Last Monday, February 10th, award-winning author, journalist, and activist Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke to a packed audience at Swarthmore College. Best known for his National Book Award-winning memoir Between the World and Me, Coates has long been at the forefront of discussions on race, history, and justice. His latest book, The Message, chronicles his travels to Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine, examining the narratives that shape historical memory and contemporary identity.
On Monday, students, staff, and community members lined up outside the Lang Performing Arts Center for a reading from The Message and a conversation between Coates and Ahmad Shokr, Associate Professor of History at Swarthmore. The event was the first of the semester in Swarthmore’s Global Justice: Historical Present, Imagined Futures series. Last semester, the series hosted five speakers, including the famed abolition activist and academic Angela Davis. Davis’ and Coates’ events drew many students from across the Tri-College Consortium.
Coates was introduced by Jamal Batts, Assistant Professor of Black Studies at Swarthmore, followed by a reading from The Message about the importance of making mistakes. The passage was inspired by Coates’ experience writing one of his most well-known works as a journalist at The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations.”
In the article, Coates employs West Germany’s post-WWII reparations to Israel as an example of how reparations can effectively allow a people to rebuild after being devastated by systemic “plunder.” However, when he wrote The Message, Coates realized this example was flawed.
Coates writes in The Message about his visit to Palestine, where he was “shocked” by the stark inequality he witnessed between Israelis and Palestinians. He says he expected it to be like the “complicated,” somewhat hidden Jim Crow that existed in the North in the United States in the 1940s-60s but found that it was more like the Jim Crow of the South–blatant and “naked.” He realized Germany’s reparations to Israel were an unsuitable example of the power of reparations because Israel’s establishment was “just more plunder” of the Palestinians.
Coates emphasized the importance of bearing witness to injustice, telling himself and the audience, “You have to tell them what you saw.” He acknowledged that “We still aren’t getting what we’re supposed to get, which is the [Palestinian] people speaking for themselves.” The Committee to Protect Journalists has declared the war in Gaza as the “deadliest period for journalists since the [Committee] began gathering data in 1992,” which helps explain the lack of Palestinian narratives in the international media’s reporting on the crisis. Because of this, Coates described his book as a “stop-gap” to fight the silencing of Palestinian narratives.
Coates said, “This battle of narrative is my battle. But that doesn’t mean it has to be everyone’s battle.” According to Coates, fighting this battle by bearing witness is just one way to advance the struggle for justice. Coates advised the audience to find what they are good at, and then “try to find the most just way to do it possible,” because “there will always be a need for people who want to use their craft to fight the just fight.”
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