When Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, The Message, was published in the US last autumn, there was a media uproar over its final section about Palestine. After a tense interview on CBS Mornings, CBS News said a week later that the segment had not met its editorial standards. If you followed that media storm, it’s hard to come to The Message, now that it is out in the UK, fresh. But it’s important to try.
The title is a slim volume of essays addressed to Coates’s writing students at Howard University, one of the premier historically black universities in the US. The collection roams: from Darryl Stingley, a New England Patriots wide receiver paralysed in a 1978 pre-season game, to Senegal, to Coates’s own struggles as a student, to Paulo Freire’s pedagogical theories, to a South Carolina school board meeting – and, yes, to Palestine.
