From the Liberal Mainstream

Coates made his name as a columnist for the Atlantic, a magazine that has disgraced itself since October 7 by arguing, for instance, that it was “possible to kill children legally, if for example one is being attacked by an enemy who hides behind them.” Within its pages, he penned the bombshell 2014 article “The Case for Reparations,” an agenda-setting essay that broadened liberal political horizons by arguing for restitution for African American descendants of the slave trade. As is typical of his writing, Coates’s essay ignored the political question of how such a sweeping reform — hundreds of billions of dollars by all accounts — could be passed in a majority-white country that its author had insisted is riddled with white supremacy. Nevertheless, the article found its utility as a cudgel against sections of the Left whose calls for economic redistribution were dismissed as inadequately sensitive to racialized inequalities.

The following year, Between the World and Me, a lyrical memoir about race and fatherhood, advanced a radical critique of what its author saw as the racist foundations of American democracy, drawing comparisons to the work of James Baldwin. Coates’s memoir was an epistolary essay addressed to his teenage son, to whom he sought to describe his own cultural and intellectual formation. Nas’s music, Malcolm X’s speeches, and the writing of intellectuals like Eric Williams, who worked out of Howard University, all instilled in Coates a sense for the complexity of black life within and outside of the United States. What held black experience together was the notion that “race” was the “child of racism, not the father” — a claim that allowed Coates to produce a sweeping narrative that ignored the history of multiracial politics and treated white hatred and fear of blacks as one of the motor forces of American history. Written in the wake of the killings of Eric Garner, Renisha McBride, and John Crawford, three African Americans slain at the hands of police officers, Between the World and Me gave voice to a collective sense of outrage directed toward American law enforcement, rightly viewed as a set of discriminatory institutions. It sold 1.5 million copies, topped the New York Times’ best-seller list, and made its author a household name.

While his brand of anti-racism, characterized by a focus on the experience of racism conveyed to predominantly white audiences in confessional writing, has come to dominate the liberal mainstream, Coates has since embarked on a physical and intellectual voyage. The former has taken him from Senegal to Palestine via South Carolina and the latter some distance from the liberal mainstream. The persona that Coates adopts in The Message is again that of a black intellectual in dialogue with his peers, speaking in unguarded fashion about racism for an audience unaware of harsh realities.

Coates has grand hopes for writing. Seeing himself in the tradition of figures like Frederick Douglass, whose memoirs of slavery made him one of the most famous men alive during the nineteenth century, Coates believes that his task is to point out the “common humanity” of his readers, because “what must be cultivated and cared for must first be seen.” But to accomplish this, he first needs to disabuse his readers of views hostile to egalitarian ends.

Chief among these mystifying ideas is the notion that there is a fixed relationship between an identity and its social meaning. Whereas he was able to write in 2016 that “whiteness confers knowable, quantifiable privileges, regardless of class — much like ‘manhood’ confers knowable, quantifiable privileges, regardless of race,” in The Message, he starts from the premise that racial categories are far less fixed than they seem from the vantage point of the United States.

In the section on Senegal, Coates treads ground covered in his earlier memoirs. We learn again that he emerged out of a particular nationalist tradition that fantasized about premodern black nobility and saw the bygone world of African kings and emperors as something to be emulated. Laying the ground for his later discussions of Israel in which he looks in shock at armed soldiers policing Palestinians at the Temple Mount, he argues that the monuments and heroes of the past provide a bad model for the present. “Human dignity is in the mind and body and not in stone,” he tells the reader.

Yet while Coates rejects the mythology of racial nationalism, he recognizes its appeal. Descending from the plane during his first trip to Africa, a euphoria so strong that the only expression he can find for it is the exclamation “oh, shit” takes hold of him. But as with all idealization, his fantasies about “Africa” match up awkwardly with reality. Despite his claim to have insight into the ideology underlying racism, he still finds himself surprised to see “Africans jogging on the beach,” a confirmation that he perhaps harbors some of the same prejudices he took issue with in whites. American ideas about race, too, come out badly during Coates’s adventure. Fixed categories such as black and white appear more fluid from the vantage point of Senegal. “Look, I understand what Black is in America,” Coates’s guide chides. “I get that you’re Black there, but here you are mixed. That’s how we see most Black Americans.”

