Ta-Nehisi Coates’ ‘The Message’ is an important pre-election read

When essayist, author, and Howard University professor Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses his writing, he implores readers to look beyond his accolades, his clever turns of phrase, his brilliant descriptions, and his sentiment: like really feeling – its truth.

“I will kill myself because of those punishments,” Coates told an audience of 1,800 people from the altar of The Chapel of Girard College on Monday. Coates was a guest of Marc Lamont Hill, a fellow journalist, professor and owner of Uncle Bobbie’s coffee and books in Germantown. Uncle Bobbie’s and WHYY teamed up to host the evening, one of several literary coups this year, including a visit from the Supreme Court judge Ketanji Brown Jackson and the rapper Eveboth of whom released their memoirs this fall.

“These sentences are not ornaments, they are not empty objects of beauty,” said Coates in whose seminal memoir: Between the world and me, made him a renowned commentator on the lived Black experience of Generation X. His 2014 Atlantic Ocean article “The Case for Reparations” sparked a broader discussion about what was taken and what was owed to Black Americans.

“This isn’t just the icing on the cake,” Coates continued. “This is the cake. Because the extent to which I can (clarify and write) moving, poignant sentences that really get you there is the extent to which I understand the matter.

Coates’ candid discussions make his performance in Philadelphia, in the days before our nation’s most consequential presidential election, so powerful and timely.

Coates’ freedom to tell a story through his eyes and share it on stages and in classrooms is exactly what will be jeopardized if the political party that wants America to be great again wins the presidency.

Truth and humanity

The message – a nod to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s rap from 1982 – is slim, but compact. Formulated as a letter to the writing students at Coates’ Howard University, Coates urges that young writers write from their experiences, journeys, and revelations, and not from the expectations of editors. A young writer’s mission, says Coates, should be “nothing less than saving the world.”

The truth is the weapon.

Coates takes us on a journey to find his truth The message. We visit Dakar, Senegal; Columbia, South Carolina; and the West Bank, where he sits as he lets go of long-standing impressions he has had of Africa, the Deep South and the Middle East. Coates does not want to repeat the tropes, he interrogates them, banishes them to form new insights and his truth.

‘I don’t want you to read The message and thought, ‘Wow, that was an interesting, relatively accurate book,'” Coates said Monday. ‘You’re supposed to read The message and when you get up, that’s all you can talk about. You go to your partner… and say, ‘Did you read this? You need to read this.’.”

The theme underscoring his book is about who gets to tell stories, and what power those stories have: when a group of people are treated as “the other” in their own story, inhumanity toward them grows and flourishes. When people are allowed to tell their truth, their humanity becomes reality in their eyes and in the eyes of others.

In Dakar, Coates discovers a city full of beautiful people with rich lives, not the Africans of films and his imagination. In South Carolina, he found his work appreciated by Southern whites who used his book to open the minds of children in a small town school. In Israel and the West Bank, where most of the book is set, he quotes a statistic from historian Maha Nasar, who says that from 1970 to 2019, less than 2% of all opinion pieces on Palestine in this country’s newspapers and magazines had Palestinian issues. authors.

“People have great difficulty committing inhumane acts against other people without some ambiguity that makes it okay…” Coates said at the event. “Everyone wants to be the hero in the story. For those of us who live under the weight of that obfuscation, we live under it our entire lives. Half of our job is clarifying exactly what is true.’

This reminds Coates of the African American experience. It reminds me of that experience too.

Vote as if your story is at stake

Like Coates, I have spent most of my career explaining the humanity of black people—particularly the humanity of black women—in newspaper columns, to justify my existence in the newsroom and in the world. Sometimes, even as I worked to discredit tropes, I unknowingly furthered them and maintained the status quo. I was forced to withdraw when my ‘objectivity’ was questioned by the editors.

Following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, The Philadelphia Inquirer formed a newsroom-wide focus group that created new newsgathering policies that treat people of color with humanity. My colleagues and I have written more stories, essays and columns that reflect this more shared humanity. We just broke the ice. We still have work to do. But everyone in our newsroom is aware of the stories of people of color.

It is not lost on me that Coates is on tour highlighting the importance of storytelling in the days before the presidential election that threaten to undo the small strides people of color have made in the media, publishing, and classrooms.

With the ongoing war in Gaza, I have heard people of color say they will sit this election out and refuse to vote for Harris or Trump.

But I would argue that voting is more important than ever, especially if we want journalists, artists, and storytellers to continue telling truthful, nuanced stories from our perspective.

In this way, reparations can create a better future for ourselves and our children.