The Message

What began as a book about the craft and politics of writing—addressed to his Howard University students, as his bestseller Between the World and Me was written to his son—became something else as Coates, following his own dictum to make writing concrete by reporting, was changed by the three places he visited: Senegal, in his first trip to the African continent; South Carolina, where a high school teacher put her job on the line to teach one of his books; and Palestine. That third section, the longest, has rightfully received all the attention, and not only because of the ongoing war. It's there that Coates is most engaged, and most confounded, by witnessing Israel's systemic subjugation of its Palestinian subjects, seeing its echoes of American Jim Crow, and realizing how little of that story had reached American eyes.