The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is an essential book from what I think will be considered, decades from now, as one of the essential voices of our time. So go read it and then come back here, so I don’t have to worry about spoiling anything, okay? Okay.

Through travels in America, Africa, and Palestine, Coates seeks answers to the biggest questions through conversations with others, himself, history, and the physical world. We’re not the direct audience, just as Between the World and Me was for Coates’s son, The Message is written for his students at Howard, but the invitation is for everyone. To consider to explore this unflinching and thoughtful look at the nature of home, of what it means to be a people, of colonialism and oppression and the myths used to justify them… about writing itself, and drawing on personal strength, that cold rolled steel kind of strength that is bestowed inadvertently.

Coates says that historians have been part of various projects to create a “warrant” to justify the desired actions of those in power, citing examples from colonial times to the Jim Crow era to modern Israel. Coates himself relates that he was named in repudiation of one of these myths, the attempt to separate Egyptian civilization from Africans. It was inconvenient for some, wasn’t it, that this great civilization of the ancient world was African. Just as it was inconvenient that Frederick Douglas wrote so well and apparently spoke at least equally well.

What other warrants can we find, stories used to defend indefensible actions? What do you think of this book? What did it stir in you? Let us know by stopping by or email books@joyandmatts.com.