Writing to Change the World
Lessons from Ta-Nehisi Coates's "The Message" (Part 1)
Standing before the South Carolina legislature, my chest burned with a mixture of urgency and fear as I defended what seemed to be the very essence of writing in America.
It was my first year as a law professor in South Carolina, my fifth as a tenure-track professor, and I was testifying against a bill that would ban books and similar works examining race, racism, and American identity through a critical lens—including works by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Years later, after reading The Message, I would be struck by how much Coates’s current reflections on the writer’s craft resonate with that moment, illuminating why words on a page provoke such fear in those who seek to control them, in those who are afraid of change.
As I read last fall about Coates’s visit to Columbia, South Carolina, where he met with elementary school teachers under attack for teaching his non-fiction books, I felt a deep connection to his analysis of the writer’s task. His exploration of how public writing can challenge ideologies that limit our collective potential resonated with my own experience as a teacher, legal scholar, and writer.
In the face of rising book bans targeting works that confront America’s sullied history of White supremacy and racial discrimination, Coates’s latest book serves as both a meditation on writing’s power to transform culture and a defense of literature’s role in shaping political imagination.
Writing, Coates reminds us, is not just a personal act—it’s a political one; an act capable of challenging, provoking, and transforming the world.
The Writer’s Calling
In Chapter 1, Journalism Is Not a Luxury, of The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates delves into the calling of the writer, drawing from his own experiences and reflections on the power of words.
As a child of the hip-hop era, which he detailed in his first book, The Beautiful Struggle, Coates recalls how he made connections between the poetry of hip-hop artists like Rakim and the classical literature of works like Shakespeare’s Macbeth. He argues that the best writers possess an uncanny ability to make their words resonate deeply with readers,
“to have them think about your words before bed, see them manifest in their dreams, tell their partner about them the next morning, grab random people on the street, shake them, and say, ‘Have you read this yet?’”
This kind of emotional impact, Coates suggests, is what makes writing a transformative force, one that sticks with readers long after they’ve turned the page.
For Coates, this haunting effect first took hold through a 1983 Sports Illustrated article about Darryl Stingley. In 1978, Stingley was left a quadriplegic after a brutal hit during a football game, and the article chronicled the aftermath of his life-altering injury. Coates explains how the article’s language, style, rhythm, and imagery haunted him, leaving him burdened by the lingering questions that remained unasked by the author—particularly about the unspoken injustices within Stingley’s narrative. The underlying tragedy of Stingley’s story unsettled Coates because it failed to confront the systemic violence that often dictates life’s outcomes, in sports and beyond.
After all, this sense of violence and tragedy was all too familiar to Coates, having grown up in Baltimore, Maryland, home to the award-winning HBO series The Wire, which was based on real life events. The words Coates discovered in books—stories, poems, fantasies filled with imagined worlds—became a way for him to survive the tough urban landscape and grapple with the unanswered questions that hovered around him, questions about poverty, crime, and racism.
Hip-hop, especially the lyrics of conscious rappers like Rakim, who similarly confronted life’s unresolved questions through a lyrical style and rhythm that haunted listeners, had a profound impact on him as well.
In the first chapter of The Message, Coates tells his students (the book is written as a letter to his students at Howard University, where he currently teaches English) that writing, as an artistic tradition, is fundamentally about drawing out our common humanity and clarifying the ambiguities that define our human interactions. By revealing these truths, Coates argues, the writer helps liberate the reader.
Put another way, as Coates asserts,
“You cannot act upon what you cannot see.”
The Burden of the Black Writer
In Chapter 2, On Pharaohs, Coates deepens the exploration of the writer’s mission—one that, as he puts it, goes beyond self-expression to reveal deeper truths about the world and humanity that allow readers to better understand themselves and others.
For Coates, as a Black writer, this journey requires delving into the heart of Black identity, which leads us to Africa. The so-called motherland, Africa is a place that holds deep personal significance for Coates—not only because he is a Black American and descendant of enslaved Africans, but because of his familial legacy.
As a son of the Black Power movement, with a father who was a former Black Panther and celebrated founder and director of the Black Classic Press, Coates grew up in a vibrant and proud Black culture that was, in many ways, searching for Africa within America. Now, standing upon the shores of Africa, Coates found himself searching for the origins of his Black identity in a place that felt both foreign and familiar.
In this chapter, Coates reveals what he describes as the mission—or perhaps the burden—of the Black writer. Their task, he tells us, is not just to expose the world’s truths in ways that will resonate with readers, but also to confront the history of their Blackness that inevitable shapes how they—as Black writers—perceive the world and their place in it. In other words, the Black writer must wrestle with the ghosts of American history that haunt them, negotiating a nightmarish past that is both a personal and collective trauma.
