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”

Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world. —James Baldwin

This meant that we could never practice writing solely for the craft itself, but must necessarily believe our practice to be in service of that larger emancipatory mandate.

A love of language, of course, is the root of this self. When

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?”

How could Eric Dickerson run so high, against all convention, bounding through holes in the defense, an obvious target that was never caught? These days I will occasionally watch an old clip of Roger Craig, through will alone, breaking off a forty-six-yard run against the Rams, or Marcus Allen reversing field in the Super Bowl. But back then, in an unwired world, stories, words, histories—none of it could be gotten on demand. If you bore witness to such a feat—as I did with Allen—it lived in memory until the broadcast gods decided you could see it again. And so a magazine featuring the exploits of one of these heroes was not just, to me, an assembly of words and stories. It was a treasure.

I haunt if you want, the style I possess. And I was haunted—by a style, by language. And, dimly, instinctually, I understood that the only exorcism lay in more words. I went to my father and bombarded him with questions, because that was the kind of child I was, always (to the annoyance of my siblings) asking why.

As a reader, I changed. I was no longer merely turning words over in my head or on my tongue—I was now turning over entire stories.

Armed with those raw sources and my own sense of how words might be organized—a style I possessed—maybe I could go from the haunted to the ghost, from reader to writer, and I too could have the stars, and their undeniable gravity, at my disposal. It was clear that such power must serve something beyond my amusement—that it should do the work of illuminating, of confronting and undoing, the violence I saw around me, that beauty must be joined to politics, that style possessed must meet struggle demanded:

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.

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 was writing about poetry, but I think her words apply across all arenas of writing. 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.

WHEN i stepped off the stage i knew i was home had been here before had been away roaming the cold climate of my mind where winter and summer hold the same temperature of need. and I held up my hands. face. cut by the northern winds and blood oozed forth kissed the place of my birth and the sun and sea gather round my offering and we were one as night is surely day when you truly understand the need one has for the other. a green smell rigid as morning stretched like a young maiden ’cross the land and I tasting a new geography took off my shoes let my feet grow in the new dance of growth and the dance was new and my thighs burning like chords left a trail for others to follow when they returned home as all must surely do to make past future tense. Sonia Sanchez, “Rebirth”

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.

Josiah Nott looked out at the world and saw great land masses, and to each he assigned a race and to each race he pinned an exclusive ancestor whose descendants were fit to rule or be ruled. “The grand problem,” he wrote, “is that which involves the common origin of races; for upon [it] hang[s] not only certain religious dogmas, but the more practical question of the equality and perfectibility of races.” The problem of “common origin” was the problem of “common humanity,” and common humanity invalidated the warrant for African enslavement. For if we were all descended from the same parent, why, then, was one branch made solely for enslavement? This want of a specific warrant to plunder specific humans is as old as “race” itself. In fact, it is the whole reason race was invented. Africans had to either be excised from humanity or cast into the lower reaches to justify their exploitation. But evidence for this banishment has been generally wanting, while proof of the contrary is everywhere around us.

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? For even as I left the myth of utopic African origin, I still felt something—a sense that I could not die without going home. And I felt this even knowing that that appellation—“home”—was not a fact but a need, a wish, a dream.

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 don’t know what it says about me that I just sipped my beer and laughed. Maybe it was seeing my own gospel—the social construction of race—so dispassionately preached back at me. Maybe it was thinking back to my Black American friends and all our jokes about DNA tests and who is 100 percent African (none of us) and who is not. And then the humor faded. 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, so that even here in Senegal, Pauline was pining for Jean Harlow. Except the Jean Harlow was us.

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.

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.

Toward the end of my trip, the limits of this approach were becoming clear. I began to feel there was something deeply incurious in the approach of a man who insists on walking through the rooms of his childhood home to commune with ghosts, heedless of the people making their home there now. So on my last night, Hamidou and Khanata organized a group of activists and writers to come together.

We are, Black people, here and there, victims of the West—a people held just outside its liberal declarations, but kept close enough to be enchanted with its promises. We know the beauty of this house—its limestone steps, its wainscoting, its marble baths. But more, we know that the house is haunted, that there is blood in the bricks and ghosts in the attic. We know that there is both tragedy and comedy in this condition. Our own lives and culture—our music, our dance, our writing—were all crafted in this absurd space beyond the walls of “civilization.” This is our collective power:

All classes of a people under social pressure are permeated with a common experience; they are emotionally welded as others cannot be. With them, even ordinary living has epic depth and lyric intensity, and this, their material handicap, is their spiritual advantage. So, in a day when art has run to classes, cliques and coteries, and life lacks more and more a vital common background, the Negro artist, out of the depths of his group and personal experience, has to his hand almost the conditions of a classical art.

Our own Alain Locke, the great curator of the Harlem Renaissance, called this position our “spiritual advantage,” but I like the phrase he uses a paragraph later—our “vast spiritual endowment from which our best developments have come and must come.” I find the highest meaning in communing with those with whom the endo...

inescapable act: The first word written on the warrant of plunder is Africa. Someday there will be more—and I guess there already is: in Afrobeats and Amapiano. And I guess there always was: in jazz and our rituals of dap. And the lines are bending in amazing ways.

had come back. But my own writing had gotten here first.

