The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

You cannot act upon what you cannot see. And we are plagued by dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world. And it is not enough to stand against these dissemblers. There has to be something in you, something that hungers for clarity. And you will need that hunger, because if you follow that path, soon enough you will find yourself confronting not just

their myths, not just their stories, but your own.

rightfully be considered full human beings. But I think human dignity is in the mind and body and not in stone. And I think the moment we root our worth in castes and kingdoms, in “civilization,” we have accepted the precepts of those whose whole entire legacy is the burning and flooding of a planet. And then we have already lost.

And there’s nothing high-minded about this. I don’t really care much for hearing “both sides” or “opposing points of view,” so much as I care about understanding the literary tools deployed to advance those views—the discipline of voice, the use of verbs, the length and brevity of sentences, and the curiosity of mind behind those sentences. It is this last I find so often lacking. Great canons angle toward great power, and the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it. That incuriosity is what afflicts the dullest critics of safe spaces and the like. But if these writers, teachers, and administrators could part with the privilege of their own ignorance, they would see that they too need safe spaces—and that, for their own sakes, they have made a safe space of nearly the entire world.

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. The

Again I felt the mental lens curving against the light and was reminded of something I have long known, something I’ve written and spoken about, but still was stunned to see here in such stark detail: that race is a species of power and nothing else.

But it was not just the literal meaning of “Jim Crow,” it was the feeling of the thing too. I say the words “Jim Crow” and a casket opens before me, and inside is a boy beaten out of his own humanity. I say “Jim Crow” and I see the flag of slavery waving above a state capitol. I say “Jim Crow” and I see men on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel pointing toward the shot. I say “Jim Crow” and Detroit Red turns to me and asks, “Who taught you to hate?” I say “Jim Crow” and I hear “poll tax,” “redlining,” “grandfather clause,” “whites only,” and each of these phrases conjures additional images too. But “Jim Crow” was the language of analogy, of translation, not the thing itself.

Zionism demands, as Levi Eshkol, prime minister of Israel during the 1960s, once put it, “the dowry, not the bride”—that is to say, the land without the Palestinians on it. And every expansionist power needs a good story to justify its plunder.

“One of our residents has a heart condition, and this was during this blizzard, and we called the police to help,” he said. “It’s so rare that we as Palestinians would call the forces of the occupation to help us. But we called them because he had a heart condition. They didn’t come.”

“There’s no justice for Palestinians,” Nasser said in reference to the courts. “It’s the opposite. Lack of justice. The courts are a tool of the oppressor, a tool of the occupation.”

But for Blackstone the tragedy was compounded by the fact that there was an obvious solution to the Land of Palestine—“a land without a people, and a people without a land.”

These were not soldiers but righteous, reluctant defenders of a long-persecuted people, killing only when forced to the brink.

There was a brute literalism to this process, a direct connection between the murky, symbolic claims of ancestry and the very real and exclusive claims being made on Palestinian land. And that process is ongoing.

This effort that I saw, the use of archaeology, the destruction of ancient sites, the pushing of Palestinians out of their homes, had the specific imprimatur of the United States of America. Which means that it had my imprimatur. This was not just another evil done by another state, but an evil done in my name.

Zionism and had little regard for, or simply could not see, its victims. Zionism’s victims. Even now, after all I have seen, my pen skips as I write this to you. I’m back in New York, sipping my morning coffee, Joan Armatrading in the background—“Are you for or against us, we are trying to get somewhere”—and just as over there, a beautiful sun is hanging in a cloudless sky. I’ve been home for a year, but sometimes I still dream that I am back in Palestine. Some of those dreams are pleasant—I am at peace on a cliff in Sakiya, I am folding green falafel into warm ka’ak al qud, I am feeling the crush and energy of Ramallah, I am smiling at a little girl in Tuba who wants to practice her English. So my pen skips here, as it should, because to be Palestinian is to be more than a victim of Zionism. And there’s something else.

good and loving as the neighbor may be; stupid is the person who relies on justice. Justice exists only for those whose fists and stubbornness make it possible for them to realize it…. Do not believe anyone, be always on guard, carry your stick always with you—this is the only way of surviving in this wolfish battle of all against all.

told, from 1974 to 1993, total annual exports from Tel Aviv to Pretoria averaged $600 million a year. Through all those critical years, Israel was not just an ally of South Africa; it was the very arsenal of apartheid.

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. Zionism—which from the outset sought to position itself as “an outpost of civilization against barbarism”—has never rejected these precepts. The Israeli historian Benny Morris has been celebrated for his willingness to see Zionism’s history with clarity and candor. Would that he could bring that same clarity to Zionism’s victims. In a 2004 interview with Haaretz, Morris described Palestinians as “barbarians who want to take our lives.”

It is not just the cops shooting your son, though there is that too. It is not just a racist carceral project, though that is here too. And it is not just an inequality before the law, though that was everywhere I looked. It is the thing that each of those devices served—a plunder of your home, a plunder both near and perpetual:

militias notorious for murdering civilians. The Lehi were openly racist, describing Jews as a “master race” and Arabs as a “slave race.” Setting up outside Deir Yassin, they battled the village’s Palestinian defenders throughout the day and, after taking the town, slaughtered at least a hundred inhabitants.

I had never once encountered. She spoke about the impossibility of finding work that allowed her to write as she wished, and I could tell by the way she spoke that this frustrated dream was not just hers but one she held for her people, for she too was a steward, and she too was a bearer, and she too had ancestors.

which is to say the power to haunt people, to move people, and expand the brackets of humanity. This is as true for those laboring under the shadow of enslavement as it is for those laboring under the shadow of apartheid. But that power needs a host, as sure as an arrow needs a longbow to launch

Through a fifty-year period stretching from 1970 to 2019, Nassar found that less than 2 percent of all opinion pieces discussing Palestinians had Palestinian authors. The Washington Post ranked at a dismal 1 percent. The New Republic during this period did not publish a single piece on Palestine from the perspective of Palestinians. 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. Editors and writers like to think they are not part of such systems, that they are independent, objective, and arrive at their conclusions solely by dint of their reporting and research. But the Palestine I saw bore so little likeness to the stories I read, and so much resemblance to the systems I’ve known, that I am left believing that at least here, this objectivity is self-delusion. It’s not that the facts of the stories are so wrong—though sometimes it is that—it is what is not said, the passive voice, the ceding of authority to military flacks, the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality.

we who bankroll apartheid are more ignorant for not hearing them directly from storytellers