Location:
Gilliam Concert Hall
Murphy Fine Arts Center
Morgan State University
2201 Argonne Dr, Baltimore, MD 21218

Please join Morgan State University’s Program for the Study of the Middle East & North Africa and Johns Hopkins University's Chloe Center and for a landmark event. Award-winning, bestselling author and Baltimore native Ta-Nehisi Coates will speak with Dr. Sara Rahnama (Morgan State) and Dr. Nathan Connolly (JHU History) to address the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world. Coates will address how traveling to Senegal, South Carolina, and, particularly, occupied Palestine caused him to rethink how he had accepted certain myths about politics, history, and social change.

Doors will open at 6pm, and the event will begin at 7pm. Books will be available for purchase. This event is free and open to all. No registration required.

About The Message:

Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,” but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities.

In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book’s banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation’s recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city—a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book’s longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.