Here, Coates suggests that Black writers not only navigate personal identity; they also must grapple with a larger, shared history—one marked by centuries of violence, resilience, and the ongoing process of reinvention that defines American culture, but if we are being honest, is a manifestation of the Black radical tradition. It is a journey of navigating the ongoing burden of being broken and remade, again and again, generation after generation. It is the blues and the funk, r & b and hip hop, tragedy and comedy.
For Coates, visiting Africa and standing on the shores where his ancestors were loaded onto slave ships is an experience filled with both heartbreak and confusion. There is a deep sense of loss that he cannot fully comprehend. He describes feeling as though he is returning to the roots of Black American culture, yet finds himself shrouded by the mysteries of an Africa rarely discussed in American history books or in films.
This encounter awakens a haunting feeling of being unmoored—not knowing what it means for the Black writer to set sail on a pilgrimage across the vast ocean, navigating the turbulent currents of American history, wrestling the ghosts of slave ships and slave traders, only to dive beneath the surface and uncover vibrant communities, rich histories, and dynamic stories submerged beneath the wreckage of American myths.
The imagined Africa that Coates had carried with him—a place that had given him purpose and meaning as a Black writer who started his career in journalism after attending Howard University, commonly known as ‘The Mecca’ where Black people from around the world gather—clashes with the reality of the Africa he encounters, one with its own complex narratives, hopes, and histories. Coates raises an important question:
What does it mean for the writer—and particularly the Black writer—to bridge the gap between the self we believe ourselves to be and the hidden realities we uncover on the journey to confront humanity’s deeper contradictions?
The work of the Black writer, Coates argues, is not merely about personal discovery; it is about contributing to a broader cultural, political, and intellectual discourse that speaks to Black self-determination and the ongoing reimagination of Blackness itself.
As Coates asserts, Black Americans, and by extension Black writers too,
“have a right to imagine ourselves as pharaohs, and then again, the responsibility to ask if a pharaoh is even worthy of our needs, our dreams, our imagination.”
This dual responsibility—to reckon with the complex history of who we believe ourselves to be while confronting the challenges facing Black people in America today—forms the crux of Coates’s analysis in this chapter. I believe it is also a call for Black writers to critically investigate their foundational beliefs about the Black lived experience and examine how their Blackness shapes—and sometimes overdetermines—their perceptions of the world.
Indeed, all writers must undergo such self-reflection if they are to change the world with their words.
The Power of Writing in the Face of Censorship
In Chapter 3, Bearing the Flaming Cross, Coates reflects on what it means to be American in an era when books written by Black Americans—especially works that seek to liberate the hidden truths of Black American life—are being banned from school libraries.
These books are labeled as threats because they make some students feel uncomfortable or ashamed. Coates returns to the United States from Africa and finds himself in Columbia, South Carolina, where his own books are at the center of the debate. Elementary school teachers are being targeted for allegedly violating recent book banning laws, and Coates is forced to confront the broader implications of this fight over what is taught in schools, and why.
Ironically (and sadly for me), Coates was in South Carolina at the same time I was struggling to help my law students make sense of our country’s deepening political divisions, though I had no idea he was in town, as he kept a low profile for his own safety.
In this chapter, Coates reflects on his own educational experiences, which he believes failed him as a non-traditional learner. He critiques the purpose of schooling, stating,
“What we were being taught was less a body of knowledge than a way to be in the world; orderly, organized, attentive to direction.”
He also reflects on how the emphasis on order in public schools stifled his freedom to learn and limited his early understanding of the value of critique and dissent. When we consider the implications of banning books that challenge the legitimacy of a racialized status quo (and sometimes do nothing more than suggest alternative ways of being), it becomes clear that what’s really being banned—or at least controlled—is our political imagination. As Coates puts it,
“Our political imagination is rooted in our history, our culture, and our myths.”
This chapter makes it clear that while writers have the unique opportunity—indeed, the gift—to expose uncomfortable truths and craft stories that allow readers to see themselves and the world in new ways, they also pose a serious threat. As Coates asserts,
“The danger we present... is not that we will simply convince their children of a different dogma but that we will convince them that they have the power to form their own.”
Perhaps the protesting parents who want to keep Coates’s books out of their children’s schools are not so much concerned about their children’s discomfort or shame as they learn the ugly truth about American history. Rather, they are concerned that their children will challenge their long-held beliefs about what it means to be racialized as White in America—beliefs that confront their own deeply-held internalized traumas. And South Carolina certainly has its own traumas.
