The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Sometimes I wonder how I got out—that is, how in god’s name a child who could barely write his own name in a straight line would become a writer.

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.

it just so happened I learned best away from my desk, where ideas and concepts could be made tangible.

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.

And that is because they do not study the language to speak it. Instead, they study the portion of the language that is most amenable to flashcards and pop quizzes: conjugations, vocabulary, declensions. This amenable portion of knowledge has great value, but removed from everyday life, it’s just theory.

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.

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.

But how would I have felt, barely eighteen years old, being presented with this same case for my genetic inferiority by a white professor in a room full of white students? How would I feel knowing that some of those students—maybe even my professor—agreed with Shockley? What would the lesson have been?

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.

I am trying to entrance, to inspire, to excite, because I think that is exactly what I needed. But often plain human decency will suffice,

My sense is that if I spend more time talking to you than I spend complaining about you, then something wonderful often happens and the enlightenment is mutual.

But I remember a different era, when the names of those killed died with the people who carried them.

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.”

I guess it’s worth pointing out the obvious—that the very governors and politicians who loudly exalt the values of free speech are among the most aggressive prosecutors of “divisive concepts.”

“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.”

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. And if you believe that, then you can believe that these inexplicable haters of freedom are worthy of our drones.

But books work when no one else is looking, mind-melding author and audience, forging an imagined world that only the reader can see.

but then I remember that American history is filled with men and women who were as lethal as they were ridiculous. And when I force myself to take a serious look, I see something familiar: an attempt by adults to break the young minds entrusted to them and remake them in a more orderly and pliable form.

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.

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.

the South Carolina 2022 budget contained a prohibition lifted, nearly word for word, from 13950.

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.

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.

This was the second time I’d heard of a reading group in this town as the epicenter of political disruption. From bell hooks on, books by Black authors helped Mary understand “why things are so fucked up.” And it was these books that had brought Bobbie out to support Mary.

A fourteen-year-old girl stood up and quoted from Between the World and Me, noting that in all her time in school she had never been assigned a book by a Black author.

but later I understood—school board meetings, and local politics, are small affairs, easily dominated by an organized faction, and that night the faction was Mary’s.

In this case, self-interest meant that here in the heart of Jim Crow and Redemption, ideas to the contrary could not be driven from the public square. And that is progress. It just isn’t inevitable that such progress continues.

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. A policy of welfare reform exists downstream from the myth of the welfare queen.

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.

They wrote histories, memoirs, and novels. And then, with the work of Redemption complete, more stories were published so that terrorists and bandits would be remembered as knights and champions. Jesse James is America’s own Robin Hood, an outlaw hailed in novels, film, and music for standing against the great forces of industrial capitalism, the railroads, and the robber barons of the North. Art hides the truth of Jesse James—that he was the scion of a slaveholding family, that he fought on the side of slavery and then against Reconstruction, and that in his first train robbery he wore a Ku Klux Klan mask. In time, even that symbol of terrorism would itself be redeemed.

Life imitated art, and Black people were left fleeing and fighting for their lives.

The fear instilled by this rising culture is not for what it does today but what it augurs for tomorrow—a different world in which the boundaries of humanity are not so easily drawn and enforced.

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.

As we walked the grounds of the State House, I thought about what it meant for a young student to visit these same grounds. I thought about what it must mean to walk amongst these Klansmen, enslavers, and segregationists raised up on their platforms to the status of titans. I thought about what it means to go back to the schools, where work questioning this beatification is slowly being pushed out, to the libraries that are being bleached of discomforting stories. And I thought how it all works not simply to misinform but to miseducate; not just to assure the right answers are memorized but that the wrong questions are never asked.

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.

Book of Names—seventy separate tomes stretching almost the entire length of the eight-meter-long hall that contains it, holding some 17,500 pages, each the height of an adult human being, and on those pages are the names of nearly five million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust.

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.

the earthworks at the Wilderness in Virginia,

but one image still haunts—two little girls facing the camera, waving, beckoning me across the years. Then they disappeared, and I felt myself standing on the conveyor belt of time, moving through a world that too was about to be disappeared.

and you wonder if human depravity has any bottom at all, and if it does not, what hope is there for any of us?

It is not just that the Jewish people were finally left to cultivate their own Promised Land, free from the terror of gentiles, but that upon that Promised Land they erected a Jewish state, which is to say the Jewish nation cleaved to an official Jewish flag, an official Jewish language, and an official Jewish army. And what that meant was not just freedom but power.

The shape of this story is not just the curving arc of justice but something more: a perfect circle. Not merely a righting but a restoration, a redemption.

All three Abrahamic religions—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—believe Temple Mount to be the site of a temple built by the biblical King Solomon. Beyond faith, Temple Mount is also the site of King Herod’s Temple.

allotted for Jews to worship under an agreement called the “status quo,” which divides the district of the Old City into separate worship zones for Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

But no one visibly Muslim passed through the Lion’s Gate in all the time we were made to wait. I could not quite put words to what I was seeing, but watching those soldiers stand there and steal our time, the sun glinting off their shades like Georgia sheriffs, I could feel the lens of my mind curving to refract the blur of new and strange events.

But as in the Old City, Israeli soldiers exercised total control over all movement through the town.

Palestinians are now barred from Al-Shuhada Street, while any non-Palestinian can stroll the street as they please.

But before I could get there, a soldier walked out from a checkpoint, blocked my path, and asked me to state my religion.

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.