The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

yawning chasm between wealth and want,

plunderers are human beings whose violent ambitions must contend with the guilt that gnaws at them when they meet the eyes of their victims.

so that even here in Senegal, Pauline was pining for Jean Harlow.

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.

The weakness in me is always talking. But so are my ancestors.

The tension of Jerusalem gave way

if you are predisposed to believe that you are in the seat of an ancient kingdom, then why can’t it be the throne room?

“Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians.”