The Shamelessness of Ta-Nehisi Coates

By Tal Fortgang

Sunday, December 29, 2024

 

None of the many criticisms leveled at Ta-Nehisi Coates seem to land. Coates has made a fool of himself in his new book, The Message, and the tour promoting it, with TV and podcast appearances (including one in which he suggested that he, too, would have been tempted to raid Israel, rape women, and burn children alive if he grew up in Gaza) that would spell the end of nearly anyone else’s time in the limelight. Who can take seriously a man whose career was built on profound musings about race now observing that black Israeli soldiers — many of whom are Ethiopian Jews who have sought refuge in Israel — “would, in America, have been seen as ‘white’”? Is that what we have landed on? “White” just means the guy with the gun? The bad guy?

 

That’s where Coates has settled, which ought to make anyone who previously treated his musings on American racism as gospel question their own judgment. Yet, his TV appearances and media profiles keep coming, and his reputation seems likely to remain intact. He hardly seems moved to consider that perhaps he may have bitten off more than he can chew in pronouncing his judgment on one of the world’s most vexing conflicts after a short junket to Israel and the Palestinian territories, all of which he calls “Palestine.”

 

The man is like the Dunning-Kruger effect incarnate — yet he acts as though he really has an irreproachable sense of moral discernment. After CBS host Tony Dokoupil was accused of racism and put through the sensitivity-training ringer for civilly pointing out that Coates’s book was extreme and thoroughly misleading, Coates kept mum. Perhaps it would be too much to ask Coates to stick up for Dokoupil by publicly admitting that Coates had pretended to analyze the Israeli/Palestinian conflict by amplifying conspiracy theories about the Jewish state. But a certain kind of public intellectual, committed to honest grappling with the world’s complexity, might have been tempted to tell Dokoupil’s tormentors to back off because the whole exchange was within the bounds of normal argument. He didn’t do that either. Honest grappling is not Coates’s commitment, attested to most of all by The Message, the publication of which affirms that for Coates, shamelessness remains the name of the game.

 

Shamelessness is one thread running through Coates’s short but eventful stint as the darling oracle of race-obsessed Americans. It did not begin with The Message. There’s a shamelessness to insisting with a straight face that white Americans are engaged in an ongoing race war against black Americans when the most basic facts that might prove such a claim actually point the other direction. (There is no race war, which you could have figured out by the amount of time Coates spends mind-reading in Between the World and Me, for which he won several awards.) There’s a similar shamelessness to hearing Dokoupil point out that Coates’s book about a region has completely ignored the eliminationism animating one side of a conflict and responding, yeah, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.

 

Most of what you need to know about The Message is that it’s a whole lot more of that: warning readers against the “elevation of complexity over justice” — as if that isn’t the consummate false choice, as if justice is self-evident and straightforward — and assuming that readers will pretend this is profound and not an incredible insult to their intelligence.

 

But merely calling Coates a shameless grifter misses the point. More important questions situate Coates in the context of a movement whose adherents allow him to get away with — indeed, get famous for — unserious drivel. Why are Coates and his writings impervious to criticism? How has he avoided consignment to laughingstock status?

 

That his books land him spots on network TV and glowing profiles in elite media, despite openly aiming to tackle questions way beyond Coates’s depth, doesn’t mean they’re strong. It only means they have a secret shield: They don’t operate on the level of rationality. Coates isn’t ashamed to hear the argument that Israel has instituted security measures that make life difficult, even horrible, for Palestinians because of unrelenting and vicious attempts to eliminate the Jewish state, respond ‘I’ve heard that side of the story,’ and not feel obligated to explain why that side of the story is wrong because right and wrong, true and untrue do not move him.

 

His writings are Romantic works. They fit perfectly the Encyclopedia Britannica explanation of the late-18th-century rejection of Enlightenment rationalism: Romanticism “emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.” Coates’s idea is to stir feelings such that you could say, ‘I don’t care what arguments you give; I feel my conclusion in my bones, and nothing will move me from it.’ The very idea that this conflict could be “complicated,” says Coates, is “horseshit.” He repeatedly writes that nothing could justify the status quo in Israel. Really? Nothing? Not even wars of annihilation and genocidal terror groups who kidnap babies and murder entire families in their beds? A rationalist sees both sides and tries to propose a proper balance between Israel’s security concerns and Palestinians’ dignity interests. A Romantic feels the whole situation is wrong, refuses to entertain evidence that his feelings might not tell the whole story, and proposes overhauling it all.

