The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. George Orwell, “Why I Write”

Haunt. You’ve heard me say this word a lot. It is never enough for the reader of your words to be convinced. The goal is to haunt—to have them think about your words before bed, see them manifest in their dreams, tell their partner about them the next morning, to have them grab random people on the street, shake them and say, “Have you read this yet?”

But violence was the antagonist in a story with a happy ending. It could never win, could it? But all around me violence actually was winning. That was the year when I first remember a child being shot over a trendy article of clothing; stories like that would soon become the background of my adolescence. And now danger swirled all around me—tales of razors slipped into candy apples, four-year-olds impaled with lawn darts. Stingley’s story pulled all this together and illuminated a new idea: Evil did win, sometimes—maybe most times. Bad things did happen, if only for the simple reason that they could.

Disturbing as this knowledge was, it made me stronger because it made me wiser. And the weight of this wisdom was intimately associated with the method of its delivery. Journalism. Personal narrative. Testimony. Stories.

I grew older. Bad things began to happen to me and the people around me: beatdowns, bankings, tool poppings, jewel runnings. I think the only way I ultimately survived was through stories. Because as much as stories could expl...

that sound and rhythm are even more powerful when organized into narrative.

To write like this, to imagine the enslaved, the colonized, the conquered as human beings has always been a political act. For Black writers it has been so often employed that it amounts to a tradition—one that I returned to that summer in Virginia with you. I think this tradition of writing, of drawing out a common humanity, is indispensable to our future, if only because what must be cultivated and cared for must first be seen.

to write, to draw that map, to pull us into the wilderness, you cannot merely stand at the edge. You have to walk the land. You have to see the elevation for yourself, the color of the soil. You have to discover that the ravine is really a valley and that the stream is in fact a river winding south from a glacier in the mountains. You can’t know any of this beforehand. You can’t “logic” your way through it or retreat to your innate genius. 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. Audre Lorde

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.

My father thinks he can fix the date of the sketch’s creation. It is long before your time—1978. He is five years out of the Black Panther Party, and it is now clear that the revolution will not be televised, because the revolution will not be happening at all. We live in a row house up on Park Heights, which my parents rent by the week, and making that weekly rent is the hardest thing they will ever do. My father has worked all kinds of jobs—training guard dogs, handling bags at the airport, and now, down at the docks, unloading salt boats. But this day, the day of the portrait, he has been told that there has been some sort of misunderstanding with the union and he will not be paid. He comes home with the weight of it all upon him. He is thirty-two, and maybe now he can feel the dread that strikes you at that age—a realization that the years really can slip away, like all those dreams of revolution, without leaving a trace. And his response to all that weight is incredible: He picks up a book. Daddy says he reads to learn. But what was Daddy trying to learn?

Ugh

he would see that some people’s credits earned them more, and their mistakes cost them less. And those people who took more and paid less lived in a world of iniquitous wealth, while his own people lived in a world of terrifying want. And what my father would have also seen is that he was confronted not just by the yawning chasm between wealth and want, but by the stories that sought to inscribe that chasm as natural. He would have pointed to the arsenal of histories, essays, novels, ethnographies, teleplays, treatments, and monographs, which were not white supremacy itself but its syllabus, its corpus, its canon.

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.

I am trying to urge you toward something new—not simply against their myths of conquest, but against the urge to craft your own. But this is a negative proposition—a description of what should not be, but not what should be—and it creates an absence in the place of a myth. How do we fill the void?

This is about the forest again—about the limits of genius, about the need to walk the land, as opposed to intuit and hypothesize from the edge. There are dimensions in your words—rhythm, content, shape, feeling. And so too with the world outside.

The accretion of imperfect, discomfiting life must be seen and felt so that the space in your mind, gray, automatic, and square, fills with angle, color, and curve—the potholes, the dented fenders, the fried bread, the walls of fabric, the heaping plate of rice and fish. But the color is not just in the physical world you observe but in the unique interaction between that world and your consciousness—in your interpretation, your subjectivity, the things you notice in yourself.

Teddy Roosevelt, reporting on his voyage to Africa, described a continent of “ape-like savages” whose brightest lights had only “advanced to the upper stages of barbarism” and had thus developed “a very primitive kind of semi-civilization.” It was not narrow prejudice that Roosevelt wielded but something broader, a story that would make his reader understand that “progress and development in this particular kind of new land depend exclusively upon the masterful leadership of the whites.” And from this foundational notion of “ape-like men,” “half-civilized Africans,” and “tropical barbarians,” the cinematic universe of Niggerology follows: the Gold Dust Twins, Korn Kinks cereal, Niggerheads, Nigger Hair tobacco, Sambo, Uncle Ben’s, Aunt Jemima, and Marse Chan—icons meant to denigrate our world and elevate theirs.

