The Message

Coates includes an epigraph from George Orwell’s Why I Write, in which Orwell laments having to be more explicit about his politics in his writing because the age demands it.

The essay is framed as an open letter to students who took a writing workshop with Coates at Howard University. Coates greets his former students as “[c]omrades” and then recalls how special his class with them was (1). The fact that he was teaching students from Howard, one of the nation’s premier historically Black colleges and universities, the original mission of which was to educate formerly enslaved people, added an extra charge to the class. The writing tradition that sprang from that history is one in which writing and politics are always intertwined because Black people have always had the task of writing as a people whose humanity is in doubt. Young writers today must focus on telling stories that are as grounded in particular facts as possible if they are to be good contributors to that tradition.

Coates then narrates his own development as a writer and journalist. Coates understood from an early age that “[w]ords are powerful, but more so when organized to tell stories. And stories, because of their power, demand[] rigorous reading, interpretation, and investigation” (13). He discovered this power in his father’s spoken-word albums, children’s encyclopedias, and the art of rap MCs. These narratives stuck with him and haunted him; Coates quotes a lyric from Eric B. and Rakim’s “Lyrics of Fury” to introduce the idea of powerful storytelling and stories as haunting.

Coates remembers reading a Sports Illustrated article on Darryl Stingley, a football running back who was paralyzed by a hard hit. He also read the autobiography of the man who hit him. What struck Coates then was how the article made the hit viscerally real to him, while the autobiography maintained a silence on the hit that, to Coates, had a whiff of shame to it. The stories revealed something true to him—that glorification of violence is central to football; this insight was especially important since he was a football fan who had never thought to consider that his enjoyment came at the expense of players.

The story haunted him because it was one in which violence won out, something that he was not accustomed to seeing in his children’s books. He was accustomed to seeing violence win in his tough Baltimore neighborhood, where he was the victim of bullies. Stories helped him better understand that reality but also helped him escape it. The article haunted and horrified him, but the desire to understand how words and stories could do that to him put him on the path to becoming a journalist. Coates doggedly pursued details about Stingley through childhood discussions with his father (who pointed him to a book), during high school, as a college student with access to Howard’s library, and later as an adult with the ability to do interviews. He went from being solely a reader to being a writer with a distinctive style.

Coates quotes Black writers Frederick Douglass and Audre Lorde. From Douglass, Coates learned that writers have to be prepared both figuratively and literally to explore unknown terrain in order to find truth. Douglass dared the unknown in living and writing the terrifying reality of freedom after having been enslaved his whole life. Lorde believes that self-scrutiny has a direct bearing on the quality of one’s life. One can’t change that life unless one looks at it with unsparing clarity.

Coates tells his students that there is power in a willingness to explore what has been unknown and what has been obscured by powerful interests. Writers and non-writers alike cannot attack what they can’t see. There is already enough writing devoted to telling the same old stories, and some of those stories are lies that powerful interests tell to perpetuate oppression. If these young writers really want to commit to their craft, they have to write with the clarity that Lorde recommends. Doing so is a fraught but rewarding path that will lead one to examine myths and false stories but also stories that allow the writer to reflect on who they themselves are.

This is a hard path since Black writers are already awash in myths that were originally designed to free Black people. It is also hard because powerful interests will claim that Black writers are not up to standards that have been designed to exclude them. Black writers have to be willing to ignore these standards and focus instead on clarity. This clarity is essential to that tradition of Black writing because what it reveals is nothing less than the historical narratives that powerful people have told to maintain power over the oppressed. Coates reminds the young writers that “[t]he systems we oppose are systems of oppression, and thus inherently systems of cowardice. They work best in the dark, their essence tucked away” (19).

As a reader, Coates has had the experience of discovering hidden truths through journalism. As he read firsthand accounts and investigative journalism around the #MeToo movement, the act of reading made clear how much male privilege he had. The stories made visible and concrete what all the abstract discussion of these issues in academia could not. Those are the kinds of stories that Coates believes writers should be telling: ones that make systems of oppression visible and that expose the narratives and myths that paper over that oppression.

Coates told his students in the workshop that he would write his own essay for them to workshop, but he didn’t deliver during the class. After having traveled to Senegal, South Carolina, Palestine, and Israel, he is ready to write with clarity for his students. He sees now that his students and all young writers “who must save the world” are part of his audience (20).