The Message

Critical race theory—first articulated in the 1970s by legal scholars Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw, among others—holds that racism is central to the United States from its founding and that US institutions and social relations are responsible for reproducing it. Addressing racism’s negative effects requires identifying the structural aspects of institutions like the law and education that keep producing unequal outcomes. The major aim of the theory is to provide a framework to reform laws and institutions. It is not a theory traditionally taught in K-12 schools, but its insights are threatening to people who accept the dominant narrative in which the United States is steadily progressing toward racial equality. On the other hand, there are more conservative forces who use critical race theory as a shorthand for what they see as the liberal indoctrination of children in classrooms. It was parents like these who attacked Mary Wood for teaching Between the World and Me. Coates reads these parents and school board members as people who rightly fear that reading history through the lens of critical race theory’s insights about the construction of the law will undercut narratives that maintain oppression.

Jim Crow is the informal name for the laws that enforced segregation in the American South in the period between Reconstruction and the civil rights movement. Jim Crow wasn’t just a matter of laws—it was also deeply woven into the fabric of American life in that it shaped social interactions between Black people and white people in the Southern United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Vestiges of Jim Crow were also apparent in the practice of redlining—withholding financial support for the purchase of housing in neighborhoods where Black people lived. Coates is intimately familiar with the idea of Jim Crow because of his study of race in the United States. When he sees the unequal treatment of Palestinians at the hands of the Israel government, he thinks of Jim Crow as an analogy for that domination. He eventually concludes that Jim Crow is an inadequate name for Israel’s domination of Palestinians; only Palestinians can define what they are experiencing fully.

#MeToo is a movement dedicated to exposing and ending the culture of sexual harassment and rape of women in the workforce, in relationships, and in public spaces. The movement gained steam on social media (hence the hashtag) as women shared in public what they had been saying in private. Coates uses the investigative journalism around #MeToo as an example of writing that intervenes in reality by upending existing historical narratives and exposing the way that such narratives hide oppression. Coates admits that reading the accounts of women and journalists of #MeToo helped him examine the privilege he holds as a man. His commentary on how indicted he felt by #MeToo anticipates the intense sense of guilt that he feels about not knowing more about the struggle of Palestinians.

“Plunder” is a concept that appears in several of Coates’s works. In The Message, it initially refers to the wholesale theft of Black labor, bodies, culture, and wealth. Coates argues that plunder isn’t confined to the past; it is ongoing in the United States. Because of the ongoing plunder of Black Americans, Coates believes that the US should pay reparations to make Black Americans whole. Coates expands the racial and national boundaries of plunder in The Message by labeling what Israel is doing to Palestinians as plunder. This situation disturbs Coates because he readily admits that, given the horrors of the Holocaust, Jews must be the most plundered people in history. After seeing conditions on the ground in Palestine and Israel, Coates characterizes Israel as a state in which a plundered people have in turn plundered others. One of the primary purposes of The Message is for Coates to right the wrong he did to the Palestinian people by ignoring their oppression when he wrote “The Case for Reparations.”

The two-state solution is a proposed approach in which Israel and Palestine would each have their own state and territory—as opposed to the status quo in which Palestinians exist as second-class citizens within what is officially the state of Israel. Coates presents the two-state solution as fundamentally flawed because it assumes that Israel is interested in anything other than domination of Palestinians.

Coined by historian St. Clair Drake, the vindicationist tradition is one in which “Black people [seek] to reclaim the very history weaponized against them and turn it back against their tormentors” (34). These vindicationist narratives glorify and sometimes mythologize ancient African empires—especially the Egyptian and Nubian empires—to counteract the racist, white supremacist narratives used to denigrate African people and people of the African diaspora and underwrite slavery and colonialism. Coates is suspicious of this tradition because it is a grand narrative based on a mythologization of history. “On Pharaohs” is in part devoted to debunking what is nevertheless a powerful set of beliefs in Black history.