The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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?”

I’m the arsenal, I got artillery, lyrics are ammo Rounds of rhythm, then I’ma give ’em piano

At the top of the sketch there was a handwritten caption—“Daddy reads all the time”—and another at the bottom—“Daddy says he reads to learn.” The captions were mine.

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.

That was how I got my African name—“Ta-Nehisi,” a designation in Ancient Egyptian for the kingdom of Nubia, sometimes translated as “Land of the Blacks.”

pronounced Ta Nehahsi

If a “Black Egypt” was what the Niggerologists feared, then we would insist on its truth and take it to its logical conclusion: We were born not to be slaves but to be royalty.

And now, approaching Gorée, I was a pilgrim on an ancestral journey, back to the beginning of time, not just to my own birth but to the birth of the modern world.

this part reminds me a bit of the blog post I wrote about going to Skellig Michael. different significance, of course, just similar vibes

He sighed as he recounted it to me and said, “I don’t think we are going to get back to Africa.”

I was six years old, and I had already begun to suspect that something was wrong with me.

I guess I should add that I’ve showed those notebooks to a few friends who have told me that the ADHD screams off the page.

my son was just diagnosed and this part made me cry a bit. It does scream off the page and I am so afraid that he will feel that same inadequacy and shame

What is wrong is their fetishization, the way they were allowed to outrank the actual body of knowledge held within algebra or English lit.

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.

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 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.

I love these characterizations. Especially since "We Were 8 Yrs" was the first work of his I read.

I see my books this way because it helps me remember that though they are made by me, they are not ultimately mine.

From bell hooks on, books by Black authors helped Mary understand “why things are so fucked up.”

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.

This arc—from Holocaust to nation-state—has been traced in film, literature, and global memory.

And so to make the case, I reached for the same story invoked by Yad Vashem—the perfect circle, from Holocaust to state—and Germany’s efforts to pay off its own inconceivable debt by making reparations to the state of Israel.

and somewhere in my mind, I was still a college dropout, still “Ta-Nehisi was restless today” written in lipstick red. I

Lydd, a city inside the borders of Israel where in 1948 the nascent Israeli Defense Forces massacred a group of Palestinians by, among other means, tossing grenades into a mosque.

Thus a redemption of a different kind was affected: By routing the savage “Arab,” by murdering his leaders, by confining him to the Bantustans of Tuba, or the reservations of Gaza, or the ghettoes of Lydd, Jewish national honor was restored in the traditional manner of Western European powers.

Zionism, which held that majority status within a strong Jewish state was the only true bulwark against antisemitism.

The astonishment was for me—for my own ignorance, for my own incuriosity, for the limits of my sense of reparations. The betrayal was for my colleagues in journalism—betrayal for the way they reported, for the way they’d laundered open discrimination, for the voices they’d erased. And the anger was for my own past—for Black Bottom, for Rosewood, for Tulsa—which I could not help but feel being evoked here.

The City of David “managed to get so mainstream that the American ambassador comes here and declares that this place is part of the glorious heritage of the United States of America abroad,”

And when you talk about white supremacy and when you talk about how things look here, this is why I think that the Evangelical church and the settlers found each other as a perfect match.

I think it’s best that way—for should that mythic Africa have ever descended out of the imagination and into the real, I shudder at what we might lose in realizing and defending it.

The link is colonialism, which has always had a racist cynicism at its core—a belief that the world is not just savage, but that the most dangerous savages tend to live beyond the borders of the West.