The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

For you there can be no real distance between writing and politics.

The goal is to haunt—to have them think about your words

I lived in a house overflowing with language organized into books, most of them concerned with “the community,”

was made clear to me that words could haunt not only in form, not only in their rhythm and roundness, but in their content.

To write like this, to imagine the enslaved, the colonized, the conquered as human beings has always been a political act.

this tradition of writing, of drawing out a common humanity, is indispensable to our future,

You cannot act upon what you cannot see.

the sharpening of our writing as the sharpening of our quality of light.

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.

a grand theory had to be crafted and an array of warrants produced, all of them rooted in a simple assertion of fact: The African was barely human at all.

Ta-Nehisi,” a designation in Ancient Egyptian for the kingdom of Nubia, sometimes translated as “Land of the Blacks.”

when the first of us were carried off. Entire worldviews, systems of study, political movements, wars, and literature were birthed by that one act.

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

A political order is premised not just on who can vote but on what they can vote for, which is to say on what can be imagined.

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,

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.

The cradle of material change is in our imagination and ideas.

we have the burden of crafting new language and stories that allow people to imagine that new policies are possible.

Novels, memoirs, paintings, sculptures, statues, monuments, films, miniseries, advertisements, and journalism all order our reality.

The arts tell us what is possible and what is not, because, among other things, they tell us who is human and who is not.

the way the bully pretends to be the victim to add virtue to his violence.

to miseducate; not just to assure the right answers are memorized but that the wrong questions are never asked.

Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere.

it occurred to me that Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself.

I want to tell you that your oppression will not save you, that being a victim will not enlighten you, that it can just as easily deceive you.

you are ultimately in their world and are thus compelled to speak to them through their symbols and stories.

you can see the world and still never see the people in it.

there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires,

Ancestors are important to me—they live on for me, not as ghosts but through words.

it is the journalists themselves who are playing god—it is the journalists who decide which sides are legitimate

When you are erased from the argument and purged from the narrative, you do not exist.

the dialect of liberal expansionism—with its descriptions of barbaric natives and promises of the great improvements brought to the savages

how hard it is to truly acknowledge your place in a system whose actions indict your conscience.

“Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians.”

the country’s papers and magazines preferred writing about Palestinians to allowing Palestinians to write.

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

If Palestinians are to be truly seen, it will be through stories woven by their own hands—not by their plunderers, not even by their comrades.