The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

What I saw here was my city, which was connected to other cities whose mores and codes were then being rhapsodized in mixtapes and music videos—Gods and Earths, Gangstas and Queens. But here was another dead star, with another gravity, pulling me across centuries, until I saw that even there the rules and mores, which I had taken to be ours alone, still held. And through words

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.

It was not news to me that I was privileged, as a man, but I now felt that privilege with new horror. I thought about my own career and understood that whatever its challenges, a rape button did not rank among them.

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.

Who is he talking about?

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.

to make past future tense.

What does to make past future tense mean?

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,

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.

If a “Black Egypt” was what the Niggerologists feared, then we would insist on its truth and take it to its logical conclusion: We were born not to be slaves but to be royalty.

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.”

Don't understand fully what he's trying to say

On that count we settled for humor, joking about how most Africans, who have never lived under the one-drop rule, see African Americans. The lines were blurry. LeBron James was Black. Beyoncé was mixed, despite having two Black parents by the American definition. Her husband, Jay-Z, was Black because he was a “rapper” and not a “singer.” Likewise, Steph Curry—two Black parents notwithstanding—would be mixed, but he played basketball, and so was Black. His wife, though—she was mixed. And what of me. “You’re mixed, Ta-Nehisi,” Khanata replied, laughing. “Look, I understand what Black is in America. I get that you’re Black there, but here you are mixed. That’s how we see most Black Americans.”

I feel this as a mixed person.

Khanata pointed out that in Senegal this “mixed” look is treasured. Black Americans are seen as cool, glamorous, and even beautiful because we are mixed. And many of the Senegalese women take steps—from straightening hair to lightening skin—to get that “Black American/mixed” look. This did surprise me. The one-drop rule had shaped us and then reached across the ocean to shape them,

What America does has influenced. Good or bad.

The valuing of light skin was obviously not new to me as a Black American, but to encounter the idea here, to know that even “back home” Pauline would not be safe, was chilling.

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

What's the word? The plunderer’s canon?

I’ve walked the spiraling halls of the National Museum of African-American History, a journey that begins in the depths of a slave ship.

But the real control belongs to the occupying power, with predictable results: Israelis regularly tour Al-Aqsa, while Palestinians are barred from the Western Wall.

On seeing these cisterns, 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.

And I was in that world, even as I walked haltingly through Yad Vashem, which is, among other things, a grand narrative of conquered ancestors built by their conquering progeny. I can see that, now that I have walked the land. But there was a time when I took my survey from afar, and invoked this same land to service my own, more narrow story. It hurts to tell you this. It hurts to know that in my own writing I have done to people that which, in this writing, I have inveighed against—that I have reduced people, diminished people, erased people. I want to tell you I was wrong. 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. I learned that here. In Haifa. In Ramallah. And especially here at Yad Vashem. So this is another story about writing, about power, about settling accounts, a story not of redemption but of reparation.

Just wow. Have to still do the work no matter what you've been through. Not above it.

All that week I listened to Palestinians invoking that tradition, invoking James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, or Angela Davis, explaining how these writers and activists revealed something of their own struggle to them.

Similarities with Black struggle. Compares Palestinians .

and I had little reason to feel that such trailblazing efforts would remain in Palestine. And at that I despaired.

Hate will grow unless we stop it intentionally.

I was standing in a park bearing Kahane’s name in which he and his mass-murdering acolyte were memorialized, a park that rested in a settlement sanctioned and subsidized by the state that claims to denounce him.

My readers have a general idea of the history of colonization in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonization being carried on with the consent of the native population.

This narrative of a barbaric Palestine plagued by filth and chaos, as contrasted with an ostensibly pristine and orderly West, has never faded.

Othering

Jackson understands London’s sanitation problems structurally—from 1801 to 1901, the city’s population grew from one million to six million. But Shavit’s narrative of Jaffa’s sanitation problems is about the people themselves.

A way of othering is marking as dirty

The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else. I could hear that same pain in Avner’s and Guy’s words. They were raised under the story that the Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been confronted with an incredible truth—that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing.

No ultimate victim.

But the security of Israel did not just require an agreement with apartheid—it required that Israel practice apartheid itself. Israel’s defenders claim that the apartheid charge, like the charge of colonialism, is little more than ad hominem seeking to undermine that last redoubt of the Jewish people. Human rights groups disagree and point to the definition enshrined in international law, which defines the crime of apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.” This definition matched everything I saw on the ground during my trip.

“What wounds you most,” writes Darwish, “is that ‘there’ is so close to ‘here.’ ”

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