The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

A belief in genius is a large part of what plagues us, and I have found that people widely praised for the power of their intellect are as likely to illuminate as they are to confound. “Genius” may or may not help a writer whose job is, above all else, to clarify.

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized.

You cannot act upon what you cannot see. And we are plagued by dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world. And it is not enough to stand against these dissemblers. There has to be something in you, something that hungers for clarity. And you will need that hunger, because if you follow that path, soon enough you will find yourself confronting not just their myths, not just their stories, but your own.

The systems we oppose are systems of oppression, and thus inherently systems of cowardice. They work best in the dark, their essence tucked away and as unexamined as the great American pastime was once to me. But then a writer told me a story and I saw something essential and terrible about the world. All our conversations of technique, of rhythm and metaphor, ultimately come down to this—to the stories we tell, to the need to haunt, which is to say to make people feel all that is now at stake.

It may seem strange that people who have already attained a position of power through violence invest so much time in justifying their plunder with words. But even plunderers are human beings whose violent ambitions must contend with the guilt that gnaws at them when they meet the eyes of their victims. And so a story must be told, one that raises a wall between themselves and those they seek to throttle and rob.

But I think human dignity is in the mind and body and not in stone. And I think the moment we root our worth in castes and kingdoms, in “civilization,” we have accepted the precepts of those whose whole entire legacy is the burning and flooding of a planet. And then we have already lost.

We have a right to our imagined traditions, to our imagined places, and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess that they are imagined.

that the very governors and politicians who loudly exalt the values of free speech are among the most aggressive prosecutors of “divisive concepts.”

History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates or justifies political order.

The oppressors use their “humanitarianism” to preserve a profitable situation.

If American history really does begin in enslavement, in genocide, then the lies, and the policies that attack writing from beyond the order, must not just be deemed possible. They must be expected.

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.

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.

Oppressive power is preserved in the smoke and fog, and sometimes it is smuggled in the unexamined shadows of the language of the oppressed themselves. The strategy banks on the limited amount of time possessed by most readers and listeners and aims to communicate via shorthand that is just as often sleight of hand.

We have lived under a class of people who ruled American culture with a flaming cross for so long that we regularly cease to notice the import of being ruled at all. But they do not.

The statues and pageantry can fool you. They look like symbols of wars long settled, fought on behalf of men long dead. But their Redemption is not about honoring a past. It’s about killing a future.

race is a species of power and nothing else.

that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing.

And I see the literal standard of white supremacy taking its place at a monument to some six million of its victims.

Writing is a powerful tool of politics.

An inhumane system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television.