As Toni Morrison described the existential crisis,
“But when you take it away, I take your race away, and there you are all strung out and all you got is your little self. And what is that? What are you without racism? Are you any good? Are you still strong? Are you still smart? Do you still like yourself? These are the questions.”
I witnessed White folks wrestling with this kind of existential crisis firsthand during my first year as a law professor in South Carolina when I delivered public testimony against a bill that would ultimately ban books like Coates’s. At the time, the bill was blunt and explicit, using critical race theory as a catch-all phrase for anything related to African American history, White supremacy, structural racism, or implicit bias. It would later be stripped down, underscoring the ongoing attempt to limit the teaching of race in South Carolina schools, by any means necessary.
While I was among those arguing that the bill was far too broad and posed a serious threat to learning and critical discourse among young students, some argued that South Carolina elementary school teachers were attempting to expose students to Marxism and other leftist ideologies.
I found these arguments fascinating, especially since I didn’t encounter Marxism until high school and certainly didn’t discover critical race theory until law school (and in both instances, at only a surface level). I sincerely doubt that many (if any) elementary schools in South Carolina, or anywhere else around the country for that matter, are teaching kids about Marxism or critical race theory.
Instead of well-reasoned insight and critique, what I saw in that room was fear—a fear of writing’s power to expose hypocrisy and ignite imagination. As Coates declares,
“Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics.”
This, I believe, is the central takeaway from Chapter 3 of The Message. The writer is not only called to expose truths while grappling with their own place in the world. The writer is also an artist. And words, meticulously crafted into sentences and strung together into stimulating prose, become art—from films to novels to monuments to memoirs—that have the power to transform politics in profound ways.
Art, after all, is what helped reconfigure the promise of Reconstruction into the stain of Jim Crow through influential works like the 1915 film Birth of a Nation and the public veneration of Confederate monuments and flags. Coates’s art threatened to change the South once again, challenging the political imagination of South Carolina’s youngest citizens.
And the protesting parents, cloaked in their protective roles, had assumed the mantle of modern redeemers, seeking to preserve the racial hierarchy that art had long shaped and protected—perhaps without even knowing it—even at the expense of their children’s imagination of a more inclusive future.
Global Imagination and Reckoning
Coates could have ended The Message here, and it would have succeeded in showing us why public writing remains an essential and powerful force in the modern era. Further, it would have still been celebrated as a powerful manifesto on the calling, duty, and immense power of writers.
But we live in a global world, and our understanding of what it means to be American cannot be fully interrogated without confronting our global footprint. Chapter 4, The Gigantic Dream, shifts the focus outward once again, this time taking us to Palestine before the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel. Coates shares his encounters with the way U.S. politics have shaped and continue to define Israel’s treatment of Palestinians—both before and after that horrific event, and its brutal genocidal aftermath.
Coates’s reflections add a crucial layer (and corrective) to his longstanding critique of U.S. imperialism—see, e.g., The Case For Reparations—exposing how American political influence extends beyond our borders, shaping global consciousness. The U.S. has long been complicit in systems of oppression and colonial violence around the world, demonstrating how interconnected our racial politics are with international movements for racial justice. Coates calls on us to recognize that solidarity with our own struggles, especially Black American struggles, must also extend to global solidarity.
Given the weight of this topic, I’ll save my own reflections on Coates’s visit to Palestine for a future letter. His words moved me in ways that I am still processing. In 2014, almost a decade ago, I visited Israel and Palestine for a pilgrimage with a Christian student group. I vividly recall standing at the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem, crossing the Sea of Galilee, and walking past soldiers at various checkpoints throughout our journey—each experience left a deep impression.
Yet, reading Coates’s account of Palestine, which took me to places I did not encounter on my trip, forced me to rethink my assumptions and confront my limiting beliefs. It’s uncomfortable, yet necessary, to question whether our perceptions of the world are truly worthy of our imaginations. This, I believe, is the power of great writing. It challenges us to reflect, grow, and redefine our understanding of ourselves and others.
I’ll share more on this in a future letter, but for now, it’s clear that Coates’s ability to provoke such deep introspection speaks to his gift for turning the personal into the universal. The Message does more than explore what it means to be Black in America—it demands that we examine how our local struggles as Americans are connected to global issues of power, oppression, and justice. By doing so, Coates pushes us to imagine a world far beyond the one we’ve inherited.
His message deserves our attention.
In solidarity,
P.S. As always, thank you for reading this edition of Freedom Papers. If you found this piece meaningful, share it with a friend. If it moved you, consider supporting with a paid subscription or buying me a coffee. This creative exploration happens because readers like you believe words and stories matter.
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The Message contains so many messages I got writers cramp trying to jot them all down