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”It is never enough for the reader of your words to be convinced; the goal is to haunt.��

”We are plagued by dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world.��

Words and stories are powerful, for they shape the meaning we give to the world. This is why established orders put such high value on controlling the stories you hear, determining what is newsworthy, shaping the dialogue that it is possible to have. Which is why Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has an extraordinary talent with these tools combined with bedrock values that disincline him toward establishment viewpoints, is so subversive. And it’s why you should read this book.

The first few essays in this collection are well done, thoughtful, incisive. They contain powerful scenes, like Coates illuminating first journey to Africa, or his attending a school board meeting in rural South Carolina in support of an English teacher whose job was threatened because she assigned his book. But good as those essays are, that’s not why you are here. It’s the final essay, The Gigantic Dream, that electrifies and packs the power. He opens that essay with these words:
”On the last day of my trip to Palestine…��
and before he can even finish the sentence, you know that the battle lines have been drawn, the glove has been thrown down, and the shit is about to hit the fan.

Because, of course, to refer that that part of the world as Palestine has come to be seen by right-thinking establishment source as an incendiary political statement. It just isn’t done in polite society, or really anywhere outside of wild-eyed, naive student protestor encampments. So when one of the most thoughtful and brilliant voices of our era articulates viewpoints and stories that almost never make it onto our newscasts, into our newspapers or magazines, when he makes comparisons between the Zionist government of Israel and Jim Crow America, or when he invokes the word Apartheid to describe what is happening, the firestorm of outrage is inevitable.

When I come to read a non fiction book, I always read the one star reviews first. Are they articulate? Well reasoned? Or not? You can tell a lot about a book by what people hate it and why. The outpouring of one star reviews for The Message are pure Id. They rage against the author for daring to write what he did. Challenge his knowledge. Challenge his motivation. Call him antisemitic. Shout him down. What they don’t do is present any counter argument to what he has written. They call his essay one sided, but don’t challenge the side Mr. Coates presents here. They are all invective and outrage, incensed that Coates dared to pen what he did, dared to speak what has been collectively agreed should remain silent.

No reasonable person should decide any matter of import based on a single source, no matter how eloquently and powerfully presented. I certainly have not. But any reasonable person, presented with such an eloquent and powerful piece, should have further questions, not least of which is why am I not hearing this elsewhere? And reasonable people should resist the absolute shutting down of difficult dialogues because the damning word antisemitic has been wielded as a weapon. Also, reasonable people should be wary when negative mention of a political ideology, Zionism, is suddenly equated as being synonymous with antisemitism, and therefore verboten. Ta-Nehisi Coates won’t stand for that kind of bullshit, and neither should you.