The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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?”

And so it 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. For Black writers it has been so often employed that it amounts to a tradition—one

“Genius” may or may not help a writer whose job is, above all else, to clarify.

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.

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.

He is five years out of the Black Panther Party, and it is now clear that the revolution will not be televised, because the revolution will not be happening at all.

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.

And so a story must be told, one that raises a wall between themselves and those they seek to throttle and rob.

For such a grand system, 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.

Nott and Gliddon dedicated their lives to clearing up any confusion about the racial composition of Egyptians. They authored the treatise Types of Mankind, which sought, among other things, to cleanse Ancient Egypt of any taint of Blackness.

schools teach “how the ancient Egyptians differed from the Negro, and why.”

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.

story on their lips and a warrant in their hand: Slavery must endure and the races must be separated to save their “wives and daughters” from “pollution and violation” on account of “the lust of half-civilized Africans.” Before that war, they had already transfigured slaveholding into the work of God, which sought to save “the African, coming from a barbarous state and from a tropical climate,” and transform these captives into “the happiest set of people on the face of the globe.”

It was not narrow prejudice that Roosevelt wielded but something broader, a story that would make his reader understand that “progress and development in this particular kind of new land depend exclusively upon the masterful leadership of the whites.”

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.

More often, they did not go on at all.

undulating (what a beautiful word).

Every year our school system turns out straight-A students who have taken the same foreign language for years and yet can barely communicate with native speakers of that language.

But there are people who would prefer that that question remain unasked, that the world and its affairs be reducible to flash cards and pop quizzes.

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.

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

Great canons angle toward great power, and the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it.

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.

Around the same time George Floyd was killed, 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.

But I can’t say I understood how profound this backlash would be—that a “1776 Project” would be initiated by the president, that the 2020 protests would be dubbed by some on the right as the “1619 Riots,” thus explicitly, if in bad faith, connecting the writing and the street, and that the White House would issue Executive Order 13950, targeting any education or training that included the notion that America was “fundamentally racist,” the idea that any race bore “responsibility for actions committed in the past,” or any other “divisive concept” that should provoke “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.”

And in North Carolina, Nikole’s tenure offer from the state’s flagship university—where she herself was an alum—was scotched at the behest of the Board of Trustees.

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.

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

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.

If American history really does begin in enslavement, in genocide, then the lies, and the policies that attack writing from beyond the order, must not just be deemed possible. They must be expected.

My first instinct is to laugh, but then I remember that American history is filled with men and women who were as lethal as they were ridiculous.

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.

Whatever the attempt to ape the language of college students, it was neither “anguish” nor “discomfort” that these people were trying to prohibit. It was enlightenment.

Some of us see the lack of policy change and wonder if the movement itself was futile. But policy change is an end point, not an origin.

What I seemed to be witnessing was as much about a book as it was something more localized—a kind of referendum on the school district’s identity.

And then in college, books righted the frame: She read bell hooks’s Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. When she finished, she called her mother and said, “This is why things are so fucked up.”

It was exactly the experience that the purveyors of 13950, the book banners, and those targeting CRT were seeking to prevent.

The stories justified the forced labor of feudalism—emphasis

The narratives about serfs—the Niggerology of thirteenth-century Europe—justified their exploitation.

You don’t raise the kind of looming statues I saw at the State House just for the hell of it. Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics.

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.

In turn, Wilson screened the film at the White House.

Inspired by Birth of a Nation, the second Ku Klux Klan was born, taking their rituals—which haunt us to this day—directly from the film. And then in 1919, four years after the film’s premiere, the Red Summer and the scourge of lynching swept the country. Life imitated art, and Black people were left fleeing and fighting for their lives.

In this context, the Mom for Liberty shrieking “Think of the children!” must be taken seriously. What she is saying is that her right to the America she knows, her right to the biggest and greenest of lawns, to the most hulking and sturdiest SUVs, to an arsenal of infinite AR-15s, rests on a hierarchy, on an order, helpfully explained and sanctified by her country’s ideas, art, and methods of education.

This is not about me or any writer of the moment. It is about writers to come—the boundaries of their imagination, the angle of their

thinking, the depth of their questions.