The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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.

History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates or justifies political order. So it was with Josiah Nott looking back to Ancient Egypt to justify slavery. And so it is with the American Revolution and the founding of a great republic, or the Greatest Generation who did not fight to defend merely the homeland but the entire world. If you believe that history, then you are primed to believe that the American state is a force for good, that it is the world’s oldest democracy, and that those who hate America hate it for its freedoms.

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. And our political imagination is rooted in our history, our culture, and our myths. That the country’s major magazines, newspapers, publishing houses, and social media were suddenly lending space to stories that questioned the agreed-upon narrative meant that Americans, as a whole, might begin to question them too. And a new narrative—and a new set of possibilities—might then be born. Freire knew: The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students’ creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors use their “humanitarianism” to preserve a profitable situation. Thus they react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality but always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another.

imagine my books to be my children, each with its own profile and way of walking through the world. My eldest, The Beautiful Struggle, is the honorable, hardworking son. He has that union job my father once aspired to, four kids, and a wife he met in high school. My second son, Between the World and Me, is the “gifted” one, or rather the one whose gifts are most easily translated to the rest of the world. He plays in the NBA, enjoys the finer things, and talks more than he should. I see We Were Eight Years in Power as the insecure one, born in the shadow of my “gifted” son and who has never quite gotten over it. He has problems. We don’t talk about him much. All these children suspect that my daughter, my baby girl, The Water Dancer, is my favorite. Perhaps. She certainly is the one that is most like me—if a little better, more confident, and more self-assured. I see my books this way because it helps me remember that though they are made by me, they are not ultimately mine. They leave home, travel, have their own relationships, and leave their own impressions. I’ve learned it’s best to, as much as possible, stay out of the way and let them live their own lives.

My work is to set the table, craft the argument, render the world as I imagine it, and then go. The late Jamal Khashoggi was fond of the Arabic proverb “Say your word, then leave.” I try to live by that, because I am at my worst out there defending my children, and at my best making more of them.

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. It’s not surprising that everyday people grappling with laundry, PTA meetings, and bills do not always see the device and the deception. But the difference is clear—Mary Wood’s protesting students were not looking to attach a warning to Between the World and Me about its disturbing imagery or themes but to have the book, by force of law, removed from the state’s school altogether.

Literature is anguish.

Advanced Placement English, to be precise. For the exam, students would have to write an argumentative essay themselves, and to help them learn how, she’d called upon Between the World and Me, my loud and boisterous second son. Perhaps I am straining the metaphor, but I really did feel like one of my children had gone and gotten someone else into trouble.

Writing is all process to me, not finished work. It begins in the kind of anguish South Carolina sought to forbid, sometimes originating in something I’ve read, but more often in the world itself—in peoples and systems whose declared aims run contrary to their actions. And through reading, through reporting, I begin to comprehend a truth. That moment of comprehension is ecstatic. Writing and rewriting is the attempt to communicate not just a truth but the ecstasy of a truth. It is not enough for me to convince the reader of my argument; I want them to feel that same private joy that I feel alone. When I go out in the world, it’s gratifying to hear that people have shared part of that joy, but Mary didn’t just enjoy reading the book. The book had brought her into the fight.

What I wanted was to be Mary for a moment, to understand how she came to believe that it was worth risking her job over a book.

Novels, memoirs, paintings, sculptures, statues, monuments, films, miniseries, advertisements, and journalism all order our reality. Jim Crow segregation—with its signage and cap-doffing rituals—was both policy and a kind of public theater. 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. All the Gold Dust Twins and Korn Kinks, all the Sambos and Niggerheads, all the spooks and coons, all the Uncle Bens and Aunt Jemimas, all the Nigger-Dies-First and Black-Bitch-Craves-Dick are, at their core, the founding myths of an empire.

And I thought about myself back in Baltimore and what I was being trained for. I was saved by the books in my house, by the implicit message that learning does not belong exclusively in schools. Who would I be, left to the devices of those who seek to shrink education, to make it orderly and pliable? I don’t know. But I know what I would not be: a writer. 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.

If this had happened in America, I would have told you that the soldier who stopped me was Black, and I guess he was here too. In fact, there were “Black” soldiers everywhere lording their power over the Palestinians, many of whom would, in America, have been seen as “white.” Again I felt the mental lens curving against the light and was reminded of something I have long known, something I’ve written and spoken about, but still was stunned to see here in such stark detail: that race is a species of power and nothing else. And I knew here, in this moment, how I would have fallen in the hierarchy of power if I had told that Black soldier that I was a Muslim. And on that street so far from home, I suddenly felt that I had traveled through time as much as through space.

The separate and unequal nature of Israeli rule is both intense and omnipresent—something I saw directly. The roads and highways we traveled were marked off for license plates of different colors—yellow, used mostly by those who are Jewish, and white with green lettering, used almost entirely by those who are not. As we drove these roads along the West Bank, our guide pointed out settlements—a word that I had always taken to refer to rugged camps staked out in the desert but in fact the settlements are more akin to American subdivisions, distinguished from the villages of the Palestinians by homes with large red roofs, as surely as a white picket fence denoted the suburbs of twentieth-century America and not its teeming cities.

All this I brought to bear, at length, in an essay for The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations.” As I wrote, I could feel it flowing through me—all the study of language, all the reading, all the reporting—all of it coming together in what felt to me like a dissertation with an audience of one.

But passport stamps and wide vocabularies are neither wisdom nor morality. As it happens, you can see the world and still never see the people in it. Empires are founded by travelers, and the claim of some exclusive knowledge of the native is their mark. I always imagined reparations as a rejection of plunder at large. And who in modern memory had been plundered more than the victims of the Holocaust? But my prototype was not reparations from a genocidal empire to its Jewish victims, but from that empire to a Jewish state. And what my young eyes now saw of that state was a world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy. I was seeking a world beyond plunder—but my proof of concept was just more plunder.

It is a precarious life. At the same time, there is a strong will to stay and keep working. There are communities whose villages are destroyed eighty times and they come back. It becomes part of how you live. It’s a mode of survival. This is how you live on the land. We will keep going back, building the things they keep destroying.