Abstract
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message came out in the fall of 2024. It had been ten years since The Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations,” had propelled him into the national spotlight. Nine years since, his Between the World and Me won a National Book Award and began to be read in many U.S. high schools. Both of these works examined the history and realities of African Americans in the United States. The pillars of Coates’s journalism include examining historical documents, invoking African American intellectual traditions, and travelling to meet with people — frequently elderly — who personally experienced the travails about which he is writing. In The Message, Coates maintains his focus on race within the U.S. with a trip to South Carolina to attend a school board meeting on book banning and also widens the frame of his journalism to include travels abroad to Senegal and Israel-Palestine. Coates often repeats that the year he published “The Case for Reparations” was the year he applied for his first adult passport. Readers familiar with Between the World and Me will recall that Coates is an eager adult learner of French, and other languages. In many ways, The Message can be understood as Coates’s journalistic entry into the world beyond the United States.
Recommended Citation
Tierney, Robin
(2026).
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message.
Bridgewater Review, 44(1), 44-46.
Available at: https://vc.bridgew.edu/br_rev/vol44/iss1/15