The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

if I spend more time talking to you than I spend complaining about you, then something wonderful often happens and the enlightenment is mutual.

But the simple fact is that these people were liars, and to take them seriously, to press a case of hypocrisy or misreading, is to be distracted again.

a fight that began in the streets has now moved to the library, that a counterrevolution in defense of brutal policing has now transformed itself into a war over scholarship and art.

But books work when no one else is looking, mind-melding author and audience, forging an imagined world that only the reader can see. Their power is so intimate, so insidious, that even its authors don’t always comprehend it.

an attempt by adults to break the young minds entrusted to them and remake them in a more orderly and pliable form.

The danger we present, as writers, is not that we will simply convince their children of a different dogma but that we will convince them that they have the power to form their own.

I thought about what it means to go back to the schools, where work questioning this beatification is slowly being pushed out, to the libraries that are being bleached of discomforting stories. And I thought how it all works not simply to misinform but to miseducate; not just to assure the right answers are memorized but that the wrong questions are never asked.

passport stamps and wide vocabularies are neither wisdom nor morality.

An inhumane system demands inhumans,