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I told a friend recently that I would read anything Ta-Nehisi Coates writes — even his grocery list. But his latest book, The Message, is far from that pedestrian. I listened to the audiobook once, and then again, feeling as though I could read it again and still not have learned everything there is to learn. In it, Coates weaves together lessons on language for his Howard students, stories of his personal pilgrimages, and reflections on who we are as Americans and how we got here. In an effort to combat Western journalism that “elevates factual complexity over self-evident morality,” Coates works to clarify and humanize the Isreal-Palestine conflict by filtering it through a history with which many of us are already familiar: he draws clear parallels between the Jim Crow South, apartheid South Africa, Europe during the Holocaust, and the occupied West Bank. Surprise surprise: the past isn’t over. It isn’t even past. Coates explores how so many governments and seats of power work tirelessly to control the narrative and through it, control the people: It happened in colonial America, when slaveholders’ lies rewrote history and justified the exploitation of another race; it happened in the language that permitted the mass slaughter of Jews in Eastern Europe; and it’s happening now, in legislation that bans teaching history and literature because it makes people uncomfortable; it’s happening now in the relentless assault against Palestine; it’s happening now in the efforts to convince us that it is too far away, too foreign, too complicated for us to grapple with. It is happening still. But Coates also offers a beacon of hope: there is always, “the threat of the storyteller who can, through words, erode the claims of the powerful.” He calls upon writers, publishers, producers, directors, and all those involved in the storytelling to give voice, and therefore humanity, to the voiceless — “tasked, as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.” 📸: I’m holding up a hardback copy of The Message with one hand. There’s a window to a street in the background. via Instagram https://instagr.am/p/DA_BhRAyLvf/