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January 10, 2025
from The Message
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
“Facing his demons head on, he got to ‘the general through the specific’ which is what all great essayists do.”—THE
Ta-Nehisi Coates is an award-winning author and journalist. His books include Between the World and Me, The Water Dancer and The Message. He is currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English department at Howard University. In 2023 Mary Wood, a white teacher from South Carolina, insisted on teaching Between the World and Me, despite threats of being fired by the school board. Coates traveled to South Carolina to support her.
The Paragraph of the Week is from his newest book, The Message, in which he describes his reaction to the event.
The Paragraph of the Week
The following afternoon, I met Mary for barbecue. I was actually giddy from the night before. I had expected to come into a den of hectoring fanatics. And instead I'd found that there were allies fighting back. Allies. When I started writing, it felt essential to think of white people as readers as little as possible, to reduce them in my mind, to resist the temptation to translate. I think that was correct. What has been surprising—pleasantly so—is that there really is no translation needed, that going deeper actually reveals the human. Get to the general through the specific, as the rule goes. Still, even as I have come to understand this, it feels abstract to me. What I wanted was to be Mary for a moment, to understand how she came to believe that it was worth risking her job over a book.
—Ta-Nehisi Coates
Comment
When he writes his books, Ta-Nehisi Coates pictures a black audience. In Between the World and Me he writes directly to his son, and in The Message, his most recent book, he has in mind his writing students at Howard University. “When I started writing, it felt essential to think of white people as readers as little as possible,” he explains, “to reduce them in my mind, to resist the temptation to translate.” But when Mary Wood, the white teacher from South Carolina, risked her job by assigning his book, he learned that a white audience too got the message about systemic racism precisely because he did not “translate” and was honest about his own experiences and the long history of oppression in America and around the world. Facing his demons head on, he got to “the general through the specific” which is what all great essayists do. Identity may have been the vehicle for such honesty, but in the end his books affirm that the human condition is what matters.
—THE
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Announcements
The Beloved Republic Recognized
by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
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The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
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The Humble Essayist Press
Closes Book Publication Arm
The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
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