Delete This Message
13th October 2024
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.
At the meeting, Coates no doubt hoped to witness a string of fat Southern ignoramuses denouncing his book. In the event, he’s obliged to say, all the speakers expressed support for the embattled teacher and her use of Between the World and Me. “No one, not a single speaker, stood up to support the book’s banning,” he writes. He explains this oddity by noting that “school board meetings, and local politics, are small affairs, easily dominated by an organized faction, and that night the faction was Mary’s.” Uh-huh.