Writing to Save the World

TSCBC Book 6: The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Feb 14, 2025

Welcome to The Socially Conscious Book Club, where we’re reading 52 books in 52 weeks, all centered around social issues. And also welcome to my HillmanTok students.

In celebration of Black History, we are reading all Black authors this month. This week’s book was The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Y'all I have too much to say about this book, this isn’t even all of it.

Written like a travel log and addressed to his previous Howard students, the book is broken down into four different essays.

Now some would say that the first three essays are one part and the last essay is separate. However, I feel the first three essays lend themselves to form the insights of the final essay.

Let’s break down each one.

Essay One: Journalism Is Not A Luxury

Addressed to his students at Howard, Coates talks about how for writers like us, Black writers, there has to be a purpose behind our writing and a different standard.

But when you live as we have, among a people whose humanity is ever in doubt, even the small and particular-especially the small and particular-becomes political. For you, there can be no real distance between writing and politics. Pg 4

I don’t know in my own writing if I’ve ever written without understanding that there would be a deeper meaning behind it.

Coates goes on to say that we are charged with a different task, to call to light the things that have been hidden. To do nothing less than save the world.

Essay Two: On Pharaohs

In this Essay Coates talks of his father's need to learn and his trip to Dakar.

As he prepares for his trip he feels the weight of it and the ties to what has been said about Africa. He talks of how oppressors need to justify their oppression through words.

It may seem strange that people who have already attained a position of power through violence invest so much time in justifying their plunder with words. Pg 29

And how historians rubbed against the idea of Egypt being Black simply because it didn’t fit their ideology so they found justifications to fit the notions they had already believed. And these notions were heavily pushed.

It’s like a diatribe that you hear over and over again and if you hear it enough, you start to think it’s true.

So when Coates lands in Dakar and sees it for the first time, that diatribe rises to the surface, despite the work his parents put in to silence it.

One moment I love is of him talking about pushing through the place of uncertainty to try something new when he goes to a local restaurant.

I think of how many times I held myself back out of fear of the unfamiliar and how some of my best experiences came from embracing it.

On the Island of Gorée, he grieves for something the island represents, a loss from centuries past and centuries to come. An imagined symbol on a stop to genocide.

Here is what I think: We have a right to our imagined traditions, to our imagined places, and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess that they are imagined. Pg 57

Towards the end of the essay, he talks of how he came to see Africa but not Africans and how this approach was limiting. So he then switches to meet the people. A lesson that lends itself to the fourth essay.

Essay Three: Bearing The Flaming Cross

In this essay, Coates starts by talking about his struggles with learning and how the labels placed on him questioned his abilities.

It’s interesting how these labels given to us as children try to define us as adults. I think about how as a child I was constantly told I talked too much and now as an adult I’m told I’m quiet.

I think that what we were being taught was less a body of knowledge than a way to be in the world: orderly, organized, attentive to direction. Pg 68

This essay also touches on book banning, Executive Order 13950, the co-opted term critical race theory (because that’s not what it really means), and the backlash to 1619.

And then his own story about his book, Between the World and Me, took him to South Carolina to witness the fight of a teacher and community to keep the book in the curriculum.

They wanted the teacher, Mary Wood, to drop the book because some of her students “feel uncomfortable” and “ashamed to be Caucasian” amongst other things.

There was a sense in the room that avoiding "divisive concepts" was not just wrong on moral grounds but that it represented a lowering of standards; that to ban a book was to erect a kind of South Carolina exception for advanced placement-one that validated the worst caricatures of Southern whiteness…” pg 102

When I read this, I was like yes! Just like how in the second essay where the historians are finding justifications to fit their notions so are these politicians finding justifications. But what it’s doing is putting these students at a disadvantage, it’s maintaining the oppressive power, expecting the people they are oppressing to be themselves.

I think what he says here sums it up nicely.

