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Name: The Message
Rating: 3.9 (20 reviews)
Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Exploring Myths that Shape our Identity and Reality

3.9 (20 ratings)

20 mins

Brief summary

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates reflects on systemic racism and its pervasive impacts on society. It blends personal narrative with political commentary, urging introspection and action towards an equitable future for marginalized communities.

Topics

US History Black History Culture Social Philosophy Memoirs Race

Table of Contents

The Message
Summary of 6 key ideas

Audio & text in the Blinkist app

Key idea 1 of 6

What’s in it for me? A study of the power of storytelling.

This Blink is about stories, narratives, and words – but it begins with an image. A man sitting in an armchair, legs crossed, a fisherman’s hat perched on his head, a book open in his lap. Below it, there’s a caption written in a child’s hand: “Daddy says he reads to learn.”

Paul Coates, the picture’s subject, says his wife drew it in 1978. His son, Ta-Nehisi, must have been three when he penned the caption. Paul doesn’t remember the exact date, but he remembers the day vividly. A union mix-up had left him without a paycheck that week – a blow in already hard times. Jobs were scarce, money was tight, and the rent was often overdue. They were dispiriting times, too. The optimism of the early seventies had evaporated; the civil rights struggle had stalled. Never mind the revolution not being televised – it was clear there wasn’t going to be one. So Coates, the former Black Panther Party militant, retreated to his study and read.

What was Daddy trying to learn? The Message is, in part, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ answer to that question. Had you asked him to describe the forces shaping his life in 1978, his father would have pointed to his own actions – his triumphs, his mistakes. Widening the frame, he would have seen that some people’s triumphs got them further while their mistakes cost them less. Some people lived in a world of plenty; others in a world of want. The root of all this was a disparity in power. But, widening the aperture further, he would have also seen that it was sustained by an arsenal of stories that said this disparity was natural and just.

For Paul Coates, emancipation had everything to do with stories – not only the ones others tell about you, but also the ones you tell about yourself. It’s a conviction his son, Ta-Nehisi, carries forward in this work.

We can only act on what we see

Why should writers care about politics? More to the point, why should they write about politics?

If he’d lived in a more peaceful age, George Orwell says in his 1946 essay “Why I Write,” he might have spent his life penning “ornate or merely descriptive books.” But he didn’t. Bracketed by trench warfare and the atom bomb, his life spanned an age of revolution and reaction, concentration camps and colonial massacres. Its horrors forced him to become a “sort of political pamphleteer.” There’s one answer.

The Palestinian writer Marwan Makhoul offers another. Explaining why politics intrudes upon his poetry, he says that you must listen to the birds to write poetry that isn’t political. But to hear the birds, “the warplanes must be silent.” It’s easier to see literature as a purely aesthetic concern, these two writers suggest, when the skies are filled with swallows, not fighter jets.

Another way of thinking about this question is to probe the boundaries between the political and the non-political. When a people’s humanity is cast into doubt, Black American writers remind us, the smallest, most particular details of their lives become political.

Take Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye. In it, we meet a character called Pauline. Heavily pregnant, she’s anxious about her future and uncomfortable in her own skin. She falls for what Morrison says is “probably” the most destructive idea in the history of human thought: that physical beauty has something to do with goodness. Pauline’s ideal of the beautiful and good is embodied by a white actress, Jean Harlow. When she goes to see one of Harlow’s movies, she styles her hair like the heroine’s. In the theater, Pauline pulls a tooth out of her mouth biting into a piece of candy. It’s a devastating moment. Her self-image collapses. After that, she says, “everything went.” She decides to settle into her supposed “ugliness.”

Desire, insecurity, delusion are universal literary themes. But this is a Jim Crow story: it takes place in a world in which value and beauty is ascribed to white bodies like Harlow’s, not Black bodies like Pauline’s. To treat these themes in purely aesthetic terms is to accept this ranking of human lives as something natural and given, not the product of political choice and systemic inequality.

Here, these three lines of argument overlap. As the poet and philosopher Audre Lorde puts it, “we can only act on what we see.” Systems of oppression thrive when they remain hidden. By shining a light on injustice, writers expose what can – and must – be changed. When writers engage with politics, they reveal the stories that demand to be seen.

The warrant

Slavery required a warrant, a justification, a story.

There had to be a reason, something that explained why bondage, terror, and exploitation were natural and just. Something that reassured enslavers and eased the consciences of slave drivers and ship captains, presidents and priests, kings and queens. That convinced ordinary people with eyes and ears that the horror they saw and heard was somehow right.

Black Egypt

Ideas can be contested, inverted, and turned against their inventors. Ancient Egypt was one of those ideas in nineteenth-century America. It was a battlefield – a site of struggle, the terrain on which competing narratives clashed.

The idea of a “Black Egypt” haunted Nott’s successors. The educator Samuel Train Dutton was one of them. Like Nott, he claimed “savage” Africans were naturally suited to slavery. The existence of a thriving Black population in Ancient Egypt, resembling the very people he sought to dehumanize, didn’t fit the story he wanted to tell about timeless bondage. American schools, Dutton said, must teach children “how the Ancient Egyptians differed from the Negro, and why.”

The moral arc of the universe

The word “vindicate” comes from a Latin verb with a complex etymology: vindicare, meaning “to set free,” “avenge,” and “lay claim to.” Those three senses resonate through Black vindicationism, a movement to set a people free, avenge its oppression, and lay claim to the dignity it had long been denied.

Vindication in this triple sense echoes through another powerful narrative: the story of the state of Israel’s creation. This exemplary case of the long arc of the universe bending toward justice is inscribed in the architecture of Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. Moving through the memorial, you first encounter the Book of Names – seventy volumes, each the height of an adult human being, each containing 17,500 pages filled with the names of the five million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Later, you watch David Ben-Gurion declaring the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 from a grainy black-and-white reel.

The catastrophe

After a wave of pogroms in Russia in the 1880s, the American clergyman William E. Blackstone lamented the plight of the millions of Jews who, as he put it, “cannot stay where they are, and yet have no other place to go.” What made this tragic situation so absurd was that it had an obvious solution: Palestine.

Here, Blackstone said, was a land without a people, and a people without a land. Ninety years later, Israel’s prime minister, Golda Meir, echoed this idea: the land on which Israel was established had no owners.

Every life is a universe

Avner Gvaryahu remembers the day he began questioning the stories he’d been told. He was a sergeant in the Israeli army. His men had just forced their way into a house in the occupied West Bank. When he entered, one of his soldiers was screaming and pointing a rifle at a man holding a terrified little girl. By the time Gvaryahu worked out what was going on – the man was trying to take his daughter to the bathroom – she’d already peed her pants. It was one of those moments, he says, when you think, “What the fuck are we doing?”

Benny Morris, the Israeli historian, argued that once Israel’s founders committed themselves to expelling Palestinians, they should have finished the job. The Israel-Palestine conflict, as he sees it, is the result of their failure to do so. The story could have ended there.

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What is The Message about?

The Message (2024) is a study of framing, narrative, myth, and the stories power tells to excuse injustice. Drawing on the interconnected histories of Black America, Africa, and Palestine, it presents a compelling moral argument: only that which is truly seen can be cared for and cultivated.

Who should read The Message?

Readers interested in African-American culture and history
Fans of thought-provoking, narrative-driven essays
Admirers of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ work

About the Author

Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Sterling Brown endowed chair at Howard University, is an acclaimed author whose works include The Beautiful Struggle, Between the World and Me, and We Were Eight Years in Power. He holds a National Book Award, a National Magazine Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship.

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Personal Development History Society & Culture

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