The only book learning we ever got was when we stole it. Master bought some slaves from Cincinnati, that had worked in white folks houses. They had stole a little learning and when they came to our place they passed on to us what they knew. We wasn’t allowed no paper and pencil. I learned all my A.B.C.’s without it. I knows how to read and aint never been in a school room in my life. There was one woman by the name Aunt Sylvia. She was so smart she foreknowed things before they took place. Anonymous

that a coming technology might save me. School was not just a place of instruction—it was a first and last chance. 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.

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.

where I was free to make the knowledge my own as I best knew how.

commit a word to memory I must see it operate in multiple sentences, associate it with an image or, better yet, a story. A few years back, I had to study seventh-grade math for research and found that I could only make the information stick by pulling the numbers out of the air and matching them with the world I knew, so that the integer –236 became a business loan, keys of coke on consignment, a sharecropper trembling at the plantation store counter. What I am saying is that, like many people, I best remember a concept when I can analyze it and place it in the real world. In this, I am fortunate to have found writing, a form that must make the abstract and distant into something tangible and felt.

Schulz sketches the future to make us feel what we might if a tsunami struck: If it happens at night, the ensuing catastrophe will unfold in darkness…. Nonchalance will shatter instantly. So will everything made of glass…. Refrigerators will walk out of kitchens, unplugging themselves and toppling over…. Unmoored on the undulating ground, the homes will begin to collapse. The verbs are surreal, but the shock of them, the contrast, brings the inanimate to life. The switch to the future tense gives the coming disaster the kind of inevitability that her reporting, by this time, has established as true. And then there are the clever rhythmic sentences that powerfully evoke sight and sound: “The ensuing catastrophe will unfold in darkness,” or “Nonchalance will shatter instantly. So will everything made of glass.”

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

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.

Paulo Freire wrote of the “banking” system of education, in which students are treated as receptacles for information and judged on how efficiently—how “meekly”—they “receive, memorize, and repeat” that information. 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.

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.

Larry Neal— After Malcolm, the seasons turned stale. There was a dullness in the air for awhile. And you had gone, and there was a lingering beauty in the pain. —because even then I was entranced with the alchemy of beauty and events, the personal and the political.

don’t know that this mode of teaching is applicable everywhere—I don’t know that we can in all subjects be comrades. But I think many of us who are teachers and professors have forgotten that the syllabus serves the student, and all around us are teachers, administrators, and columnists who seem to believe that material should be hard for the sake of it and that education itself is best when rendered not in wonder but in force. I have never formally issued a “trigger warning” or explicitly carved out a “safe space.” But I know that all readers do not come to a text equally. Some come surviving a rape, and some come caged in their assigned bodies, and some come having spent their entire young lives in classrooms with fellow students who made mascots of them. There seems to be an opportunity here, for comradeship, an invitation to allow for a more conversational literature, to revisit accepted ideas of voice and authority, to recognize that students are humans to be challenged, not animals to be broken and tamed.

It is very hard to challenge a student who arrives in class feeling endangered. This was always true of me.

Don’t you ever, in all your life, let someone say what I said to you on Friday and offer no response.

entire exercise rested on a foundation of safety. I was at a Black university—surrounded by Black students and professors. Put differently, for me, the entire university was a “safe space.”

The fact is that I have been in “safe spaces” like Howard all my life, and they were essential for the necessary process of confronting a literature suffused with white supremacy.

Even today, you can find me admiring Thomas Jefferson’s elucidations on the evils of enslavement, all of them underwritten by those very evils themselves. And for much of my time as a journalist, I have been surrounded by people who, on some level, think of me as an exception that does not disprove their theories of white supremacy. Many of these people are themselves awful writers. But some of them are incredible—and I have learned from them, and, as it happens, so have you.

don’t really care much for hearing “both sides” or “opposing points of view,” so much as I care about understanding the literary tools deployed to advance those views—the discipline of voice, the use of verbs, the length and brevity of sentences, and the curiosity of mind behind those sentences. It is this last I find so often lacking. Great canons angle toward great power, and the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it. That incuriosity is what afflicts the dullest critics of safe spaces and the like. But if these writers, teachers, and administrators could part with the privilege of their own ignorance, they would see that they too need safe spaces—and that, for their own sakes, they have made a safe space of nearly the entire world.

I am trying to entrance, to inspire, to excite, because I think that is exactly what I needed. But

Those protests succeeded in implanting some skepticism in people who were raised on the idea of Officer Friendly. 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. That fear explains the violent response to the protests, but even that violence redounded to the benefit of the protesters because it confirmed their critique. What was the justifiably noble interest that required tear-gassing protesters blocks from the Capitol, or the deployment of secret police in Portland, or the literal cracking of heads in Buffalo? White supremacists came to understand this, too, and though violence was never forsworn, by the end of 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.

Nikole Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for her lead essay in “The 1619 Project,” which argued for America’s origins not in the Declaration of Independence but in enslavement. Nikole is my homegirl, and like me, she believes that journalism, history, and literature have a place in our fight to make a better world. I had the great fortune of watching her build “The 1619 Project,” of being on the receiving end of texts with highlighted pages from history books, of hearing her speak on the thrilling experience of telling our story, some four hundred years after we arrived here, in all the grandeur it deserved.

the values of free speech are among the most aggressive prosecutors of “divisive concepts.” And I guess it should be noted that what these politicians—and even some writers—dubbed “critical race theory” bore little resemblance to that theory’s actual study and practice.

“The goal,” as their most prominent activist helpfully explained, “is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and think ‘critical race theory.’ ” It worked. Today, some four years after the signing of 13950, half the country’s schoolchildren have been protected, by the state, from “critical race theory” and other “divisive concepts.”