The Message is both intensely personal and intentionally public. Ta-Nehisi Coates reflects on his life as a writer: from his childhood, where he discovered the “haunting” effect of the written word, through the turns of his career at The Atlantic and other outlets and as a lauded author. He re-evaluates his famous essay, The Case For Reparations¹, in which he used Germany’s support for Israel as a positive example of the reparations he demands for Black Americans from their former enslavers. In the years since publishing this essay, Coates has learned more about the history of Israel’s colonization of Palestine; The Message acts as a form of reparation itself, a work that seeks to “haunt” and “clarify” for his readers in hopes of changing the world (“Seeing the world clearly allows for clearer action”).

Coates explains how he came to this error, and I think his argument holds some insight for communist writers and educators. When speaking to an audience—particularly to people that view you in some way as “other”, and particularly when coming to them with a “radical proposition”—one must write with the language, metaphors and examples that will resonate with this audience:

Making a charge according to the law of those you indict is a dangerous business. However much you try to remember your own motives, however much you may feel yourself to have succeeded, you are ultimately in their world and are thus compelled to speak to them through their symbols and stories. The need is even greater when you are a stranger to them, an adversary even, because your claims are always viewed with more skepticism. I lived in a world of white editors and white writers.

To make his message resonate with the audience of The Atlantic, Coates wove into his “radical proposition” the example of Israel. He writes that he recalls sensing there was injustice being done there, and that he vaguely knew of the history of solidarity between Black activists and Palestinians, but discarded his instincts out of a sense that he did not know enough, swayed by mainstream rhetoric about how hopelessly complicated the “conflict” is. Although, as communists, our target audience is unlikely to fit the typical profile of a subscriber to The Atlantic, we do talk to broad audiences, ones that may consider us strangers at times. When reaching for metaphors or examples that might help make our messages resonate emotionally, or connect theoretical concepts, Coates’s advice for us would be to stay on ground we know well, and avoid “easy bromides and national fictions.”

Coates also reflects more generally on the incentive structures that enabled his success as a writer, but that also shaped his writing in ways he regrets:

I see that the parts of my thinking that were most reinforced were those that most dovetailed with those around me, and the parts that were hardest to hold were those that did not. I wrote a lot of stuff I came to regret—a lot of smart-ass contrarianism, a lot of mean prose—in the young rush to get into the paper or magazine.

There are lessons for us here as well. Communists are familiar with Marx’s famous line, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” We understand that, under capitalism, mainstream media, universities and all the other “means of mental production”² owned or funded by capitalists will produce ideas in support of capitalism. Social media—also typically billionaire-owned³—is a place many of us connect with each other, yet these platforms shape our speech in their own ways. While their use of censorship to control content, particularly regarding the genocide in Gaza, has rightly received attention⁴, their impact on how we discuss a given topic is often underappreciated. These platforms reward condescending dunks, acerbic commentary, and tailing the crowd. Though scathing communication has its place, it can also turn people away, or make people feel scared to contribute or ask questions. It is harder (and unrewarded by the algorithms that shape our feeds) to write with welcoming patience, and to stay on a path you think is right even if less traveled.

Coates devotes a chapter to education, leaning on the work of Paulo Freire.⁵ He relates how the “passive role” of the dominant “banking” model of education shapes students into people that accept the world as it is rather than seeing themselves as active “transformers” of their world. There are parallels with Mao’s On Practice⁶: “If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself… If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution.” Coates’s writing seeks to educate not by cramming information into the brains of his readers, but by showing them how the world can be changed. He takes us from fights over municipal educational policy in South Carolina to the West Bank of Gaza where Palestinians defy Israeli law to claw back the resources they need to live. He connects these struggles, showing how they are all related phenomena:

Throughout the West Bank, I saw cisterns used to harvest rainwater. These cisterns were almost certainly illegal—the Israeli state’s hold on the West Bank includes control of the aquifers in the ground and the rainwater that falls from above. Any structure designed for gathering water requires a permit from the occupying power, and such permits are rarely given to Palestinians. The upshot is predictable—water consumption for Israelis is nearly four times that of Palestinians living under occupation. And in those West Bank settlements which I once took as mere outposts, you can find country clubs furnished with large swimming pools. On seeing these cisterns, it occurred to me that Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself. And more, it occurred to me that there was still one place on the planet—under American patronage—that resembled the world that my parents were born into.

If you’ve followed public discourse about The Message, perhaps it is surprising that this review is only now coming to Coates’s observations from his trip to Palestine regarding the genocidal actions by the Israeli state. His account of these horrors garnered a lot of attention (and earned him many angry but poorly-argued 1-star reviews on Goodreads), and it may be why you have heard of this book. In this way, the structure of this review echoes that of the book: it is not until the halfway mark, after he describes his experience growing up Black and his ancestral journey to Senegal that Coates begins to describe his revelatory trip to Palestine. But as you read on, you realize you’ve been reading about Palestine and Israel the whole time: what does it mean to be of a place? To be part of a community? To return to an ancestral land? To be othered? To be denied the privileges granted to another race? To not be allowed to tell your own stories? To have your life cut short? To have your history erased?

The Message is a deftly woven tale. It has deservedly earned praise for its depictions of conditions in Palestine; it is also worth reading for what it has to say on writer’s craft. Build from what people know, guide them to what they don’t yet know. Weave together history and human story, statistics and emotion, to give this knowledge power.

Last modified on 2025-12-04