by FEZOKUHLE MTHONTI
The debacle around Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest book shows us that no matter a writer’s individual acclaim, the liberal media establishment will never tolerate anything that fundamentally challenges its racist edifice.
In Michael Neocosmos’ excellent book, Thinking Freedom in Africa: Toward a Theory of Emancipatory Politics, the author presents three expressions of universal humanism across time and space.
The first is articulated in 1222 in the Mande Charter. The expression is simple: toute vie (humaine) est une vie,(every human life is a life). The second is a popular Haitian saying, believed to have originated in 1804. Again, a simple expression: tout moun se moun men ce pa memn moun (every person is a person even if they are not the same person). Finally, Neocosmos brings a more contemporary articulation of this idea through a movement called Abahlali base Mjondolo, a socialist shack dweller movement in South Africa. In 2014 and likely before, this movement offered an isiZulu expression: unyawo alunampumulo (a person is a person wherever they may come from).
These expressions center the human being as intrinsically universal, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, and class; three simple provocations that stand true despite constructed difference(s); expressions of an irrefutable call from history, guiding us through the present.
A more recent iteration of these expressions comes in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ newly published book, The Message. In this book, Coates grapples with how our reporting, imaginative narratives, and mythmaking expose and distort our realities. In three essays, Coates takes his readers to Dakar, Senegal, Columbia, South Carolina and Palestine. Coates is reported to “have seen with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.”
In a controversial interview on the US television network CBS, Coates was met with extraordinary vitriol by morning news anchor Tony Dokouipil. Turning to Coates, Dokouipil inquires: “What is it that particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish State, that is a Jewish safe place and not any other states out there.” Coates’ response immediately calls out the inherent bad-faith logic that undergirds Dokoupil’s interrogation: “there is nothing that offends me about a Jewish State,” he starts. “I am offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy no matter where they are.” Dokouipil interjects: “Muslim included?,” unmasking the double speak of liberal journalistic questioning. What is at stake here is not a balanced debate wherein opposing views can be expressed, but rather Dokoupil’s Islamophobia.
Coates responds:
I would not want a state where any group of people lay down their citizenship rights based on ethnicity. The country of Israel is a country in which half the population exist on one tier of citizenship and everybody else that’s ruled by Israelis including Palestinian-Israeli citizens. The only people that exist on that first tier are Israeli Jews. Why do we support that?
This is an important intervention from Coates. However, as the segment continues, the “debate” devolves in large part due to Dokouipil’s clear bigotry which at its core is located in his belief that Palestinian humanity is “unthinkable,” to borrow a phrase from the Haitian American academic Michel-Rolph Trouillot. It is important to note here that Dokouipil’s sentiments are not understood as an aberration to the institution of American corporate media. In fact, his views are commonplace. As Branko Marcetic argues in Jacobin:,
The past year of watching how the media and politicians talk about the war in Gaza has proven this true. Explicit calls for violence and even literal genocide (“We should kill them all,”Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee said earlier this year) against Palestinians go by with no comment, let alone condemnation.
Africa is a country for more