The Message - Important Words!

 Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Message is a book well worth reading.   Coates is a poet and storyteller, as well as journalist, a teacher, and a student.    This book exposed and deepened my knowledge and general insights related to Israel and racism, and much more.   While little was particularly new, so much wisdom showed itself through - most deeply.

Early in the book the mood of the book is exposed with things such as (referring to Jack Tatum’s jarring, paralyzing hit of Darryl Stingley), Coates stated:

Even Tatum’s story spoke volumes by not speaking much at all, for it nodded to the shame one might feel or the paradox of a game that valorizes violence and then is horrified by its consequences.  … What I felt then was that the story of Darryl Stingley broke some invisible law of justice, one that reigned in all of my cartoons.  I knew that football was violent – it was the violence that backlit Tony Dorsett’s escape act.  But violence was the antagonist in a story with a happy ending.  It could never win, could it? (p.10)

The Message shares Coates tale of his learning how he had bought into the dominant narratives of the principled, “just Israel”.    As he increasingly saw the horrors and hypocrisies of Israel, and the intersection of the U.S. Government’s huge role, I, a reader, clearly heard the ties between racism, colonialism and much, much more.

In the 1930s when the Nazis sought precedent for their battery of antisemitic laws, they found it in America – the world’s “leading racist jurisdiction” writes historian James Q. Whitman.  The relatively small presence of Black people proved no barrier for Nazis.  Hitler “saw the entire world as an Africa” writes historian Timothy Snyder.  “And everyone, including Europeans, in racial terms.”  Ukrainians and Poles were derided as “blacks”.  Slavs were said to fight “like Indians”.  And the Germans imagined themselves as heroic colonizers, “tamers of distant lands,” writes Snyder. (p.182)

Coates pushes and pulls us out of our comfort zones in a variety of ways.   It is challenging to remain within our “American Exceptionalism” and/or our imaginary world of so many “goods” and “bads”, as most of us have been taught through our schools, government and media.

Ta-Nehisi Coates visited and talks substantially of the “City of David”, essentially a created site for tourists, based loosely upon archeological digs.    He tears apart the selective use of “archaeology”.   In doing this he also references the extremely biased narrative of Leon Uris’s writings, cheering on the new vision of the Israeli (Jew) as an active “tough guy”, no longer the “wimp” (my words, not Coates’)

I was in the land that Uris so adored, where the New Jew “spits in the eye of the Arab hordes.”  But the very violence and force that emanated even from the City of David spoke to the disquiet and fear that resided somewhere deep inside Israel.  The state doth protest too much.   (p.193-4)

Coates digs into the ties of Racism with Palestine significantly related to journalism.  

Through a fifty-year period stretching from 1970 to 2019, Nasser found that less than 2 percent of all opinion pieces discussing Palestinians had Palestinian authors.   The Washington Post ranked at a dismal 1 percent.  The New Republic during this period did not publish a single piece on Palestine from the perspective of Palestinians.   (p.230)

In concluding this review, I want to share a final quote, that gets to the heart of Coates’ perspective:

And in the case of the City of David, it also allows for flooding your neighborhood with tourists hopped up on tales of religious jingoism, primed to re-aim, Alon explained, was to create a “correlation between Jewish heritage and ownership” and to birth a complete Jewish rule over Eretz Israel.  As I stood there watching the worshippers, Alon pointed to what appeared to be the ruins of an ancient wall.   Standing there amid all that remained of the Moroccan Quarter, amid a lost world, I felt a mix of astonishment, betrayal, and anger.  The astonishment was for me – for my own ignorance, for my own incuriosity, for the limits of my sense of reparations.  The betrayal was for my colleagues in journalism – betrayal for the way they reported, for the way they’d laundered open discrimination, for the voices they’d erased.   And the anger was for my own past – for Black Bottom, for Rosewood, for Tulsa – which I could not help but feel being evoked her. (p.199)