Two timely, related books: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message and Omar El Akkad’s One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This. Both are reporters and both make a plea for the humanization of those whose victimhood is conveniently ignored by the media. The world view of both writers springs from a personal history that is inextricable from the objective realities they witness and report.
Coates travels to Dakar, Senegal, to retrace the origins of the slave trade, and experiences a conflicting sense of himself as, simultaneously, belonging as Black but foreign as American. He then travels through Israel and the West Bank and is shocked by the systematic oppression of Palestinians under Israeli rule. When he notices that some houses have cisterns on the roof to catch rainwater and others do not, he learns that Israelis are given permits to have cisterns but Palestinians are almost always denied that permission. He relates these conditions to what his slave ancestors experienced in the South.
Omar El Akkad recounts his family’s journey from their native Egypt to Qatar then Canada and eventually the United States. In due course, after college, he becomes a journalist, a war reporter covering the invasion of Afghanistan and other conflicts for major Canadian and American newspapers. Years later, he is jolted out of his comfortable middle-class life in Oregon with his wife and child, by the Gaza war and its brutality. He is particularly shocked out of his complacency by the dehumanizing way in which the relentless bombing of Gaza is covere in the Western media. He had believed that American society would not violate its own rights, freedoms and principles beyond a certain point. But El Akkad does not absolve himself of the human struggle to fully empathize with the suffering of others: he notes that a momentary fright over the health of his five-year-old daughter terrifies him beyond anything he sees on the news.
