Barton Swain
The Washington Free Beacon, Oct. 13, 2024
“With The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates has become a clownish, postmodern Walter Duranty.”
Rarely has a book been so lavishly applauded as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me was in 2015. The book fetched gushing reviews, admiring interviews in prestigious media, won eminent literary prizes, and almost instantly landed on high school and college required reading lists all over the country.
The book’s rapturous reception, as I can’t be the first to note, rather undermined its central assertion that white Americans are natural-born racists and that the United States is and always has been rooted in white supremacy. A nation so constituted would have ignored Coates’s book, or suppressed it. I wondered at the time if he was made uncomfortable by all the praise or if he secretly hoped America’s cultural arbiters would denounce him and demand that bookstores and libraries remove his book from their shelves.
Evidently I was onto something. In The Message, the 49-year-old’s third memoir, Coates recalls hearing about a high school teacher named Mary Wood in Chapin, S.C., who had been sharply criticized by parents for having her students read Coates’s Between the World and Me. Plainly he had been waiting for such a moment: He recounts traveling to Chapin in order to attend the school board meeting in which Wood’s case would receive a hearing. At a previous meeting of this school board, parents had lined up to demand her firing, some claiming that her assignment violated a state budget proviso forbidding Critical Race Theory.
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