In a nation torn apart by political divisions, high-octane intolerance, cancellation craziness, fixed binary choices, fashionable antisemitism and, worst of all, exploited racial tensions, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book, “The Message,” couldn’t have come at a worse moment.
Coates is America’s most widely admired and richly awarded Black public intellectual. The fact that his greatest success seems to be confined to comic books, and he never graduated from college, has not encumbered his acclaim.
Of course, in this prickly culture of identity politics and extreme wokeness, such an observation might be regarded as racist. It shouldn’t be, and if it is, well, right there is the central problem that polarizes us. To criticize or question a person of color is neither a sin nor a racist act.
There are many Black intellectuals who don’t (or didn’t) write in crayon and who possess more dazzling minds than Coates — such as Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Coleman Hughes, Walter Williams, Stanley Crouch, George Schuyler, Albert Murray, William Julius Wilson, Randall Kennedy, Anne Wortham, Bayard Rustin, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Carter and Jason L. Riley, among others. But they are all far well less known, if not entirely obscure to most people—even to African-Americans, and not just because none of them had a hand in reviving Marvel’s “Black Panther” franchise.
What sets Coates apart is his outsized role in the racial zeitgeist of our times, one that glorifies pigmentation and demonizes whiteness in whatever shade it may be found. Instead of self-advancement and -reliance, this new preoccupation—enshrined in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter protests—is with the intrinsic racism and white malfeasance that sabotages the aspirations of persons of color.
All the racial progress America has made is trivialized as insignificant footnotes. The outlawing of discrimination in public accommodations and private employment; two consecutive African-American Secretaries of State; Barack Obama twice getting elected president with overwhelming white majorities —all are regarded as short-lived aberrations. Nothing can absolve the wicked hearts of white people.
New racial remedies are called for. Martin Luther King Jr.’s equality of opportunity swapped for equality of outcome. Remember the dream that his children be “judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”? Well, in today’s black and white world, color is everything. Character has been forever assassinated.
Coates is the high priest of a new racial reckoning in America. He has received assistance from the “anti-racist” activist, Ibram X. Kendi, and the New York Times’ dreadful “1619 Project.” Suddenly, “systemic racism” and “reparations” are terms of art with unquestioned cultural currency. Everything about America—commencing with the first white feet that soiled its soil—is seen through a racial lens, illuminating the dark reality that this has always been a racist nation.
To be “woke” is to be awakened, alert to all racial inequities and social injustices. America’s wall-to-wall racism is plentiful and easily discoverable, however. The good and bad guys are preassigned. But unlike in cowboy westerns, the white and black hats in America’s racial rodeo are reversed. White is never the new black. The earnestly woke can come across as positively whacked.
Which brings us back to Coates’ new book, a large portion of which superimposes his racialist Manichean view onto Israel and its treatment of Palestinians. At a time when the aftermath of the October 7 massacre has led to widespread global antisemitism, for Coates to turn his cursed attention to the complexities of the Middle East, and conclude that Israel is a racist, apartheid state, will only enflame an already combustible situation. After all, the progressives who worship him know even less about Israel’s existential dilemma than he does.
At a time when the aftermath of the October 7 massacre has led to widespread global antisemitism, for Coates to turn his cursed attention to the complexities of the Middle East, and conclude that Israel is a racist, apartheid state, will only enflame an already combustible situation.
But this is Coates’ specialty: identify a people worthy of contempt, paint the context with a broad racial brush, add the color and simplicity found in a comic book, and you have the makings of a pogrom waged by Jew-hating social justice warriors.
Coates condemns Israel as a Jim Crow society writ large in the Middle East. How does he know this? Well, he spent ten whole days in the West Bank and East Jerusalem where he deliberately chose not to speak with any Israelis in Israel. He didn’t need to. His framework was easily adaptable to accommodate these adversaries. Jews are the white, land-grabbing, colonialist oppressors who have no business in the Holy Land despite what the Old Testament may say. The fact that most Israelis are actually persons of color, or that 20% of its population are Muslims who ride the same public transports, eat in the same restaurants, are represented in its legislature and serve on its Supreme Court, somehow flew under the radar of his woke antennae.
Apartheid?
It gets worse. The book never mentions terrorism, or the existence of Hamas and Hezbollah, the tens of thousands of rockets fired at Israeli civilians, the beheading of babies and gangraping of girls. Why ruin a good story and flip the script? The five rejected offers of Palestinian statehood, disregarded. The Second Intifada, where 1,000 Israelis were killed by suicide bus and pizza shop bombers, is nowhere to be found in its pages.
Never interrupt or undermine an antisemitic screed. His response to the region laced with complexity: “horseshit.” It’s all very simple, actually: the Middle East is nothing more than the Deep South with biblical accents. Of course, I don’t recall former slaves beheading white babies, blowing themselves up at debutante balls, or launching rockets at plantation owners.
No matter. Coates took the occasion of this book to confess that given what the Palestinians have endured, he could see himself joining the barbarians that butchered Jews a year ago. Really? Does he understand the implications of what he is saying? This is the nobility of a Marvel superhero?
Naturally, the book has received unstinting praise. One-sided storytelling, partial truths, severed plotlines are all welcome among the woke. We are told that persons of color are in possession of knowledge that must be heard, taken on faith, and go unchallenged. Remember what happened to the two Jewish founders of the Women’s March? They were admonished to sit quietly and listen while atoning for their people’s participation in the slave trade.
Coates has quite intentionally added to the appalling public ignorance that already misinforms the geopolitics of the Middle East. Fiery antisemitic denunciations aside, would it make any difference to his loyal but ignorant readers that Martin Luther King, and his civil rights cohorts, were confirmed Zionists?
Coates would never allow such an inconvenient truth to color his latest comic book.
Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor and Distinguished University Professor at Touro University, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. He is the legal analyst for CBS News Radio. His most recent book is titled “Saving Free Speech … From Itself,” and his forthcoming book is titled, “Beyond Proportionality: Is Israel Fighting a Just War in Gaza?”