Rather than treating the realities of race as a refutation of fantasies of belonging, The Message suggests that such dreams are inescapable. The task of serious thinking, Coates implies, is to temper these ideals with the demands of morality and politics. Adopting the sanctimonious tone typical of the first half of the book, he concludes that blacks “have a right to imagine ourselves as pharaohs, and then again the responsibility to ask if a pharaoh is even worthy of our needs, our dreams, our imagination.”

Orders of Discovery

We learn what could or should temper these fantasies in the book’s final and longest chapter, “The Gigantic Dream.” Freed from the occasionally clumsy didacticism of the previous sections, Coates’s discussion of Palestine is stylistically and argumentatively his strongest. However, the force of his arguments can only be fully appreciated if the reader keeps in mind the size of Coates’s readership and the political significance of such an attack on Israel coming from someone as well regarded as he is by liberals in his country.

Adopting the tone of the earlier sections of the book, Coates’s dominant mode of writing is naive revelation. He begins his discussion of Israel, as he presumes the average American liberal would, with the Holocaust and its legacy. At Yad Vashem, he looks through the Book of Names that lists those killed during the Shoah, comparing Israel’s memorial to the National Museum of African American History and the Whitney Plantation in New Orleans. Coates’s eye is one drawn to comparisons, and the effect of his early sections discussing Israel is to reveal both American slavery and the European Judeocide as events of unimaginable horror. He looks over the “braided whips used to drive Jewish captives to work in the camps” and pauses before the thought of the Klooga concentration camp, in which Nazis killed two thousand Jews rather than see them rescued by Russians.

A dozen pages in, Coates reveals that his order of presenting the facts — starting with the shock of the Holocaust and its survivors — was not the same as his order of discovering them. On entering Yad Vashem, what he actually encountered was not a space of mourning and remembrance but soldiers holding guns “the size of small children”: “There was something incongruous about so many guns being flagrantly wielded in so solemn a place.” Coates observes gently, “I knew they were there to protect this site from those who would wish Hitler’s work more complete,” guiding his reader along familiar terrain — before remarking ominously, “But by then, I knew that that was not all the soldiers of this country were protecting.”

What follows are firsthand observations of Jerusalem and the West Bank, gleaned from the eye of an American for whom the most unconscionable sin that any state could commit is to reproduce the system of de jure racial hierarchy of the mid-century South. Stuck at a checkpoint, the sun gleams off a soldier’s glasses like a “Georgia sheriff’s.” At another checkpoint, Coates is asked for his religion and held until he is able to confirm to the soldier questioning him that his grandfather was in fact Christian.

Armed with a fluid notion of race from his travels through Senegal, Coates notices that what is being constructed before his eyes is a form of racial hierarchy, no different in practice from that of the Jim Crow South. He describes the Israeli state as “separate and unequal.”

But Israel manages to go beyond Coates’s wildest imaginings in the cruelty and comprehensiveness of its segregation regime. Familiar with the separate water fountains of the mid-century American South, Coates looks in horror at an illegal cistern placed on a Palestinian’s roof. The Israeli state, he learns, maintains the right to issue permits to harvest rain and groundwater. These are, of course, handed out on a discriminatory basis:

[In] 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.

Revelations such as these are intended to shock the kind of readership that Coates has spent over a decade cultivating, using comparisons that are very familiar to them. Surveying the grave of Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish-supremacist terrorist who murdered twenty-nine Muslims worshipping in the Ibrahimi Mosque in 1994, he coolly points out that not only have Goldstein’s supporters erected a grave for him in the occupied West Bank but they have done so with subsidies from the Israeli state. A few pages later, Coates turns to the white-supremacist mass shooter Dylann Roof, who murdered nine black people in a South Carolina church in 2015; the reader, of course, finds himself imagining a counterfactual world in which the American government paid for Roof’s memorial. The effect of all of this is to conflate large sections of the Israeli establishment with the most reactionary wings of the American right, the kind of people with whom liberals would find it unthinkable to be associated.

