The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates review – face to face with uncomfortable truths

When Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, The Message, was published in the US last autumn, there was a media uproar over its final section about Palestine. After a tense interview on CBS Mornings, CBS News said a week later that the segment had not met its editorial standards. If you followed that media storm, it’s hard to come to The Message, now that it is out in the UK, fresh. But it’s important to try.

The title is a slim volume of essays addressed to Coates’s writing students at Howard University, one of the premier historically black universities in the US. The collection roams: from Darryl Stingley, a New England Patriots wide receiver paralysed in a 1978 pre-season game, to Senegal, to Coates’s own struggles as a student, to Paulo Freire’s pedagogical theories, to a South Carolina school board meeting – and, yes, to Palestine.

What connects these topics is his argument that stories shape what we know about the world and, he insists, still serve to justify its least moral aspects. Education too often confines students to the sanctioned stories that don’t threaten national myth-making. And journalists, he argues, have a responsibility to report what’s uncomfortable too.

Coates first writes about his trip to Dakar, Senegal. He does not flatter himself in his descriptions. He admits to arriving with preconceptions and wasn’t always up for conversation. But he captures how overwhelming it can be for a Black American to stand on the African Atlantic coastline for the first time and look west. The emotions wash over him when he goes to Gorée, an island just across the water from Dakar, to see the House of Slaves, now a museum. He already knew that far fewer enslaved Africans walked through the building’s “door of no return” than once thought, but the site’s symbolism still has power.

Next, Coates goes to a school board meeting in Chapin, South Carolina, where a teacher has been fighting, at the risk of her job, to teach his second book to her advanced placement English students. Between the World and Me is a deeply personal exploration of Black masculinity and American life in the form of a letter to his son. It’s now one of many books that school boards have banned across the US, part of the post-Covid, post-Black Lives Matter backlash against Black histories. Once again, Coates’s expectations are upended. He thinks he’ll see pitched battles, but the faction against the book isn’t at the meeting. Instead, there is a line of white South Carolinians, from a teenage student to a maths professor, supporting the book’s place within the curriculum.

As a writer, Coates’s great gift is learning in public. This was first evident in the blog he wrote for many years at the Atlantic. His entries charted his reading progress through Tony Judt’s Postwar and Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, while posting periodic updates about his attempts to learn French. That same spirit animates The Message, especially in the final essay, on Palestine, which is an attempt to repair something he got wrong.

In 2014, the Atlantic published his piece The Case for Reparations. In it Coates argued that the US owed Black Americans reparations as much for what was withheld from Black people after slavery as for slavery itself. The piece ended by noting Germany’s reparations to Israel, which drew immediate criticism from those who wondered where the Palestinian side of the story was. When the Palestine festival of literature invited him to visit East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Coates went. (This trip took place in late spring 2023, though he never says this in the book itself.) What follows in The Message is a firm critique of Israel and of Zionism. He is stunned to see the network of checkpoints that make it impossible for Palestinians to move freely. He is offended that he is only allowed to go through one after he, an atheist, confirms that his grandparents were Christian. He realises that Palestinians in the West Bank have limited access to water while settlers have swimming pools. If it is a surprise that Coates has only just realised this, he makes the point himself. He remains ruthlessly self-critical.

The author is equally dismayed that American journalism has largely refused to tell this story. In the City of David complex in Jerusalem, he sees a plaque that reads in part: “The spiritual bedrock of our values as a nation comes from Jerusalem. It is upon these ideals that the American republic was founded.” As he considers why the US supports Israel to this extent, however, he walks right past an important explanation. For American evangelicals, still a significant portion of the voting population, Israel has an important role in bringing on the “end times”. Tens of millions of Americans (if not many more) have heard something like this from a pulpit at least once. Coates never draws the connection, but an Israeli archaeologist he speaks to does. “This is why I think that the Evangelical church and the settlers found each other as a perfect match,” says the scholar. “Their mindset is the same. They do other things, but their mindset is the same…”

Coates interrupts him to take a breather, and The Message never returns to the point. In a book about stories, maybe this one was too much to bear. In the final pages, Coates insists that American newsrooms must make space for Palestinian journalists. There are some stories that are not his to tell.

• The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates is published by Hamish Hamilton (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply