [DW] Griffith's Birth of a Nation. For just as the vulgar caricature of Black people served the cause of white redemption, so too did the Arabs in Exodus serve the cause of Zionism”.
For such an improbable narrative to stick, it needed two more ingredients:
The God element was fashioned from biblical stories. Adopt the name Israel, and suddenly, everything in the Bible pertaining to that name is referencing you! It's like changing your name to Eiffel and immediately becoming the heir to that weird tower in Paris or the similarly named mountain range in the Rhineland.
The last, and perhaps most important, component was a concomitant utter vilification and degradation of the actual indigenous people of Palestine - as savages, terrorists, and, incredibly, the most recent: colonisers. Thus, the control of popular narrative, public imagination and discourse is complete, or at least complete enough to accomplish the ambitions of empire.
Coates concludes:
"…it is journalists themselves who are playing god - it is the journalists who decide which sides are legitimate and which are not, which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame. And this power is an extension of the power of other curators of the culture - network execs, producers, publishers - whose core job is deciding which stories get told and which do not. When you are erased from the argument and purged from the narrative, you do not exist. Thus the complex of curators is doing more than setting pub dates and greenlighting - they are establishing and monitoring a criterion for humanity. Without this criterion, there can be no oppressive power, because the first duty of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so forth is the framing of who is human and who is not….[the] elevation of complexity over justice is part and parcel of the effort to forge a story of Palestine told solely by the coloniser, an effort that extends to the proscribing of boycotts by American states, the revocation of articles by journals, the expulsion of students from universities, the dismissal of news anchors by skittish networks, the shooting of journalists by army snipers, and the car-bombing of novelists by spy agencies. No other story, save one that enables theft, can be tolerated."
Arab or other West Asian writers, journalists, thinkers, intellectuals, artists, filmmakers, and musicians have long understood this reality.
Despite being the subjects of nearly 100 years of American coups, wars, regime changes, and all manner of their violent chaos and theft, no book by Arab writers has ever truly been put forth in earnest by cultural establishments in the US.
Worse, there is active and targeted silencing and smearing of Palestinian writers and other cultural workers. A prominent example was the cancellation of an award ceremony for Adania Shibli at the Frankfurt Book Fair in the wake of 7 October.
There are many more such examples - a list too long - and that's just what's in the public sphere. It doesn't include the quiet firing of journalists and professors. The rejection of submissions and applications and cancellation of book events that pass under the radar or occur in darkness is pervasive.
Silencing or side-lining Coates is a far more difficult endeavour, particularly after the liberal establishment spent years propping him up as a progressive Black voice for social justice.
The first attempt during a CBS appearance backfired spectacularly. A racist review by conservative commentator Helen Andrews was likewise popularly repudiated. Incidentally, this article doesn't show up in a Google search, even with specific words or phrases.
It remains to be seen how the establishment will regroup and react to him going forward. However, a look at the eventual media assault on cultural icons like Helen Thomas or Alice Walker may foretell.
From fairy tale to a new holocaust
In Dakar, Coates reminds us that Gorée is mostly symbolic because it's "well established that very few of the reported millions of enslaved people passed through that door."
The story itself is "an origin [collectively] imagined and dreamed up to fill an emptiness of a people told that they come from nothing and thus have done nothing and thus are nothing."
My mind wandered here because I had found the perfect analogy to Israel's most recent popular narrative. I say "most recent" because Israel's national stories change depending on changing political winds.
Whereas at its inception, the slogan was "a land without a people for a people without a land", with conversations and institutions explicitly dedicated to "colonisation" and "settlement" of Palestine, that lie couldn't stick and later changed.
Those for whom Jim Crow, Wounded Knee, the Trail of Tears, or Tulsa are embedded in their intellectual foundations do not see a 'complicated' matter
As colonialism moved out of political fashion, a need to invoke the contemporary language of intersectionality arose. Israelis created an incredible new myth whereby Jews from Poland, Ukraine, Brooklyn, England and so on claim indigeneity and "return to their ancestral homeland".
Of course, it's an invented tale without a shred of forensic or historical evidence, which employs, as all genocidal colonial movements employ, providence and divine entitlement.
What if Black Americans ran with the tidy origin story of having all passed exclusively through the gates of Gorée?
What if they decided in 2024, of their own agency and whims, to "return" to Senegal, to close the circle after centuries of unspeakable white supremacist violence and terror, to reconstitute themselves in their "ancestral homeland", fulfilling a promise of redemption, a romantic happy ending to their ancestors' anguish and frustrated dreams of home?
What if they arrived with all manner of death machines to remove or subjugate the indigenous population, who had lived there since time immemorial, proclaiming themselves as the rightful heirs to the land and all it contained of history, life, and resources? What if Black American families simply expelled the Senegalese and then moved into their homes and built up cities, claiming a historical presence there and a 1-2 percent genetic accord to a local tribe?
That might be the most apt analogy to the contemporary Zionist narrative invention, though Black America's claim would still be less tenuous than a European Zionist's claim to Palestine, most of whom are utterly bereft of familial or ancestral relevance to the region.
Israel has acted upon this narrative of divine privilege to kill, destroy, dismember, torture, oppress, humiliate, displace, rape, burn, and bomb their way through the lives of indigenous Palestinians to effectuate regional domination, expansion, hoarding of resources, and accumulation of global prominence.
The impunity they've enjoyed for at least eight decades, primarily from unconditional US support - financial, military, and political - has finally culminated in a "final solution", a holocaust playing out on our screens from Gaza.
The Message opens a powerful crack in Israel's propaganda armour, and it gives us a pathway to understanding the pivotal role played by the mass media, first in fomenting and then in justifying the wanton slaughter of a defenceless civilian indigenous population by a powerful colonial military.
Those for whom Jim Crow, Wounded Knee, the Trail of Tears, or Tulsa are embedded in their intellectual foundations do not see a "complicated" matter.
Coates tells us: "The most shocking thing about my time [in Palestine] was how uncomplicated it actually is."
That is probably the ultimate message of The Message.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
