by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Book list Coates presents three blazing essays on race, moral complicity, and a storyteller’s responsibility to the truth. Coates evokes his father’s struggle with the wretched narrative legacy of Jim Crow. He travels to South Carolina, where school districts seek to ban his work for suggesting that America was “fundamentally racist,” or any other “divisive concept.” Coates concludes that “it is neither ‘anguish’ nor ‘discomfort’ that these people were trying to prohibit. It was enlightenment.” Finally, he connects the dots between the self-justifying narratives of European and American racism and Palestinian oppression in Israel. Going to Palestine is like time traveling back to Jim Crow: IDF soldiers with “sun glinting off their shades like Georgia sheriffs” harass Palestinians at checkpoints, proving that “as sure as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man, Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere.” Dehumanization is essential to exploitation, whether the targets are serfs in medieval Europe, African slaves and their descendants in America, or Palestinians on the West Bank. Coates exhorts readers, including students, parents, educators, and journalists, to challenge conventional narratives that can be used to justify ethnic cleansing or camouflage racist policing. Brilliant and timely.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Coates is a prominent public thinker and these essays about racism and censorship will spark avid attention and debate. From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission. Kirkus Bearing witness to oppression. Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use ofBetween the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informedBetween the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.” A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission. |
