Little Rock There are so many conspiracies and controversies out there these days, who has time to shovel past the first couple of inches to suss many of them out? Not me, for sure, but that doesn’t mean that we bury our head in the dirt, does it? No, we pick and choose. For example, I can’t even keep counting the conspiracies the former president Trump is promoting, I just don’t have the fingers and toes to keep up with the daily barrage. On the other hand, the recent contretemps involving an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates on CBS did get me digging. I’ve read a couple of Coates books, so what was up?
If you’ve missed the backstory, here’s the crib notes version. Coates is a well-known award-winning journalist and essayist first with the Atlantic and subsequently in a number of books, most notably Between the World and Me, ostensibly a long letter to his son about the America where he would be raised and the racism that scars the country. His most recent book, igniting the current brouhaha, is called The Message, and it is framed as the fulfillment of a commitment to a writing class he taught at Howard University. He visits Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine on the West Bank and Israel. He was promoting the book in an interview on a CBS morning show. One of the “This Morning” hosts, Tony Dokoupil, went a bit of aggro about the Israeli/Palestinian essay and in essence said, “if he were to remove the accolades, the prestige of the book’s publishing house, and all other attributes that could lend credence to Coates’s position, Coates’s writings on Gaza, the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem ‘would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.’” Pretty harsh, as affirmed by his boss at CBS in her view of the “gotcha” moment, although defended by Shari Redstone, who continues to own CBS for the next several months. Coates is Black. Dokoupil is Jewish.
I listened to Coates read the whole book on Audible. There were no surprises. Coates didn’t do an Israel hatchet job. His essay hit hard on the Holocaust and its inhuman tragedy for example. He was no liberal on October 7th. But through the prism of his reflection, he basically asks how could a people who had experience so much pain and hate, inflict the same on other people, particularly the Palestinians they were deliberately displacing in Israel and continue to deal with through occupation and various forms of apartheid?
How could anyone who has read a word that Coates has written in the past about reparations, race, slavery, and the enduring poison of this history and its continuing power have ever believed that he would be oblivious to the similarities in any visit to Jerusalem or the West Bank? In fact, so much of this same history has been written even in the mainstream media in the last year, Dokoupil could have easily said the New York Times Magazine and a dozen other publications could have been crammed in any backpack. No matter what case anyone wants to make, no one can say it’s pretty over there, rationalizations aside. Don’t get me wrong, the Times has a position on the current Gaza conflict, and it’s not the same as one might hear in a message from Coates. At the same time, readers can make their own conclusions about things like the separate highways, bus routes, and licenses plates for Palestinians versus Jewish Israelis. If that’s not apartheid, then what is the right name for it?
In this one-minute media firestorm, it’s easy to sort out the problem. I’m afraid it’s not the messenger, even if Coates was predictable; it’s the message. As Richard Pryor famously said, “who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?” The message on the ground is irrefutable. None of that has to do with Israel’s right to exist, but it absolutely has to do with the way that Israel is existing now when it comes to how they deal with their Palestinian neighbors and their equal right to live in their homes, work their land, and, frankly, exist as well.