His new essay collection, The Message, is a masterpiece of warped arguments and moral confusion. But it is important to take it seriously, not because Coates’s arguments are serious, but because so many treat them as if they are. ...

If you read nothing about a subject other than this author’s work, how informed would you be? To what degree would you understand the big picture? 

On that metric, Coates fails spectacularly. Because Coates is not a journalist so much as a composer—one who uses words not to convey the truth, much less to point a constructive path forward, but to create a mood, the same way that a film scorer uses notes. And the specter haunting this book, and indeed all of his work, is the crudest version of identity politics in which everything—wealth disparity, American history, our education system, and the long-standing conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors—are reduced to a childlike story in which the “victims” can do no wrong (and have no agency) and the “villains” can do no right (and are all-powerful).