The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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.

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.

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.

“physical beauty” is “probably the most destructive idea in the history of human thought.”

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

But 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.

In a place like this, your mind expands as the dark end of your imagination blooms, and you wonder if human depravity has any bottom at all, and if it does not, what hope is there for any of us?

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

America—the world’s “leading racist jurisdiction,”

I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel.

I felt something that I have always enjoyed about reporting, about seeing worlds beyond my own—I feel myself disappear. When no one is holding my hand or guiding me, and I am watching people living out their particular customs, engaged in their small conversations, I can feel myself dissolving into it all.

Through a fifty-year period stretching from 1970 to 2019, Nassar found that less than 2 percent of all opinion pieces discussing Palestinians had Palestinian authors. The Washington Post ranked at a dismal 1 percent. The New Republic during this period did not publish a single piece on Palestine from the perspective of Palestinians.