Ta-Nehisi Coates’ History of Injustice is Unjust
Ta-Nehisi Coates has been making the rounds in a variety of outlets to promote his latest book, The Message. His stated aim in writing it was to explain the role that stories play in shaping a society’s consciousness surrounding identity and struggle. As his primary source material, Coates draws from his ten-day trip to Gaza during which time he witnessed the tensions there and drew conclusions about the social consciousness of the Palestinian-Arabs. The work and its author have generated much controversy for making the ahistorical claim that Israel is an apartheid state analogous to Jim Crow segregation.
Some journalists have pushed back on Coates’ interpretation of the conflict, most notably Tony Dikoupil, who challenged the author openly in his initial major interview with CBS Mornings, only later to be reprimanded by the network. Coates has leaned into this controversy, discussing it repeatedly on Trevor Noah’s podcast, Ezra Klein’s, and more recently with Marc Lamont Hill, a staunch pro-Palestine activist who has accused Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza. In much the same way that he has marshaled legitimate criticism to generate more buzz around his book, Coates sensationalizes the Israel-Palestine conflict to serve his racial agenda. Coates’ grasp of the history of Israel-Palestine is deplorable, his interpretation of the tensions there, a shameful appropriation.
A glaring problem is Coates’ oversimplification of the morality of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Coates rejects the idea that the conflict is complex and insists that the same could have been said for slavery and segregation within their time. When appearing on Trevor Noah’s podcast Coates compared the military checkpoints which Palestinians must cross through in Judea and Samaria to enter Israeli spaces to designated White-Black spaces of the Jim Crow South saying, “I know what this is.” But to know what those checkpoints were, he would have had to learn more about the history of the region.
These checkpoints were not established because of racial animosity or hatred as Jim Crow laws were. Rather, the Israeli Security Forces began employing them in the 1990’s as a security measure in response to busbombings against Jews and to guard against Hamas operatives who embedded themselves within the Palestinian population to carry out these attacks (“The Shortest History of Israel and Palestine,” Scott-Baumann, 165). Although these checkpoints have at times been the site of severe cruelty against Palestinians in the course of the decades-long feud between the nations, this is very different from the history of chattel slavery in the American South and the bitterness that many whites internalized towards black Americans after the Civil War.
Coates’ disregard for the real history of the region reveals that he doesn’t care about the Israel-Palestine conflict except insofar as he can appropriate it for his real polemic — American race relations. It is for this reason that he neither mentions Hamas in his book, nor acknowledges that Israelis are a Middle East minority group surrounded by hostile countries that want it destroyed.
Unfortunately, this practice of historical appropriation is not unique to left-wing writers. In an interview with Tucker Carlon earlier this year, podcaster Darryl Cooper offered a revisionist take on Winston Churchill in the Second World War, calling him “the chief villain of the Second World War,” and regurgitating old Nazi propaganda lines about Hitler just wanting a peace deal.
Why does someone like Darryl Cooper want to argue this? And why do podcasters like Dave Smith hail him as a “brilliant historian” who is challenging the power structures that be? It’s the same reason that Coates has dismissed any of the pushback he has received over his views on the Israel-Palestine conflict: He believes his version of history is better suited to supporting his own polemic than the real events. Cooper is less concerned with what Churchill did or didn’t do. Rather, he has a vendetta against the military industrial complex, and he thinks that revising the history of WWII will help his case.
In the same way, Coates has no qualms distorting the facts of the Israel-Palestine conflict as long as he can support the claim that all discrimination comes down to a racial struggle between white and black. Their issue is not with Churchill or Israel per se, but really trying to argue against current policy issues by employing a presentist view of the past. If Coates can force this analogy hard enough, then he can continue to stay relevant in the conversation surrounding racism in the United States.
The fact that Cooper is championed as a “brilliant historian” and Coates is hailed by the left as a brave journalist bringing his talents to bear on a Middle East conflict demonstrates an anti-intellectualism so prevalent in an age of populist sentiments. Both men view themselves as challenging the powers that be whenever they’re criticized for their views.
For men like Coates, and Cooper for that matter, any legitimate critique of their work or the factual errors therein is new artillery in their polemical warfare. Truth is irrelevant in the face of the useful story they’re telling. But those who truly care about injustice care about getting the facts right. To distort history in the service of a political agenda damages our national sense of self and leaves us disoriented and lost, unable to pave out a future that learns from the mistakes of the past. Coates’ readers would be wise to see through the righteous indignation he seeks to portray on behalf of the Palestinians.
