The Problem With Moral Purity
11 min read
I felt tremendous shame,” Ta-Nehisi Coates confessed in November at a pro-Palestinian event called “But We Must Speak.” His shame, he told a rapt crowd near Columbia University, had arisen during a recent trip to Israel, his first. Long deceived by “all of the articles I’ve read,” he had assumed that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was exceedingly complex, that “you need a degree in Middle Eastern studies or some such, a Ph.D., to really understand what’s happening.” But when he was guided from Jerusalem to Hebron on a tour organized by the Palestine Festival of Literature, he found that the situation was far from complicated.
He had confronted, he said, Israel’s “Jim Crow regime,” its “segregationist order,” enforced by the “biggest guns I’d ever seen in my life.” And given that he had been “reared on the fight against Jim Crow, against white supremacy,” he felt mortified by his years of blindness to the brutal simplicity of the Palestinian plight. “How,” he asked, “could I not know?”
A year later, he is publishing The Message, a book of four essays; the first, serving as an introduction, is presented as an imaginary lecture to his writing students at Howard University. Addressing them as “comrades,” he pronounces that his mandate and theirs, as writers, is “doing their part to save the world.” Then come three essays built around racially or ethnically charged travel. The last and by far the longest piece is devoted to his single transformative visit to Israel. It is the book’s main reason for being, and it is a condemnation of the “elevation of complexity over justice,” which is “parcel of the effort to forge a story of Palestine told solely by the colonizer.” Coates’s dismissal of complication amplifies the certainty of the book’s title, which, given the biblical landscape of the book’s second half, appears to allude to the fierce truth-telling of the prophets. Coates seems almost to put himself on that plane.
Yet an undercurrent of shame, in multiple forms, lies beneath his conviction: shame, partly, over having internalized the worldview of oppressors. Though quieter than other themes, it is a propulsive force—and it helps to explain, in the Israel essay, a stunning omission, a moral abdication.
Coates opens his culminating essay on the tenth and final day of his Israel trip, at Yad Vashem, the country’s Holocaust memorial, where the first thing he sees is “not an exhibit but a row of twenty-odd soldiers in brown fatigues, carrying guns the size of small children.” He stares “longer than I should have. There was something incongruous about so many guns being so flagrantly wielded in so solemn a place. I knew that they were there to protect this site from those who would wish Hitler’s work more complete. But by then, I knew that that was not all the soldiers of this country were protecting.”
As Coates moves through the Holocaust displays, he reels with raw feeling. But to absorb the rest of the essay, to reread and reread it, is to sense that his rendering of his experience inside Yad Vashem is strategic as well as sincere, a means of inoculating himself against charges of insensitivity or worse as he becomes purely polemical and takes up, without any complication, the Palestinian anti-colonial narrative. The row of soldiers at Yad Vashem is, in Coates’s mind, safeguarding nothing less than the evil of the Jewish state, an evil barely obscured by the “moral badge of the Holocaust,” by Israel’s self-congratulatory creation story of rising from victimization to strength and self-determination in “a God-given home.”
Traveling in the West Bank, he observes that Palestinians collect rainwater in cisterns while Jewish country clubs fill their swimming pools with bountiful state-supplied water. In a Jewish settlement outside Hebron, he walks into a park named in honor of Meir Kahane, a Zionist extremist whose disciple, Baruch Goldstein, in 1994, slaughtered 29 Muslims worshiping at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, an ancient site venerated by both Muslims and Jews. Coates discusses the West Bank roads that Palestinians are forbidden to drive on, the checkpoints they’re subjected to, the state-perpetrated or state-permitted violence that stalks them constantly, the mass displacements that saturate their history. The list of injustices is long—and it is harrowing, though nearly every detail Coates offers may be familiar to anyone who has studied the conflict reasonably well. Jolting, too, if unsurprising in historical context, are the quotations Coates marshals to demonstrate that leading Zionists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries thought and wrote in ruthlessly colonialist and racist terms.
Beneath the essay’s unremitting argument runs a set of powerful and convergent emotional forces, among them the shame and guilt Coates declared nearly a year ago and reiterates in The Message. Yet his sense of culpability is at once more precise and more sprawling than “How could I not know?” It involves a crime that he accuses himself of committing in the pages of this magazine—and which, he announced at the November event, he would be “making amends for until the day they put me in the ground.”
