The Message: not comprehensive but stimulating all the same

Ta-Nehisi Coates made his name with “The Case for Reparations” published in the Atlantic in 2014. A decade later The Message has caused a flurry of media debate over the dominant section of the book, which draws from Coates’s 10-day visit to the West Bank and Israel just before the October 7 attack.

In it, Coates draws comparisons between the Jim Crow South and what he saw and experienced in Hebron and Jerusalem. Ahead of the book’s US release Coates was interviewed on CBS’s morning show, where co-anchor Tony Dokoupil suggested that without Coates’s name, The Message “wouldn’t be out of place in the backpack of an extremist”.

This video has been viewed more than 20 million times and effectively forms the fourth chapter of the book. Which is arguably the greatest strength of The Message. It is not conclusive or comprehensive – nor does it claim to be.

There is much missing from its 256 pages. What is on the page is intimate, stimulating and considered writing on the abuses of storytelling in the hands of the powerful.