The Message

Content Warning: This section discusses racism, enslavement, and racist violence, including a reference to the murder of George Floyd.

Coates includes an epigraph in which a formerly enslaved person tells the story of how he and his fellow enslaved people surreptitiously learned to read and write even though their owners didn’t intend for them to learn. They passed this knowledge on to each other.

Coates explores the purpose of education and the power of narrative in this essay. As a young student, Coates was bright but didn’t thrive because he couldn’t follow rules or instructions. As an adult, he has been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and in retrospect, he realizes that this was a probable contributing factor, but he maintains that the deeper problem was with the education system itself. The purpose of the education he got was to make him compliant, not to foster the open-ended inquiry that he craved and that continues to form the core of his work. What he enjoyed but didn’t get much of was experiential education. He still remembers the things that he learned in hands-on settings. He learns best when he can take a concept, analyze it, and place it in the real world. Writing helps him turn abstractions into something “tangible and felt” (69).

As a teacher, Coates tries to practice a different kind of education than the one he got in school. It is built on a teacher-student relationship in which “the line between teacher and student is dotted” (75). It is also closer to a “comradeship” that acknowledges the humanity and biographical particularities of students (75). Students need to feel safe in order to learn in this way, so a lot of Coates’s work as a teacher is to create a sense of trust with his students and more simply to be a decent person to them.

Coates rejects the accusation—most famously articulated in Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind—that this prioritization of safety amounts to coddling. White supremacists are comfortable in the world because the whole world is their safe space. In that world, Coates managed to learn and still learns from writers, peers, and editors who, on some level, consciously or unconsciously, endorse white supremacist beliefs; the important thing about those people was that they had mastery of their craft or curiosity about other people—something that critics of safe spaces lack. Coates isn’t worried about young people. What people should be worried about are the old, entrenched interests “whose tyrannies are legislative” (80).

Coates contrasts the form of education that he fosters with educational theorist Paulo Freire’s notion in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that status quo education is like a banking system in which students are mere receptacles of information that the teacher deposits in them. Such an education does not equip students to question the purposes of what they are learning; instead, they are encouraged to accept oppressive societal structures. 

The protests over the murder of George Floyd in 2020 were just what entrenched powers feared if education upended narratives that support the existing order. People en masse rejected the narrative that law enforcement and the state are fundamentally good and began reading the many texts about race, racism, and American history that were published that year. Unsurprisingly, there was backlash. Panic over Nikole Hannah-Jones’s introduction to The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, an anthology in which she argues that genocide and slavery are central to America’s founding; the rise of book banning; and the pitting of parental rights against the rights of teachers (in the form of academic freedom in the classroom) surged.

Coates engages with these issues in his work, but he was never one for defending his work after publication; he saw his books as children who should be left to make their own way in the world once he wrote them. The cost that librarians and teachers paid for teaching his work changed his mind about that. He attended a school board meeting in Chapin, South Carolina (a suburb of Columbia, the state capital), where parents tried to stop AP English teacher Mary Wood from teaching Coates’s book Between the World and Me.

The background for the censoring of Wood was Executive Order 13950, signed by President Donald Trump to prevent the teaching of “divisive” concepts (83). In addition, a South Carolina education budget proviso prohibited the teaching of material that might cause students to feel uncomfortable, anguished, or guilty because of their race or sex (“General Appropriations Bill for Fiscal Year 2022-2023.” Subsection 1.93, 2022). Coates calls this a fool’s errand since “[l]iterature is anguish” if it is doing its job of forcing people to question narratives and myths they cherish (91). Despite the reversal of Trump’s order in the next administration, reactionary forces gathered steam and organized around the issue of quelling narratives that upset their faith in their narrative of America; they framed their movement as a counter to what they mistakenly believed was critical race theory.

Coates didn’t find what he expected in this conservative enclave of South Carolina. The first surprise was Mary Wood. As an undergraduate, Wood broke away from the banking concept of education by reading the works of authors who revealed to her what she had long suspected was the suppressed truth about America as a place where powerful interests crushed the oppressed. The second surprise was that on the day of the school board meeting about her teaching of the book, many parents were there to support her. They were there because they believed that Chapin students should learn from the same texts that students elsewhere were reading, and they felt that this kind of educational censorship confirmed Northern stereotypes about intolerant, ignorant Southerners. Those who showed up for Wood proved that some people in the heart of the “Old Confederacy” wouldn’t tolerate the suppression of ideas in public discourse. Coates notes that a good portion of those who spoke up were in reading groups in which they had encountered books like his.

Coates understands why books like his are the subject of contest over what schools can teach. Literature—stories—create the order by which we experience reality. If one teaches young people from texts that reject the existing order, symbolized in nearby Columbia by the monuments to Confederates, lynchers, and inveterate racists on the grounds of the state capitol, one creates thinkers and writers who will carry those ideas forward into the future. They will teach us to see that “we have lived under a class of people who ruled American culture with a flaming cross for so long that we regularly cease to notice the import of being ruled at all” (45). The rulers of the order are right to fear competing narratives, as these narratives reveal the lies at the center of the current system and offer an alternative.