The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.

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?”

But if he widened the aperture to the world around him, he would see that some people’s credits earned them more, and their mistakes cost them less.

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.

Jean Harlow is the anchor for Morrison’s claim that “physical beauty” is “probably the most destructive idea in the history of human thought.”

began to feel there was something deeply incurious in the approach of a man who insists on walking through the rooms of his childhood home to commune with ghosts, heedless of the people making their home there now.

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 war might be raging in the streets, but it could never be defeated there, because what they were ultimately fighting was the word.

It may seem strange that a fight that began in the streets has now moved to the library, that a counterrevolution in defense of brutal policing has now transformed itself into a war over scholarship and art.

What these adults are ultimately seeking is not simply the reinstatement of their preferred dates and interpretations but the preservation of a whole manner of learning, austere and authoritarian, that privileges the apprehension of national dogmas over the questioning of them. 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.

Literature is anguish. Even small children know this. I was no older than five, crying in the back seat of my parents’ orange Volkswagen while they argued up front. When they turned to comfort me, they were shocked to learn that I was crying not about their argument but about the grasshopper who starved in winter while the ant feasted.

But policy change is an end point, not an origin.

She’d been bred to be a Southern lady, but it didn’t really take. She had to be bribed into etiquette class with Bojangles.

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.

Much of the current hoopla about “book bans” and “censorship” gets it wrong. 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.

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 state doth protest too much.

I do not believe that this is a conspiracy. But more important, I do not think it is a coincidence.

An inhumane system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television.