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 le

The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates

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2024-10-01 16:00:02

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.”