Coates weaves his own journey, from childhood in America to Senegal, to the fight over his banned books, into a final, devastating section on Palestine, where he draws stark parallels between Jim Crow and the treatment of Palestinians. Deeply personal yet globally reaching, it's a masterclass in humanizing conflict through real stories.
Oh boy, where do I even begin with this book. I'd never heard of the author before. Even though I studied American politics in university, I left the North American continent and returned to my home country after graduating, so while I understand the dynamics at play, how much race shapes political life and personal experience in America, it's not something I've lived through directly. I first learned about Ta-Nehisi Coates through his interview with Hasan Minhaj. Hasan is someone I follow on YouTube, I enjoy his interviewing style and usually watch all of his episodes when I have the time. When I listened to Coates in that interview, he came across as so eloquent and well-spoken, clearly someone empathetic, and someone unafraid to criticize his own side of the political aisle. That's what convinced me to read his work, and I ended up adding almost all of his books to my Goodreads "want to read" list. This one became the first I picked up, since it felt the most relevant right now, touching as it does on what I see as Israel's cultural genocide and its ongoing killing and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
When I bought this book, I was expecting a journal-style, informative kind of read, and that's exactly what I got. It starts from his childhood, tracing how his thought process evolved, how he processes new information and revelations over time. What struck me here is that I could completely relate to his way of processing information. That's honestly what hit me the hardest. Think about it, I'm a white guy from a middle-class background in Turkey, and the author is a Black man from America, we're part of different generations entirely, and yet the way we process information and learn to perceive the world around us made me relate to him deeply. That's masterful writing, being able to bridge that kind of distance between two completely different lives. People like him, trying to navigate a world that so often punishes empathy, that idea alone sets the tone for the rest of the book. It gripped me from its very first part and didn't let go.
The next part covers Coates's experience visiting Senegal. He shares powerful reflections and revelations from that trip, exploring the strange experience of African Americans making a kind of "pilgrimage" back to their roots, caught between a modern city like Dakar and a mythic homeland that exists mostly in memory and imagination. This is the part I couldn't fully relate to, since I don't share the history that African Americans and African people carry, and I already live in my homeland, I've never been forced to relocate or bought and sold by people who wished me harm. What I could relate to in this section, though, is when Coates mentions that some people in Senegal try to lighten their skin, straighten their hair, and so on, in an attempt to look more like African Americans, essentially forsaking their own rich culture to imitate another one. We have plenty of people like that here in Turkey too, and it's just as baffling and strange to me, watching people quietly abandon something rich and their own for something borrowed and foreign.
The next part of the book is the least relatable for me, since it deals with domestic race politics in the U.S. He covers his experience with the American education system and how uncomfortable topics, mainly the history of race, are increasingly under attack from school boards. In this section, he mainly focuses on the fight over his own books being banned, taking readers to Columbia, South Carolina, to witness it firsthand. There are some genuinely powerful stories here, including one about a teacher fighting to keep one of his books in the curriculum, and through that, Coates finds both despair and hope in the situation, despair at how easily history gets rewritten or erased, hope in the individual people still willing to fight for the truth of it.
Now the final part of the book, the reason I bought it, and the crescendo of the whole thing, covers his trip to Palestine and Israel for the Palestinian Literary Festival and his first experiences in the Levant. This is easily the most masterfully written section of the book. The reason being, he does an incredible job connecting the struggle of Black people and Black history to the current situation in Gaza and the West Bank. In the treatment of the Palestinian people, he sees a direct extension of classic American systematic racism. He references Jim Crow laws and draws parallels to the current situation quite often, and he does it masterfully, never forcing the comparison, just laying it out until it makes uncomfortable sense on its own. He shares real stories of real people who are victims of what he frames as an apartheid state in Israel. The stories are so real and so powerfully written that I found myself seething while reading them. What this section also did was help me better understand what Black people have gone through, and continue to go through, in the U.S., seeing one struggle illuminate the other in both directions. He self-critiques his own past ignorance of the situation too, and you can genuinely feel his empathy on the page. He does an excellent job humanizing the conflict through real, individual stories rather than abstractions or statistics.
This book is a must-read, whether you already like the author himself or you're simply looking to understand different life experiences better. It's the kind of book that manages to be deeply personal and globally reaching at the same time, and even in the sections I couldn't personally relate to, I still came away with a clearer understanding of the world and the people in it.
5 out of 5 stars for me.