The Message Book Club
February 23 @ 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Join us to discuss Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Message over coffee and donuts
🗓️🕚 Sunday, February 23rd @ 11 AM
📍 Lucy Parsons Center (4100 S 28th Ave, Minneapolis)
The book is available in audiobook format. Physical copies are available for purchase from @maydaybooksmpls (cash only!)
Quotes from the author from NPR’s “Ta-Nehisi Coates explores how oppression can breed oppression in ‘The Message’”:
On the need for more Palestinian voices to be heard:
We need more Palestinians to be enshrined to tell their story and to tell their perspective. … The people who are enduring, from my perspective, this system of apartheid have not been enshrined to speak about what future they would envision.
It would be as if we were trying to figure out segregation … and we completely sidelined Black people and deprived them of the ability to articulate what they felt the world should look like.
Imagine a world where there can’t be an “I Have a Dream” speech because nobody will cover it and nobody will give the opportunity for that message to get out in the first place.
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On differences he observed between the ways that Palestinians and Israelis are treated in the Israeli-occupied West Bank:
I was being made aware of the fact that if a Palestinian is arrested on the West Bank, they are subject to the military system of justice, whereas if a Jewish settler is arrested on the West Bank, they’re subjected to the civil system. … I was made aware of the differing water laws that govern [access] depending on who you are, an entire separate system of justice that was … separate and unequal.
As a descendant of someone who was, or peoples who are, born into a system of governance that was separate and unequal, it was very hard for me to not be struck by that emotionally.