Ta-Nehisi Coates sees free speech as antidote to crisis of liberalism

“History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates or justifies the political order,” bestselling author Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in the third chapter of his new book “The Message” (2024).

If one sentence could serve as a thesis for his book, this is as promising a contender as any. Although “The Message” is ostensibly about the craft of writing (and what it means to be a writer in the modern era), the story that Coates weaves to get us there is almost everywhere preoccupied with the contradictions of liberalism, although he never actually uses the word. 

On the one hand, Coates yearns for a world where the arc of the universe bends toward justice and where all men are created equal. At times, he almost seems optimistic that America is closer than at any moment in history to fulfilling the promise of our founding principles. 

On the other hand, the history of liberalism is also vexed by the failures of liberal democracies to live up to their principles. Even today, we are witnessing the worldwide erosion of liberal values like freedom of speech and the press, due process, and academic freedom. As Coates said last year in an interview with PEN America, this is a “very long war” that predates the United States, and every generation must struggle to uphold the hard-fought freedoms won through protest and conflict.

Coates covers a lot of ground in his short treatise and lays bare the profound importance of free speech to democratic societies, arguing that we are shaped not just by the events of human history but by how they get told — which facts are conveyed or obscured, what language is used to describe the hero or villain, whose speech gets platformed or suppressed, and subsequently which ideas take root and grow in the minds of the masses. 

As in his previous books, Coates marvels at his having the incredibly good fortune of becoming one of the voices that gets to address an audience of millions, but he also reflects on the responsibility that writers bear to tell the truth faithfully as they see it — to speak freely — even if it means risking their reputation by challenging established orthodoxies.

“A political order is premised not just on who can vote but on what they can vote for, which is to say on what can be imagined. And our political imagination is rooted in our history, our culture, and our myths,” Coates writes, and points to the ways in which scholarship like the 1619 Project or critical race theory have challenged the founding principles of America. The culture wars of the past decade, as Coates describes them, were fundamentally battles over the political imagination, with writers leading the charge in radically rethinking what it means to be an American. 

“The war might be raging in the streets but it could never be defeated there,” Coates recalls, “because what they were ultimately fighting was the word.”

“The danger we present, as writers, is not that we will simply convince their children of a different dogma,” he suggests, “but that we will convince them that they have the power to form their own [dogma].”

While protests and culture wars of the past decade may dominate the headlines, history books, and documentary films made about this era in history, these are merely outward manifestations of the more profound struggle taking place within a growing number of individuals who have begun to question the validity of the structures and social order that underpins civil society. So important is this struggle, Coates suggests, that this is the primary underlying cause of much censorship that we see today — from book bans to deplatformings and attacks on faculty free speech and academic freedom — because nothing less than the liberal world order itself is at stake.

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Liberalism as we know it, or a civil society based on individual freedom and the rules-based social contract, undergirds democratic societies around the world. Liberalism was the guiding light of Enlightenment thinkers from John Locke to Benjamin Franklin, that all men are born with certain inalienable rights. Of course, any honest telling of history is filled with footnotes and clarifications, and the founding of America is no exception. Frederick Douglass also believed that all men are created equal, and as a former slave from Maryland who escaped to freedom in Philadelphia, his understanding of our nation’s founding myths challenged the patriotic dogma of the nineteenth century.

“​​What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim,” Douglass wrote in 1852. The rights enshrined in the Constitution, and the ethos that “all men are created equal” evoked in the Declaration of Independence, did not apply to all who were born in the United States. Douglass’ speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” proves the value of speech — because if we don’t let everyone have their say, some truths might go unsaid. 

Looking back at the publication of the 1619 Project and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Coates contends that these two events called into question many of the underlying assumptions that form the basis of American national identity, and a lot of people didn’t want to believe what those scholars and activists were saying.

“The war might be raging in the streets but it could never be defeated there,” Coates recalls, “because what they were ultimately fighting was the word.”

As Coates explains, states across the country saw the rise of censorship laws that sought to ban so-called “divisive concepts,” often defined so broadly as to exclude almost any critical discussion of race, sex, or gender in the classroom. FIRE vehemently opposed the enforcement of these laws at public colleges and universities across the country, and called them out for what they are — blatant attempts to censor free speech.

Far from being discouraged by the backlash to ideas that he believes are crucial to understanding life in the United States, Coates remains optimistic, buoyed by the examples set by writers who came before him.

“Writing is a powerful tool of politics,” he writes, pointing to authors who were controversial in their own day for speaking out — Harriet Jacobs exposed the cruelty of slavery, Ida B. Wells reported on the lynchings of Black men, and W.E.B. Du Bois “debunked Confederate hagiography.” They did this, Coates contends, “despite concerted effort to deny Black writers access to leading journals and publishers, to assault their schools and libraries, to outlaw reading and writing itself, and thus deny their access to this tool which is not just powerful but nonviolent.”

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This history is why Coates takes such a personal disliking to book bans, and why, at the end of Chapter 3 in "The Message," he travels to Chapin, South Carolina, where a high school teacher named Mary Wood had been compelled to remove his book “Between the World and Me” from the curriculum of her advanced placement English class. Instead of bigoted Southerners, Coates finds a community grappling with racial divisions and trying their best to bridge those divides.

In other words, he finds a willing audience.

Change is an iterative process. Progress is not inevitable. Through his travels in this book, Coates sees a world filled with messengers who have an obligation to speak out against injustice. Although he may be critical of what has become of liberalism and America’s founding principles, Coates concludes the book sounding more optimistic than he has in years because perhaps, just maybe, the next generation of writers will continue the struggle and bring America one step closer to truly fulfilling promises of liberalism.