In his 2014 Atlantic article calling on the United States to pay reparations for the ongoing effects of slavery and state-sponsored discrimination, Coates turned to the history of the young Jewish state and the reparations it received from Germany as an example of how beneficial such payments can be. He now vehemently repudiates that part of the article for its obliviousness to the oppression wrapped up in Israel’s birth and existence. “My words here,” he writes in the book’s Israel essay, are a personal “bid for reparation.”
Within the failure Coates sees in the magazine article that launched him toward fame lie strata not only of guilt but also, it seems, of searing anger. Thinking back to when he wrote it, he remembers himself as a journalist all too willing to tread tactically and tactfully at the “hallowed and lauded” and white-led publication that gave him a platform, and all too ready to conform to what he believes is the governing Israel-friendly outlook of the mostly white media world. For Coates, it is a world infused by white supremacy and by a mindset that, even if only half-consciously, views Israel as an outpost of Western white hegemony. He recalls his feelings as a racial outsider advancing a marginalized argument about the need for U.S. reparations: “You are ultimately in their world and are thus compelled to speak to them through their symbols and stories.” The story of Israel provided the perfect exemplar, a way to couch an outsider’s argument in an insider’s language. Now, he writes, he knows better about what Israel represents, but back then he was insecure, unquestioning, accepting. “I felt my deep ignorance of the world beyond America’s borders and, with that, a deep shame.”
Though Coates’s Israel essay dominates the book, the other pieces are essential to fully understanding his motivations, as well as his willful blind spots, while he is there. The book’s second essay, about a trip to Dakar, Senegal, painfully evokes an acute sense of internalized inferiority: “The weight of my first trip to Africa—the many years it took me to actually go—is directly tied to … men like Josiah Nott, a nineteenth-century anthropologist, epidemiologist, and student of civilization. Nott was also a slaveholder” who called his anthropological specialty “Niggerology.” He deemed himself “the big gun of the profession,” a profession that, according to Coates, “had but one aim—assembling all the knowledge Nott could summon to prove we were inferior and thus fit for enslavement.”
Coates’s candor is riveting. The long legacy of such racist anthropology made him reluctant to visit Africa. When he finally did, he found himself looking through a white-supremacist lens. In one of the best passages in the book, he recounts taking a taxi from the airport into Dakar on a beachside road. “All along that beach I saw what looked like the abandoned remnants of an outdoor training gym,” he writes, “and in the blur of our passing I saw yellow paint peeling from the machines to reveal the rusting metal beneath. I assumed that these pieces were the remains of some public works project gone wrong, and the sight of this ostensible failure immediately became a sign of our collective dysfunction, of the ‘Negro race’s’ irredeemably savage state. And hearing that voice in my mind, I came to a terrible realization.” It is that despite the Afrocentric lessons he learned from his parents, and despite the Afrocentric name they gave him, “I was still afraid that the Niggerologists were right about us.”
Dakar starts to liberate him from this predatory fear. He buys “the most beautiful fabric I’d ever seen.” He is transfixed by the physical beauty of the people, which leaves him “amazed—too amazed, I think,” betraying “a deep insecurity, a shock that the deepest and blackest part of us is really beautiful.” But the liberation is fleeting. One night at dinner with a Senegalese writer and his wife, he hears about the widespread practice of skin-bleaching in Senegal. “The valuing of light skin was obviously not new to me as a Black American, but to encounter the idea here”—among “my lost siblings”—“was chilling.”
The next morning, he takes a short ferry ride to the Gorée Island memorial, with its Door of No Return, long believed to be a point of embarkation for the Middle Passage. He is keenly aware that the importance of this place in the slave trade is likely more myth than history, that probably very few enslaved people passed through this port, that the idea of its being “any kind of origin point for Black America” is “imagined and dreamed up to fill an emptiness of a people told that they come from nothing and thus have done nothing and thus are nothing.”
