The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

to imagine the enslaved, the colonized, the conquered as human beings has always been a political act.

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

there is great pain in understanding that, without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime, in learning that the whole game was rigged in your favor, that there are nations within your nation who have spent all of their collective lives in the Trump years. The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else.