“Coates on the Stories We Tell to Survive”
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Title: The Message
Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Category: Personal Growth, World History, Culture & Society, Philosophy & Big Ideas
What happens when the story you've been told about the world turns out to be a lie? Sam and Sophie open Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Message with that question and don't let it go.
They walk through the book's three journeys: Senegal's Goree Island and the Door of No Return, where Coates goes looking for a homeland and finds only a rupture; the West Bank, where he traces the administrative machinery of occupation back to Jim Crow; and Howard University, where students challenge him to tell a different story about Black life. Along the way the pair unpack the Dream from Between the World and Me, Coates' suspicion of objectivity, and why he refuses to resolve the argument he started.
If you've ever felt the gap between the story a country tells about itself and what you can see with your own eyes, this episode is for you. The takeaway: the story that comforts us and the story that's true are rarely the same thing.
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates. For the full written summary, the whole library is on 7minutebooks.com/app — over 6,000 fiction and nonfiction titles you can read or listen to in any language, with infographics on many titles. Unlimited access from $2.99 a month, $9.99 a year, or $19.99 lifetime.
Chapters
00:00Three Journeys, One Question00:41Goree Island And The Rupture01:57The West Bank As Jim Crow03:28Howard University And The Unresolved Argument04:25The Dream And The Writer's Duty06:11Reading The World Differently
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