The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Bad things began to happen to me and the people around me: beatdowns, bankings, tool poppings, jewel runnings.

I know what beatdowns are, but I don't know the rest and neither does Google...

I have found that people widely praised for the power of their intellect are as likely to illuminate as they are to confound. “Genius” may or may not help a writer whose job is, above all else, to clarify.

So I don’t really worry about the young, whose excesses are confined to lecture halls and quadrangles, so much as I fear the old, whose tyrannies are legislative.

History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates or justifies political order.

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.

Writing and rewriting is the attempt to communicate not just a truth but the ecstasy of a truth.

But virtues should be signaled, and the signalers should act to make their virtues manifest. It is the latter, not the former, that is the problem.

A system of supremacy justifies itself through illusion, so that those moments when the illusion can no longer hold always come as a great shock. The Trump years amazed a certain kind of white person; they had no reference for national vulgarity, for such broad corruption and venality, until it was too late. The least reflective of them say, “This is not America.” But some of them suspect that it is America, and 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.

I can hear the response now: "so it's racist to criticize Trump?"

The special nature of Israel’s mission as antiracist flows through the words of its own leaders, from David Ben-Gurion (“A Jew can’t be for discrimination”) to Shimon Peres (“A Jew who accepts apartheid ceases to be a Jew”) to Benjamin Netanyahu (“For the Jewish people, apartheid is the ultimate abomination. It is an expression of the cruelest inhumanity. Israel will do everything possible to eliminate this odious system”). But this rhetoric cannot stand against the record.