the message – (ta-nehisi coates)

there’s been no shortage of press on this book. i’ll confess i’ve ingested a fair amount of what’s surrounded it.

given the press around the book you’d be forgiven for glossing over the trip to dakar and to a school board meeting. i’m not sure that i parse the dakar bits, i’m probably not cerebral enough to grok what’s going on here. the school board stuff i thoroughly got, but that’s not why i bought the book.

the spicy bit of the book takes off in the back half. he comes out literary guns blazing and just starts pointing left, right, and center the parallels between the jim crow south and the state of the palestinian people. he’s explicitly clear here that he’s not interested in the justifications for the behavior, and does a solid job of pointing out the BS on the both-sides-isms endemic in media and how this effectively provides a mechanism for policing the dialog and creating the structure for a preferential story.

there’s no shortage of examples of either apartheid or jim crow systemic abuses and if you pay attention to any of the interviews surrounding this book (the ezra klein podcast and the daily show hit about 80% of the key ones) you’re likely up to speed on the elements he references in the book.

the disparities and the situation here isn’t a surprise to you if you’ve been paying reasonable attention to the plight of the palestinians over the past 20 years.

this ends pretty much where you’d expect it. there are no proposed solutions. coates feels, burned/lied to, by a profession that has continuously described the situation as complicated. there is an important digression into the linkages between israel and south africa’s apartheid regime. this is a messy arrangement and commingled on israel’s part with an existential need to do anything to ensure the durability of israel as a country. there are a lot of details i wasn’t aware of here.

a new, for me, perspective around the ascension of israel and jews in the hierarchy of whiteness. i’m not sure that i’ve fully digested what goes into this theory, but it’s not something that i had previously considered in any depth.

summary

5/5 would recommend. but it would benefit from some at least nodding at the additional perspectives here.

references and surrounding press