Home The problem with Coates is that he never turns his critical eye inward. Ezra should have said, “So you think Charlie Kirk promoted hate. Have you considered that some people might feel exactly the same way about you?” One punch I pulled in my review of his last book—which, let’s be honest, got me in enough trouble as it was—was a section I cut trying to get him to stop thinking about white people’s complicity in violence for a minute and start thinking about his own. He spends a lot of time in the book persuading ordinary Israelis to grasp their complicity in violent dispossession. You personally may never have hurt a Palestinian, he says, but the house you live in is yours only because of evil deeds your countrymen did and are doing today. The book ends with Hassan Jaber, a 91-year-old Palestinian in Chicago, who longs for the land he grew up on. This was in living memory. His family wants to return. Coates implies that any solution is hollow if it doesn’t involve this guy getting his house back. He analogizes their plight to every historical crime he can think of from Jim Crow to imperialism—but never anything that implicates himself. Coates is from Baltimore. The city was 80% white in 1940, and it’s about 25% white today. That’s hundreds of thousands of people who fled. By the time Coates was growing up, Baltimore was majority black and that majority was consolidating political power, which it holds today.
26 August 2026
The problem with Coates is that he never turns his critical eye inward. Ezra should have said, “So you think Charlie Kirk promoted hate. Have you considered that some people might feel exactly the same way about you?” One punch I pulled in my review of his last book—which, let’s be honest, got me in enough trouble as it was—was a section I cut trying to get him to stop thinking about white people’s complicity in violence for a minute and start thinking about his own. He spends a lot of time in the book persuading ordinary Israelis to grasp their complicity in violent dispossession. You personally may never have hurt a Palestinian, he says, but the house you live in is yours only because of evil deeds your countrymen did and are doing today. The book ends with Hassan Jaber, a 91-year-old Palestinian in Chicago, who longs for the land he grew up on. This was in living memory. His family wants to return. Coates implies that any solution is hollow if it doesn’t involve this guy getting his house back. He analogizes their plight to every historical crime he can think of from Jim Crow to imperialism—but never anything that implicates himself. Coates is from Baltimore. The city was 80% white in 1940, and it’s about 25% white today. That’s hundreds of thousands of people who fled. By the time Coates was growing up, Baltimore was majority black and that majority was consolidating political power, which it holds today.