From Civil Rights to Anti-Zionism

A potted history of Zionism, starting not with the Holocaust but with the dreams of Theodor Herzl in the nineteenth century, makes up the bulk of Coates’s final chapter. Rhetorically, his approach mirrors the one advocated by the Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi, who in his The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine remarked that no critique of Israel that began with the premise that it was a settler-colonial state could sway the American public. For many Americans, settlers are rugged, romantic figures fighting against an untamed wilderness and uncivilized natives.

Not only is this the United States’ founding myth, but it was also the official ideology of the imperialist wars of the early 2000s. The constructed image of the Afghan woman waiting longingly on an F-15 to liberate her from the veil was no different from the colonial fantasies of nineteenth-century Europeans.

But while describing Israel as a settler colony might be less politically efficacious than drawing analogies between it and Jim Crow, it is nonetheless descriptively accurate, in ways that are also politically important. The bargain underlying the founding of Israel was, according to Levi Eshkol, the country’s prime minister in the 1960s, that it should get “the dowry, not the bride, that is to say the land without the Palestinians on it.”

Regardless of whether one finds the justification for such a project in the antisemitism of the nineteenth century or the Holocaust, it is clear, Coates shows, that it cannot be carried out without a level of repression incompatible with the norms of civilized society. The combination of the ineradicability of nationalism — whether in the fantasies of black pharaohs or in the concrete history of a Palestinian national identity — and the increasing brutality of weaponry has made states like Israel uniquely violent.

But where Coates distinguishes himself from other liberal critics of Israel is in his insistence that its failings are constitutive features of its existence as a Jewish state. The problem with Israel is, Coates writes, that it is a nation in which no “Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere.” The reason for this is that Israel is only a “democracy for the Jewish people,” in the same way, Coates suggests, that America throughout much of the twentieth century was only a democracy for whites.

Looking again at the opinion data quoted above, and in particular the discrepancy between the growing unease with Israel’s criminal behavior in Gaza and the steady support and sympathy for Israel as a nation, one way of interpreting these polls is as proof that there is a collective sense among Americans that there is something incidental about Benjamin Netanyahu’s actions — that it just happens to be the case that he and his right-wing government are ethnically cleansing Palestinians. But Coates suggests that the whole idea of a nation founded on a racial basis is incompatible with democracy and can only be reinforced through authoritarian rule — which, because of the persistence of demands for self-determination, inevitably provokes resistance.

As the Israeli political scientist Yoav Peled has argued, attempts to square the circle by imagining a racially defined state that is also egalitarian rely on contradictions. Even during the early years of the British mandate (1920–1948), a period unfortunately unmentioned by Coates, the demand of the most “progressive” wing of the Zionist movement — marginal figures like Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, and Judah Magnes — was for Jewish control over immigration and land purchases in Palestine, despite the fact that the Jewish population of Palestine was less than a third of its total during this period. This “irredeemable minimum” requirement, in Arendt’s words, of the Zionist left in the early twentieth century was not tolerated by any Palestinian faction.

Coates’s book limits itself to observing these kinds of contradictions, allowing the reader to develop a sense of moral disgust at the world that has emerged out of them, then showing that American military and economic support makes it all possible. By relying almost entirely on analogies between Israel and the worst parts of America’s history, it offers a path forward for advancing a critique of Zionism that may appeal to the growing sections of the liberal public shocked by the appalling violence of the Netanyahu government but unable to diagnose its causes. For this reason, The Message is, despite its limits, a courageous book, made more so by the genuine hostility of large sections of the conservative and political establishment to arguments critical of American empire.