Morrison presents a Black woman aspiring to white beauty but not just a vague, abstract white beauty. Jean Harlow is the anchor for Morrison’s claim that “physical beauty” is “probably the most destructive idea in the history of human thought.” It is a grand pronouncement, made grander by use of contrast: the superlative (most destructive) enhanced by the chancy (probably), like sea salt over dark chocolate. Morrison’s “probably” is irony—an understatement that understates nothing. But what grounds these ideas is the specificity of how they land in the life of Pauline, the particulars of her story and language—the part and curl in her hair, the candy breaking her tooth, the pregnancy, and the simple, devastating declaration “everything went then.” Here is a woman whose condition is defined by a Jim Crow order, defined still further by a Jim Crow story—“A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment.”

A few weeks after I got back he called me. He’d just finished a history of the rebellion of the enslaved in eighteenth-century Guyana. He loved the book but was pained by how the rebellion concluded—not just in defeat but with its leaders turning on each other and ultimately collaborating with the very people who had enslaved them. He sighed as he recounted it to me and said, “I don’t think we are going to get back to Africa.” My father did not mean this physically. He meant the Africa of our imagination, that glorious Eden we conjured up as exiles, a place without the Mayflower, Founding Fathers, conquistadors, and the assorted corruptions they had imposed on us. That Africa could no longer even be supported in his imagination because the corruption was not imposed at all but was in us, was part of the very humanity that had been denied us. That is where his skeptical searching landed him—not on the shores of a lost utopia but in the cold fact of human fallibility. And yet here I was, on this boat from Gorée, my eyes welling up, grieving for something, in the grips of some feeling I am still, even as I write this, struggling to name.

Here is what I think: 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. Gorée is the name of a place my people have proclaimed as sacred, a symbolic representation of our last stop before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage, before, as Robert Hayden once wrote, our “voyage through death / to life upon these shores.” We have a right to that memory, to choose the rock of Gorée, to consecrate it, to cry before it, to mourn its meaning. And we have a right to imagine ourselves as pharaohs, and then again the responsibility to ask if a pharaoh is even worthy of our needs, our dreams, our imagination.

Now the amazement was my own: There I was on the other side, among family divided from each other by centuries. I had come back. But my own writing had gotten here first.

Black boys who failed at school did not, from what I saw, generally go on to better things. More often, they did not go on at all. I think that what we were being taught was less a body of knowledge than a way to be in the world: orderly, organized, attentive to direction.

There is nothing wrong with developing those skills—in fact, I’ve learned the hard way how useful they can be. What is wrong is their fetishization, the way they were allowed to outrank the actual body of knowledge held within algebra or English lit. The result was that “learning” felt like a kind of bait and switch. And this frustrated me because I truly did love to learn—it just so happened I learned best away from my desk, where ideas and concepts could be made tangible.

Which brings me back to my struggles in school. What was I supposed to learn? There is the obvious answer to that question—the times tables, spelling, grammar, the facts of American history—but I’m not so sure. Every year our school system turns out straight-A students who have taken the same foreign language for years and yet can barely communicate with native speakers of that language. And that is because they do not study the language to speak it. Instead, they study the portion of the language that is most amenable to flashcards and pop quizzes: conjugations, vocabulary, declensions. This amenable portion of knowledge has great value, but removed from everyday life, it’s just theory. Imagine learning to swim by reading and memorizing the steps of a front crawl but never jumping into a pool. Why do we teach our students this way? I return to the idea that seeing the world clearly allows for clearer action. I taught “The Really Big One” for its craft because it does a hard and necessary thing: It fuses beauty and politics in a way that clarifies our view and clarifies our action. Now that I can see the full scale of this disaster and the terror that will inevitably ensue, and now that I understand this as the eventual fate of a large swath of the western coast of my country, it is natural that I also now ask what our government is doing about it.

A teacher delivers the student information and the student succeeds by repeating it. But the medium is the message: What is being learned by students is not just the facts they memorize but the purpose of this knowledge: The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.

This makes me sad in so many ways. I feel the sadness of being back there in third grade, disappointing my teachers and parents, wondering what was wrong with me. I feel the sadness of knowing my parents and teachers were doing the best they could. And then, finally, I feel the sadness of knowing that we were all enrolled in a banking system and that, even now, there are young people laboring under this system, being told that their dreams of being a writer, or an artist, or even just an educated person, hinge on their ability to sit still in a square box, when, for so many of us, it hinges on the opposite.

students are humans to be challenged, not animals to be broken and tamed.

My sense is that if I spend more time talking to you than I spend complaining about you, then something wonderful often happens and the enlightenment is mutual. So I don’t really worry about the young, whose excesses are confined to lecture halls and quadrangles, so much as I fear the old, whose tyrannies are legislative.