Much of the current hoopla about "book bans" and "censorship" gets it wrong. This is not about me or any writer of the moment. It is about writers to come—the boundaries of their imagination, the angle of their thinking, the depth of their questions… it’s not about honoring the past. It’s about killing the future. Pg 110-111

Essay Four: The Gigantic Dream

Now this is the longest essay and the one that gave the book the most backlash. The thing about backlash is that it looks awfully like a bandwagon.

This essay is about Coates's trip to Palestine. But before we get to it, I want you to play this clip (you can also watch in the above video) and I want you to take this into context as we talk about this essay.

Here is the full audio from the conference. The clip comes from 13:56. Here is a video of it as well.

The very top of the page starts with a quote from Noura Erakat, a Palestinian-American activist, “We’ve all been lied to about too much.” pg 115

Coates starts with his last day in the country and his visit to the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, which struck me as an interesting place to start.

The shape of this story is not just the curving arc of justice but something more: a perfect circle. Pg 121

In this passage, he’s talking about the path of the Jewish nation but it also feels like the path of this story.

In this essay, he weaves a narrative between Jim Crow, Apartheid, and the current state of Palestine under Israel's occupation. He divides his time between listening and talking to Palestinians and Israelis.

He talks of the long history of Palestinian freedom fighters and Black Activists. And Israel’s hand in South Africa’s Apartheid. How this plan for Palestine had been in place for a long time but wasn’t activated until 1948.

How is it that you can so quickly move from oppressed to the oppressor?

Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere. Pg 126

After seeing everything that was going on and hearing the various stories Coates is overwhelmed by it all. It’s a lot of information to take in, to try to justify, to try to reason with.

…part of me was still searching. I did this because the weight of evil is so great. I did this because if the worst was true, if l was forced to see it square, then I knew what must come next. I did this because "a good reason" is also a way out. The weakness in me is always talking. But so are my ancestors. pg 154

Page 184 stood out to me for two reasons. The first is the American view on immigration in 1945 and how much hasn’t changed.

The US basically said to Jewish people, listen we only went to war because we had to, glad that you're free, but you can’t come here. Which is so messed up.

It makes me recall the line in the book James by Percival Everett.

I knew that whatever the cause of their war, freeing slaves was an incidental premise and would be an incidental result. Pg 286

The second thing that stands out is the cause of Jewish whiteness, the need to no longer be seen as weak, and how the use of “righteous violence” is needed to gain entry to Western nations.

Or as they call it, the fight for Democracy.

I think of people asking how so many people of color can vote for Trump, smooze up to him, and campaign to be part of his party and cabinet.

And I think the answer to this and the cause of whiteness is the same. There is safety and power in being white. And if you can’t be white then you need to become white adjacent.

I keep coming back to Coates's point on reparations and I wonder what would Black people be like today if we had been given reparations? Would we be an arc of justice still or a circle? Was there a fear of retaliation if we were given our just dues like the Jews?

The end of this essay links back to the other three. It’s not lost on me how Coates is once again taking the task of doing his part to save the world. But this time it’s not left up to him. Now it’s about the importance of journalism for Palestinians to tell their own stories,

If Palestinians are to be truly seen, it will be through stories woven by their own hands… pg 232

Which I think makes starting with the quote at the beginning even more profound.

I recommend reading this book if you haven’t. If you have read the whole book, I would love to hear your thoughts on what stood out to you.

Happy Reading.

What are some of the social issues throughout this book and the questions they ask?

These are some of the things I want you to think about while reading or reflecting on the book.

Race: The author is Black and therefore speaks from a Black perspective. As the author himself notes, everything we write becomes political. He visits Africa for the first time as part of the diaspora. How does his experience differ from the racist view of historians?
Politics: Talking about book banning, critical race theory, and laws. How is it that knowledge is power? And when access to knowledge or “divisive concepts” is taken away, how is oppressive power able to move in?
Human Rights: Talking about immigration, atrocities, Jim Crow, apartheid, and Palestine. Who gets to tell their story? And who is right? At what point does the arc of justice become a circle? How do you define humanity? And when is it stripped away?