Few writers boast ignorance as a credential — Coates is one of them
By Stanley Ridgley, PhD
October 14, 2024
Few persons could get a book into print on the current Israeli-Hamas conflict, based on a single 10-day visit to Gaza hosted by terrorist-sympathizers, but Ta-Nehisi Coates has done just that.
That fact alone motivates me to read his new tome The Message when it arrives today (as announced by Amazon).
Count my piece here as a Pre-Review–a piece animated by my own low expectations of Coates, which have grown with each iteration of a new “memoir” of this young fellow, who believes he has much to say that is grounded in his “lived experience.” This is an “experience” that he contrives as he moves his career along (witness his brief terror-tourism in gaza).
Coates has been a reliable practitioner of a critical racialist writing methodology pioneered by the late Harvard Law Professor Derrick Bell here and here. You simply manufacture a point you want to make, then fabricate an oppression story around it that caters to an audience’s prejudice. Presto!
Couple this technique as a tacit supporter of mutilation, murder, and rape–as Coates apparently does here–and you’ve pushed the envelope to another million-copy best-seller.
The beauty of this technique, if you practice it, is that ignorance is no obstacle.
As is his habit, Coates has never hidden his ignorance of that which he writes about, but rather boasts of his ignorance, considering it a virtue. In this, he is much like Ibram Kendi.
As with Kendi, Coates is at best a pedestrian writer. He is most at home with the comic book form, and he has always centered himself in his narcissistic memoirs. The Kendi-Coates method is to begin with a primitive racialist theory, and then interpret a superficial understanding of major events through this racialism. Racialists call this their “lens.” Facts are not simply curated selectively in this method–facts are irrelevant if they are incovenient.
This lastest Coates effort is apparently no different, given initial reviews. We shall see.
Reviewers have already weighed-in. Here is Barton Swaim from the Washington Free Beacon.
Coates is comically ill-equipped to talk about Israel and its conflicts with Palestinian terror groups and Arab states, and you quickly get the sense that he knows he has no idea what he’s talking about and doesn’t care. His authority to write on the subject derives from a 10-day visit to Israel in which, as an invited guest of the “Palestine Festival of Literature,” he was plied with Palestinian propaganda. A more enthusiastic imbiber of agitprop the festival’s organizers, I imagine, could not have hoped for.
The Message contains many fictions. But cataloguing them all—he claims, for instance, that “Palestinians are barred from the Western Wall,” when he must know this to be false—is beside the point. Coates boasts of his refusal to study the conflict’s complexities and learn. “I don’t really care much for hearing ‘both sides’ or ‘opposing points of view,’” he writes. And again: “I had no interest in hearing defenses of the occupation and what struck me then as segregation.” He came to Israel with the intention of portraying it as the Jim Crow South, and he wasn’t going to let any countervailing facts get in his way.
Here’s another review, this one by Colman Hughes:
Here’s the crucial test of that metric: If you read nothing about a subject other than this author’s work, how informed would you be? To what degree would you understand the big picture?
On that metric, Coates fails spectacularly. Because Coates is not a journalist so much as a composer—one who uses words not to convey the truth, much less to point a constructive path forward, but to create a mood, the same way that a film scorer uses notes. And the specter haunting this book, and indeed all of his work, is the crudest version of identity politics in which everything—wealth disparity, American history, our education system, and the long-standing conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors—are reduced to a childlike story in which the “victims” can do no wrong (and have no agency) and the “villains” can do no right (and are all-powerful).
The publisher offers a series of the most banal platitudes one might imagine on its publicity page for the book on Amazon (copied above). They are so banal, in fact, they could serve as a parody of the faux profundity of this genre. But sadly, this is not parody. It is the author’s idea of chin-scratching sagacity. You can decide for yourself, of course.
This latest tome by the esteemed Ta-Nehisi Coates awaits. High hopes that he doesn’t turn out to be another habitual fabulist (that is to say, “liar”) like Derrick Bell and Ibram Kendi. Perhaps he will pleasantly surprise.
One suspects that he won’t.
Coates, of course, is one of our society’s BRUTAL MINDS.