I think that is what the white supremacists feared most—the spreading realization that the cops were not knights and the creeping sense that there was something rotten not just in law enforcement but maybe also in the law itself.

the summer they had learned a lesson: The war might be raging in the streets, but it could never be defeated there, because what they were ultimately fighting was the word.

journalism, history, and literature have a place in our fight to make a better world.

included the notion that America was “fundamentally racist,” the idea that any race bore “responsibility for actions committed in the past,” or any other “divisive concept” that should provoke “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” It’s true that the order was revoked after its author lost the next election, but by that time it had spawned a suite of state-level variants—laws, policies, directives, and resolutions—all erected to excise “divisive concepts” from any training or education. The flag of parental rights was raised. In Tennessee, teachers were fired. School boards in Virginia were besieged. And in North Carolina, Nikole’s tenure offer from the state’s flagship university—where she herself was an alum—was scotched at the behest of the Board of Trustees.

Insane

It may seem strange that 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 in the months after George Floyd’s murder, books by Black authors on race and racism shot to the top of bestseller and most-borrowed lists. Black bookstores saw their sales skyrocket. The cause for this spike was, in the main, people who had been exposed to George Floyd’s murder coming to suspect that they had not been taught the entire truth about justice, history, policing, racism, and any number of other related subjects. The spike only lasted that summer—but it was enough to leave the executors of 13950 shook. And they were right to be.

Insane!

It is very hard to be a writer from any community held outside of the promises of an order and be “content with a partial view of reality.” It is impossible to write truthfully of Black people, in all our genius and folly, in all our joy and anguish, and not disturb those who “care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed.”

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. I wish I were better at that part—expecting. But the fact is that, even as I know and teach the power of writing, I still find myself in disbelief when I see that power at work in the real world.

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. I see politicians in Colorado, in Tennessee, in South Carolina moving against my own work, tossing books I’ve authored out of libraries, banning them from classes, and I feel snatched out of the present and dropped into an age of pitchforks and book-burning bonfires. My first instinct is to laugh, but then I remember that American history is filled with men and women who were as lethal as they were ridiculous.

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.

it was neither “anguish” nor “discomfort” that these people were trying to prohibit. It was enlightenment.

I understand the impulse to dismiss the import of the summer of 2020, to dismiss the “national conversations,” the raft of TV specials and documentaries, even the protests themselves. Some of us see the lack of policy change and wonder if the movement itself was futile. But policy change is an end point, not an origin. The cradle of material change is in our imagination and ideas. And whereas white supremacy, like any other status quo, can default to the clichéd claims and excuses for the world as it is—bad cops are rotten apples, America is guardian of the free world—we have the burden of crafting new language and stories that allow people to imagine that new policies are possible. And now, even here in Chapin, some people, not most (it is hardly ever most), had, through the work of Black writers, begun that work of imagining.

doubt that anyone ever parts with power in the name of charity.

Jesse James is America’s own Robin Hood, an outlaw hailed in novels, film, and music for standing against the great forces of industrial capitalism, the railroads, and the robber barons of the North. Art hides the truth of Jesse James—that he was the scion of a slaveholding family, that he fought on the side of slavery and then against Reconstruction, and that in his first train robbery he wore a Ku Klux Klan mask. In time, even that symbol of terrorism would itself be redeemed.

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. And so the Redeemers of this age look out and see their kingdom besieged by trans Barbies, Muslim mutants, daughters dating daughters, sons trick-or-treating as Wakandan kings. The fear instilled by this rising culture is not for what it does today but what it augurs for tomorrow—a different world in which the boundaries of humanity are not so easily drawn and enforced. In this context, the Mom for Liberty shrieking “Think of the children!” must be taken seriously. What she is saying is that her right to the America she knows, her right to the biggest and greenest of lawns, to the most hulking and sturdiest SUVs, to an arsenal of infinite AR-15s, rests on a hierarchy, on an order, helpfully explained and sanctified by her country’s ideas, art, and methods of education. That is the heart of it.

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.

The human mind can only conceive of so much tragedy at once—and when lost lives spiral into the hundreds, then thousands, and then millions, when murder becomes a wide, seemingly unending mass, we lose our ability to see its victims as anything more than an abstract, almost theoretical, collection of lives. In this way, a second crime is perpetrated: Human beings are reduced to a gruel of misery. At Yad Vashem, the sheer enormity of the book mirrors the breadth of the crime it records, but the names, each one clearly inscribed, stand out against the mass of the thing, like stars dotting the night. In this sense, the Book of Names does exactly what we writers seek to do. It clarifies.

I felt guilty for needing these rare moments of narrative relief, if only because writing has taught me the virtue of facing horror with no demand for a cheap and easy hope.

Israel’s formation, the light out of the Shoah’s darkness, has long been held up as an uplifting coda to the Holocaust, an exemplar of the long arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. I saw the connection made right there at Yad Vashem in one of its last exhibits: a black-and-white reel of David Ben-Gurion declaring the creation of the Israeli state.

race is a species of power and nothing else.