Despite the feelings of flimsiness and futility that surround the memorial, Gorée moves Coates to tears. Then, in a deft pivot, the memorial stirs thoughts of his father reading a book about a failed slave revolt in Guyana that ended with rebel leaders “collaborating with the very people who enslaved them.” The book leaves his father lamenting, “‘I don’t think we are ever going to get back to Africa.’ My father did not mean this physically. He meant the Africa of our imagination, that glorious Eden we conjured up as exiles.”
Sadly, such layered introspection is rare across Coates’s travels. Too often, his method isn’t nearly as subtle or searching, and this, combined with a reflexive self-involvement, tends to rob The Message of truly resonant insight in both Senegal and Israel.
On the last night of Coates’s brief Dakar trip, the Senegalese writer and his wife assemble a group for him to meet over tea. “They were my kind of people—activists against the corruption of the state, writers delving into rising homophobia. But they were something more. We are, Black people, here and there, victims of the West.” Yet his writing bears no evidence that he engaged with anyone in the room. He seems to have solicited no one’s thoughts about anything that had plagued him during his visit. He doesn’t seem interested in their perspectives. Instead, the essay takes a bizarre turn in its final paragraph. Coates describes, among the guests, a young woman, a local university student, who is writing a dissertation about his work. He highlights her “look of amazement” at being in the presence of Ta-Nehisi Coates. Rather than seeking out and including the ideas of any of his fellow guests, he chooses to end by remarking on the potency and reach of his own words.
In Israel, the seal Coates creates around his own mind becomes impermeable. He refuses to countenance conversations with Jews who don’t share his opinions and don’t denounce their nation. He has “the right” to “shove bullshit,” he asserts, “out of the frame.” (In contrast to the depths of reflection inspired by the Gorée memorial, Yad Vashem becomes, in the book’s last pages, a monstrosity, because it was built not far from the site of a massacre of Palestinians during the warfare leading up to Israel’s declaration of independence.) Meanwhile, every Palestinian he spends time with is accompanied by an air of utter innocence. Early in the book, Coates praises writing that illuminates “common humanity,” but in his Israel essay, this ideal gives way to a strict dichotomy between perpetrators and victims.
The more relentless Coates becomes in his prosecution of Israel, the more he loses his way. His habitual unwillingness just to recognize conflicting perspectives and evidence, even if only to subject them to counterarguments, undermines his case. Might it have been worth noting that Israel is surrounded by Arab states and populations committed to its annihilation? That to a great degree, Palestinian leadership as well as many Palestinian people share this eliminationist view, which might help explain the forbidden roads and onerous checkpoints? That Baruch Goldstein’s unforgivable mass murder came on the heels of others, by Muslims of Jews, near the same sacred tomb? That, some would argue, the Palestinians have rejected two-state proposals running back to the late 1930s, when the British put forth a plan that would have granted the Jewish people only about 20 percent of the land that is now controlled by Israel?
Coates races right past such points. Although many of his sentences have a measured cadence, there’s something manic about his approach. He seems driven by what’s most animated in his own head and heart: the shame and persistent pain and insidious inferiority inflicted by “the long shadow of slavery.”
With all of this at play internally, Coates goes beyond allying himself with the Palestinian cause. He identifies entirely with it. He and the Palestinians share the suffering of “conquered peoples.” It is almost as if he feels that through his embattled attachment and identification, he can free his own psyche from “the long shadow.” And this personal urgency may elucidate Coates’s staggering omission. His essay, in a book published near the one-year mark of Hamas’s October 7 attack, contains nothing about that day and nothing about the war since. Not a sentence, not a word. The word Hamas does not even appear.
Why leave this out? Wouldn’t Coates have wanted to argue that Israel’s bombing campaign has amounted to genocide or ethnic cleansing? Wouldn’t he have wished to conclude his case in this way? Probably, but in doing so he would have been compelled to at least note Hamas’s murders, rapes, dismemberments, and kidnappings of civilians, even if only in the swiftest summary, and this would have marred the purity of the essay.
Purity of argument is Coates’s desire; complexity, his self-declared enemy. In this, in his refusal to wrestle with conflicting realities, the essay feels desperate. It feels devoid of the layers and depths of the most profound moral writing, devoid of the universalist goal, the exploration of “common humanity” that Coates has extolled. Complexity, not purity, is the essence of the moral and the humane.
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