"The Message": Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Power of Writing & Visiting Senegal, South Carolina, Palestine

We spend the hour with the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose book The Message features three essays tackling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, book bans and academic freedom, and the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. The Message is written as a letter to Coates’s students at Howard University, where he is the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English department. As part of the research for the book, Coates traveled to Senegal and visited the island of Gorée, often the last stop for captured Africans before they were shipped to the Americas as enslaved people. Coates also visited a schoolteacher in South Carolina who faced censorship for teaching Coates’s previous book, Between the World and Me, an experience he says showed him the power of organizing. “That, too, is about the power of stories. That, too, is about the power of narratives, the questions we ask and the questions we don’t,” Coates says of the community’s response.