“Journalism Is Not a Luxury”

In his most recent book The Message (One World, 2024), National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates presents readers with his personal journey as he travels and explores the prevalence and impact of racism on peoples throughout the United States, the Middle East, and Africa. His message represents a call to action for him, his students, and the world.

As is in his award-winning book, Between the World and Me, Coates uses the epistolary genre of letter writing to provide readers with reflections on an emotional, haunting, critical, political, and philosophical personal journey. Readers meet poets, novelists, historians, scholars, artists, and musicians who have influenced him and will gain insight into his writing, thinking, and belief that journalists must accept the social responsibility of documenting the multi-varied stories and history of people in our global community.

The Message begins with Coates’ inaugural trip to Dakar, Senegal. In the section titled, “Journalism Is Not a Luxury,” Coates visits the island of Gorée in Dakar and rather than taking a guided tour of Gorée, he wanders the grounds alone as he reflects on the tragedy, enslavement, and abuse experienced by those who endured captivity at Gorée and its “Door of No Return.”

He also affirms the importance of spiritual, historical, and cultural pilgrimages in sustaining history and cultural legacies. His “walk” conjures up memories of the annual pilgrimages that people take to commemorate historical experiences such as the March across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama, a march that resulted in Bloody Sunday.

At the beginning of his journey, Coates opines: “I think the tradition of writing, of drawing out a common humanity is indispensable to our future if only because what must be cultivated and cared for must be seen.” All that Coates witnesses as a journalist and traveler is underscored in the concluding section of the book. By the end of his journey, he understands deeply that journalism is not a luxury and that he must both “see” and “embrace” a “walk which will enable him to represent history, politics, and embedded racism in a truthful manner. In his words, “you can see the world and still never see the people in it.”

Coates confronts a series of moral and political issues throughout the text. He visits Yah Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem and points out that he does not think he has ever seen a more striking symbol of mourning. He comes to understand that reparations is a global issue and much larger than what he could have imagined. He engages readers by sketching pictures for them and describes in detail what it is like for Palestinians who are living in Israel and in occupied Palestine.

He notes that the treatment of Palestinians is very disturbing. In bearing witness to this treatment, he reframes it as a form of apartheid and ethnic cleansing while also articulating his understanding of the need for Zionists to fight for a land at all costs. In listening to Palestinians invoking the traditions of James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, and Angela Davis, he reflects on the fact that these American writers and activists symbolize the Palestinian struggle of resistance and activism.

A core reality for Coates is understanding the analogy between the oppression of the Palestinians, the oppression of Africans under apartheid in South Africa, and the history of racism in the United States in the form of enslavement, lynchings, Jim Crow, voter suppression, and the misrepresentation of the experiences of Blacks in history and literature, Although Coates sees an alignment between the oppression of people in the United States, Africa, Palestine, and Israel, he is clear that he cannot tell the Palestinian story as a Palestinian would tell it. He argues that people must bear witness to their own stories and that as a journalist he has a responsibility to go beyond what is in traditional media and to look for the truth expressed by the people who are experiencing it. He further argues that journalists must feel free to write about controversial topics and subjects and while doing so must gather all perspectives and engage in careful research and analysis. At the same time, he reminds educators to refrain from what Paulo Freire calls a banking method of education and to develop a critical consciousness in students by encouraging them to interrogate their history, literature, and politics.

The Message is not a book that one can read and digest in one sitting. It is layered with complex and complicated themes and has been critiqued because of Coates’ description of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. I encourage readers on both sides of the Israel-Palestinian conflict to read and consider Coates’ call to action in The Message.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a journalist, public intellectual, and novelist. He is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, The Water Dance, and Between the World and Me and is currently the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English Department at Howard University.

Dr. Brenda M. Greene is Professor of English and Founder and Executive Director Emeritus of the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, CUNY.