The Message
- Feb 1, 2025
- 2 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
★★★★★
In The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates connects his travels to such far-flung and seemingly unrelated locales as Senegal, Columbia, South Carolina, and Palestine through the students of a writing workshop he taught at Howard University in the fall of 2022. The book is addressed to those students, “Comrades,” he opens, and the conceit is, as he explains in the introductory essay, “Journalism Is Not a Luxury,” “I’ve addressed these notes directly to you, though I confess that I am thinking of young writers everywhere whose task is nothing less than doing their part to save the world.”
This is reportage—including current events, on-the-ground reporting, deep research, and human interest—with a keen eye trained on journalistic lessons learned and taught (be clear, be concise, be diligent), along with thoughts on language, politics, and writing deftly woven throughout. The result is a highly readable (I’ve already read it twice) and intoxicating screed against laziness, jingoism, blind acceptance, mythmaking, and complacency—in America and in the Western world generally but specifically in those future journalists who have not yet fallen into bad habits and have a chance to learn from Coates’s confessed mistakes—without, somewhat miraculously and is perhaps the truest testament to his gifts as a writer, the slightest whiff of condescension.
For anyone who doesn’t believe in the power of words, in their ability to shape the world both through what they say as much as what they don’t, The Message has a message for you: Don’t fool yourself. Words aren’t just powerful, words are power. And those who write history (which is not just some dusty academic exercise about long-ago events but is actively happening right now), that is, those who control the narrative—politicians, editors, publishers, broadcasters, even writers themselves—decide what gets written and how and therefore what we read and what we don’t and therefore what we believe and what we don’t.
All of those parties have an agenda, some more noble or forthright or transparent than others. Coates is imploring future journalists explicitly, and the rest of us implicitly, to be wary of their own agendas, of the agendas of others, and to not, to paraphrase Orwell from Nineteen Eighty-Four, “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” Those in power rely on it to sow more confusion, to create more division, to wrest more power. To fight it, to hold tyranny to account, the world needs more messengers, new messengers, and I can’t help but think The Message will do more than its fair share to cultivate them.
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