Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, The Message, is a work in which “Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.”
But, in a recent New York Magazine piece promoting the book, it’s made clear that “there is no mention of the fact that that Israel is bombarded by terrorist groups set on the state’s annihilation. There is no discussion of the intifadas and the failed negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders going back decades. There is even no mention of Gaza because Coates was unable to visit the region after the October 7 attack and he did not want to report on a place he had not seen himself.”
Instead, Coates asserts in The Message that mainstream American journalists have perpetuated “the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality” when it comes to the tragic and divisive conflict.
We Hold These Truths
I won’t bury the lede too far. “Self-evident morality” is a term that renders itself meaningless. By the “self-evident morality” of the racist Confederacy of the American Civil War — a subject Coates far-more-eloquently covers in other books – Coates himself should be in chains. By the prevalent “self-evident morality” of the current United States, I myself – a trans woman – am an abomination and shouldn’t exist. By the “self-evident morality” of Nazi leadership, the Jewish race deserved extermination. “Self-evident morality” shifts and mutates with every society, every nation, every community, and every single person. America’s own Declaration of Independence states that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Yet most of the framers of the Declaration and Constitution owned Black slaves. America grapples to this very day with what the Founders and Coates alike believe is “self-evident.”
The Show-Me State
I hail from the state of Missouri originally. I left in 2021 to seek gender-affirming care in the Pacific Northwest and to flee an abusive family that was more interested in land their ancestors stole from the indigenous Osage tribe than nurturing and supporting their own kin. Not long after, Missouri’s Attorney General Andrew Bailey declared war on transgender people in his state and issued orders that effectively banned their care and thus, their life. He joined an alarming number of other American states in this battle against human rights who all believe in their all-important, “self-evident morality” that trans people are confused, are harming themselves, and are a danger to others. This wave of anti-human legislation has resulted in the number of suicides among trans people to jump by 72%.
Missouri also has a gun control problem. My own suburban home was targeted in a drive-by shooting in 1988. I narrowly avoided bullets in two other incidents later in my life, despite never owning or discharging a firearm myself. Missouri has some of the loosest gun restrictions in the Union, a fact that led directly to the 2024 Valentine’s Day shooting in front of Union Station in Kansas City, Missouri. Thousands had gathered there to celebrate their hometown Chiefs’ victory in the Super Bowl. You can’t even celebrate a football game in Missouri without getting shot. One person was killed, twenty-two were wounded, with eleven of those being children. There have been over 400 school shootings in America since 2000. But by the “self-evident morality” of gun rights advocates, this is simply the price we pay for a “free” society.
And Missouri has not forgotten about its Black citizens. Just days ago, the state executed Marcellus Williams over the objections of nearly everyone involved in the case, including the victim’s family and three Supreme Court Justices. The 55-year-old Black man was accused and convicted of breaking into a St. Louis woman’s home and stabbing her to death in 1998. Williams’ attorneys and the victims attorneys had both reached an agreement to commute the death sentence to “life without parole” but the state’s Attorney General once again asserted his “self-evident morality” and nullified the arrangement. Missouri Governor Parson also declined to stay the execution. Thus, the state-sanctioned murder of Marcellus Williams was carried out on September 24th, 2024.
It should surprise absolutely no one that both Parson and Bailey are white men. Missouri’s government is overwhelmingly white, heterosexual, and male. Confederate flags fly freely and openly and often in the state, despite Missouri never being an official part of the Confederacy. They consider Confederate bushwhackers like Jesse James and William Quantrill to be “local heroes.” I once saw a bumper sticker in Kansas City that read “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted For Jefferson Davis.” For many in my former home, the Civil War did not end. The lives of Black people are still disposable in the eyes of many Missourians. By their “self-evident morality,” they are fighting a battle against “woke” aggression.
Stanley Mug Morality
The Message is due to be released on October 1st. The timing is suspicious at best. The October 7th, 2023 attack by Hamas against Israel killed 1,200, claimed 240 hostages and sparked a regional war that still rages. Israeli women were brutally raped, their torment filmed and livestreamed to members of their families. Nearly 100 Israeli citizens remain in captivity, their captors refusing to release them despite nearly a year of war. The conflict has also sparked antisemitism across the world, most notably in America. I myself watched former “friends” post stylized pictures of Palestinian soldiers in hang-gliders on October 8th as they preached a message of resistance at any cost. Violent demonstrations at college campuses across the nation decry Israel day after day. Left-leaning organizations that couldn’t be bothered to march for abortion rights, trans rights, voting rights, or any of the other rights that have been stripped or diminished since Donald Trump’s ascendancy…now march against the existence of the only Jewish state. Their “self-evident morality” seems to dictate that their own freedoms are immaterial and that the punishment of Israel is the most important issue facing Americans. They have foregone the “factual complexity” of a conflict that spans millennia for their TikTok-fed morality.
I know where a good section of the proceeds for the works of Ta-Nehisi Coates comes from. White Americans. White Americans who love their pumpkin spice lattes and their Stanley Mugs but “aren’t like those other whites.” They bought Between the World and Me, threw it on their coffee table or put it in a prominent place on their bookshelf, and never touched it again. The books of Coates sit dust-covered in the homes of many “progressive” Missourians whose “bake sale liberalism” ends when the trend shifts. They’re fine with the Confederate flags flying across the street. They’re fine with their trans friends having to flee the state they were born in. They’re fine with a Black man dying in chains. Their “self-evident morality” allows them to believe that buying a book and putting a Palestinian flag in their profile is all they need to do to change the world.
And now that their guy, their man, “one of the good ones,” the author of one of their performative totems, is telling them it’s fine to blame Israel for everything, they probably will. Because facts are hard, and feelings are easy.
That’s the conclusion Coates himself drew.
Another journalist, a peer of Coates, once said this: “It was painful for me several years ago when several friends were arrested. I said nothing. I didn’t want to lose my job or my freedom. I worried about my family. I have made a different choice now. I have left my home, my family and my job, and I am raising my voice. To do otherwise would betray those who languish in prison. I can speak when so many cannot.” He became an expert on the many conflicts and moralities of the Middle East, and very likely could have helped Coates better understand the “factual complexities” of the situation. But, he was assassinated by agents of the Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2018.
In many ways, former Washington Post columnist Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi was killed by “self-evident morality.”
I guess Coates is fine with that. His book is poised to capitalize on it.
I myself prefer factual complexity.