 

Categorical refusal to even acknowledge facts or arguments that contradict one’s intuitions animates much of our public discourse on race, gender, crime, and just about anything that can arouse human passions. A consistent epistemic hierarchy marks our cultural trends: The subjective has pride of place over the empirical, the unverifiable over the logical. Whether Coates helped lay the groundwork for it or merely won acclaim because the culture was hospitable to his emotivism is debatable. Either way, that explains why cultural liberals can’t seem to find the language to call Coates the charlatan he is.

 

To understand Coates’s irrational approach to Israel, you must read the first essay in The Message, an otherwise forgettable Romantic description of his time in Senegal. Without telling us any facts about his connection to Senegal, its territory, language, history, or why anything about it (rather than some other part of West Africa) resonates with him, Coates thinks he has something to communicate to his readers about an inherent connection between a college professor from Baltimore and the land of his ancestors. Well, “thinks” may be the wrong word. He feels . . . he feels . . . he feels. Every aesthetic pleasure is magnified: “my eyes were drawn to a man wearing the most beautiful tailored suit I’d ever seen”; on the very next page, “a sea of the most beautiful fabric I’d ever seen.” He cries on the shuttle back from a historic site that once served as a slave-trade hub, though he admits immediately that it “was a mythical site of departure” because “this sense of Dakar as any kind of origin point for Black America is itself a story, an invention . . . an origin imagined and dreamed up to fill an emptiness of a people told that they come from nothing and thus have done nothing and thus are nothing.”

 

Coates’s attempt to rationalize amounts to nothing more than affirming his feelings even if they have no basis in reality: “Here is what I think. We have a right to our imagined traditions, to our imagined places, and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess that they are imagined . . . we have a right to that memory, to choose the rock of Goree, to consecrate it, to cry before it.”

 

We are meant to infer something profound from the fact that Coates feels so deeply. If you are predisposed to the Romantic view that there is something inherently meaningful about subjective feelings, you will let Coates wash over you without saying anything of analytical value. If you are not, you will dismiss it as mostly harmless hogwash.

 

But left unchecked, it can be used as a weapon. Because Romanticism cannot be argued, there is no basis to say that Coates’s anti-Israel feelings are wrong. That’s just a category error. What we can point out is that Coates flunks the most basic test of fairness by denying Jews not just the historical connection to the land of Israel that makes us, in all our ethnic diversity, Jews, but the Romantic attachment to Israel we must be due. Selective Romanticism leaves the Enlightenment-ruled West bereft of counterarguments because we do not know how to argue with Romantics. The game has no rules. Whose feelings are strongest wins hearts and, as Coates has shown, can change the terms of debate in our political culture.

 

Let us point out the abject unfairness in Coates’s selectiveness, then. Jews also have an origin point, a place called Zion to which the Psalmist aspired to return, at which point we would be “like dreamers.” (We have also long been told that we come from nothing and thus have done nothing and thus are nothing — in fact, Coates’s excoriation of the Zionist project as a colonial enterprise does exactly that.) He has become the very oppressor he hates by foolishly committing himself to the view that Jews are rootless Europeans who “come from nothing” (where did that Psalmist come from? Brooklyn?) and impose systems of oppression on native Arabs.

 

Do Jews have “a right” to their traditions — not imagined but real and millennia-old, running through our prayers, our practice, our very constitution as a people — like “Black America” does? Do we have “a right” to our “memories” of the Matriarch Rachel crying from her tomb for her children being led into exile, of the Temple of Solomon, the Levites sounding their trumpets at the gates, the emergence of the successful High Priest on Yom Kippur “like lightning flashing from radiant heavenly beings”? Can we consecrate Jerusalem’s ancient stones and cry before the Wailing Wall? Does our perception of that black soldier — as a member of a lost tribe returned home and taking exile-prevention into his own hands — count for anything? Or will we be called colonizers, oppressors, and impostors for it all?

 

It would be foolish to deny the beauty of returning to the place where you feel you are understood, or have a sense of purpose in the grand sweep of history. Those feelings can reflect something ineffable, allowing us to maintain our humanity in an indifferent world. But what is foolish to an extent that is hard to chalk up to mere ignorance is crediting your own feelings even while admitting that they are triggered by a myth, and then, within the very same book, failing to even consider that other people may be motivated by similar attachments — which may even be based on real, not imagined, history.

 

You can’t shame the shameless. But the recognition of what Coates is really up to might at least chasten those who have long treated him as the moral conscience of the West: You fell for a transparently irrational and bigoted grift. For shame.