The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates is essential reading before the election

When essayist, writer, and Howard University professor Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses his work, he pleads with readers, imploring them to look beyond his accolades, his clever turns of phrase, his brilliant descriptions, and his sense of… how to really feel – his truth.

“I’m killing myself over these sentences,” Coates told an audience of 1,800 Monday at the altar of Girard College Chapel. Coates was a guest of Mark Lamont Hill, a fellow journalist, professor and owner Uncle Bobby’s coffee and books in Germantown. Uncle Bobbie’s and WHYY co-hosted the evening, one of several literary coups this year that includes a visit from a Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and rapper Evaboth released memoirs this fall.

“These sentences are not ornaments, they are not empty objects of beauty,” said Coates, whose seminal memoir Between the world and me turned him into a well-known commentator on the black experience of Generation X. His 2014 Atlantic The article, The Case for Reparations, reignited a wide-ranging debate about what was taken and what was owed to black Americans.

“It’s not just the icing on the cake,” Coates continued. “It there are pie. Because as far as I can (articulate and write) poignant sentences that haunt you, that really get to you, that’s how I understand it.’

Coates’ candid discussions made his appearance in Philadelphia, days before our nation’s most important presidential election, so powerful and timely.

Coates’ freedom to tell the story through his eyes and share it on podiums and in classrooms is exactly what will be in jeopardy if the political party that wants to make America great again wins the presidency.

Truth and humanity

Message — a nod to Rap Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five 1982 — thin, but dense. Framed as a letter to student writers at Howard Coates University, Coates insists that young writers write based on their experiences, travels, and revelations, not the expectations of editors. A young writer’s mission, says Coates, should be “nothing less than saving the world.”

Truth is a weapon.

Coates takes us on a journey to find his truth Message. We will visit Dakar, Senegal; Columbia, South Carolina; and the West Coast, sitting with him while he lets go of his long-held impressions of Africa, the Deep South, and the Middle East. Coates doesn’t want to repeat tropes, he explores them, expelling them to form a new understanding and his truth.

“I don’t want you to read Message and thought, ‘Wow, that was an interesting, relatively correct book,'” Coates said Monday. “You must read Message and when you get up, that’s all you can talk about. You go to your partner … and say, “Did you read that?” You should read this.”

A theme that underlines his book is who gets to tell stories and the power these stories have: when a group of people are treated as “others” in their own history, dehumanization of them grows and thrives. When people are allowed to speak their truth, their humanity becomes real in their eyes and in the eyes of others.

In Dakar, Coates discovers a city filled with beautiful people with rich lives, not the Africans of the movies and his imagination. In South Carolina, he found his work appreciated by southern whites who used his book to open the minds of children in a small town school. In Israel and the West Bank, where the bulk of the book is set, he cites statistics from the historian Maha Nassar that between 1970 and 2019, less than 2% of all opinions about Palestine in that country’s newspapers and magazines were pro-Palestinian. authors

“It’s very difficult for people to do inhumane things to other people without some sort of vertigo that makes it okay…” Coates said at the event. “Everyone wants to be the hero of history. For those of us who live under the burden of this obfuscation, we live under the burden of it all our lives — it is an understanding of what exactly is the truth.”

It reminds Coates of the African American experience. It also reminds me of that experience.

Vote like your story is on the line

Like Coates, I spent most of my career explaining the humanity of black people—especially black women—in newspaper columns to justify my existence in the newsroom and in the world. Sometimes, even as I worked to discredit tropes, I unwittingly contributed to them by supporting the status quo. I had to withdraw when the editors questioned my “objectivity”.

Following the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, The Philadelphia Inquirer formed an editorial task force to develop new newsgathering policies that treat people of color more humanely. My colleagues and I have written more stories, essays, and columns that reflect this more shared humanity. We just broke the ice. We still have a lot to work on. But everyone in our editorial office knows the stories of people of color.

I don’t recall Coates being on tour focusing on the importance of storytelling in the days leading up to a presidential election that threatens to reverse the small gains people of color have made in media, publishing, and classrooms.

With the ongoing war in Gaza, I have heard people of color say they are going to sit out this election, refusing to vote for either Harris or Trump.

But I would argue that voting is more important than ever, especially if we want journalists, artists and storytellers to continue telling true stories with nuance from our perspective.

In this way, reparations may simply lead to a better future for us and our children.