The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

When I was a boy, back in Baltimore, it was never enough for some kid who wanted to steal your football, your Diamondback dirt bike, or your Sixers Starter jacket to just do it. A justification was needed: “Shorty, lemme see that football,” “Somebody stole my lil cousin bike just like that one,” “Ay yo, that look like my Starter.” Debating the expansive use of the verb “see,” investigating the veracity of an alleged younger cousin, or producing a receipt misses the point. The point, even at such a young age, was the suppression of the network of neurons that houses the soft, humane parts of us. For men like Nott, who sought not to plunder toys or kicks but whole nations, the need was manifestly greater. It was not just the conscience of the enslaver that had to be soothed but multiple consciences beyond his: the slave drivers and slave breakers, slave hunters and slave ship captains, lords and congressmen, kings and queens, priests, presidents, and everyday people with no real love for the slave but with human eyes and human ears nonetheless. For such a grand system, a grand theory had to be crafted and an array of warrants produced, all of them rooted in a simple assertion of fact: The African was barely human at all.

The truth is, I never felt fitted to my name. Its length and complexity draw attention and counter my desire to live quietly in the cut. It isn’t pronounced as it’s written, thus forcing me into a constant dance, where I first correct people and then assure them that it’s not their fault. The awkwardness was part of the point: My parents meant to mark me as a citizen of a country far different from the one in which I lived; my name was an artifact of a forgotten world and an aspiration for one yet to come.

On that count we settled for humor, joking about how most Africans, who have never lived under the one-drop rule, see African Americans. The lines were blurry. LeBron James was Black. Beyoncé was mixed, despite having two Black parents by the American definition. Her husband, Jay-Z, was Black because he was a “rapper” and not a “singer.” Likewise, Steph Curry—two Black parents notwithstanding—would be mixed, but he played basketball, and so was Black. His wife, though—she was mixed.

I don’t know that this mode of teaching is applicable everywhere—I don’t know that we can in all subjects be comrades. But I think many of us who are teachers and professors have forgotten that the syllabus serves the student, and all around us are teachers, administrators, and columnists who seem to believe that material should be hard for the sake of it and that education itself is best when rendered not in wonder but in force. I have never formally issued a “trigger warning” or explicitly carved out a “safe space.” But I know that all readers do not come to a text equally. Some come surviving a rape, and some come caged in their assigned bodies, and some come having spent their entire young lives in classrooms with fellow students who made mascots of them. There seems to be an opportunity here, for comradeship, an invitation to allow for a more conversational literature, to revisit accepted ideas of voice and authority, to recognize that students are humans to be challenged, not animals to be broken and tamed.

I imagine my books to be my children, each with its own profile and way of walking through the world. My eldest, The Beautiful Struggle, is the honorable, hardworking son. He has that union job my father once aspired to, four kids, and a wife he met in high school. My second son, Between the World and Me, is the “gifted” one, or rather the one whose gifts are most easily translated to the rest of the world. He plays in the NBA, enjoys the finer things, and talks more than he should. I see We Were Eight Years in Power as the insecure one, born in the shadow of my “gifted” son and who has never quite gotten over it. He has problems. We don’t talk about him much. All these children suspect that my daughter, my baby girl, The Water Dancer, is my favorite. Perhaps. She certainly is the one that is most like me—if a little better, more confident, and more self-assured. I see my books this way because it helps me remember that though they are made by me, they are not ultimately mine. They leave home, travel, have their own relationships, and leave their own impressions. I’ve learned it’s best to, as much as possible, stay out of the way and let them live their own lives.

We have lived under a class of people who ruled American culture with a flaming cross for so long that we regularly cease to notice the import of being ruled at all. But they do not. And so the Redeemers of this age look out and see their kingdom besieged by trans Barbies, Muslim mutants, daughters dating daughters, sons trick-or-treating as Wakandan kings. The fear instilled by this rising culture is not for what it does today but what it augurs for tomorrow—a different world in which the boundaries of humanity are not so easily drawn and enforced. 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.

Throughout the West Bank, I saw cisterns used to harvest rainwater. These cisterns were almost certainly illegal—the Israeli state’s hold on the West Bank includes control of the aquifers in the ground and the rainwater that falls from above. Any structure designed for gathering water requires a permit from the occupying power, and such permits are rarely given to Palestinians. The upshot is predictable—water consumption for Israelis is nearly four times that of Palestinians living under occupation. And in those West Bank settlements which I once took as mere outposts, you can find country clubs furnished with large swimming pools. On seeing these cisterns, it occurred to me that Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself. And more, it occurred to me that there was still one place on the planet—under American patronage—that resembled the world that my parents were born into.

It hurts to tell you this. It hurts to know that in my own writing I have done to people that which, in this writing, I have inveighed against—that I have reduced people, diminished people, erased people. I want to tell you I was wrong. I want to tell you that your oppression will not save you, that being a victim will not enlighten you, that it can just as easily deceive you. I learned that here. In Haifa. In Ramallah. And especially here at Yad Vashem. So this is another story about writing, about power, about settling accounts, a story not of redemption but of reparation.

I was away for ten days, ten days in this Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns. And every day I was there, I had a moment of profound despair. I truly wanted to look away, to go home and mumble some words about what I had seen in private. And maybe if I were left alone to my own devices, maybe if I were loyal only to myself, I would have done it. But I am a writer, and a bearer. I am a writer and a steward. I am not alone, and I don’t just mean ancestors but the people I met every day living in abeyance of Israeli rule.

When I was young, I felt the physical weight of race constantly. We had less. Our lives were more violent. And whether by genes, culture, or divine judgment, this was said to be our fault. The only tool to escape this damnation—for a lucky few—was school. Later I went out into the world and saw the other side, those who allegedly, by genes, culture, or divine judgment, had more but—as I came to understand—knew less. These people, white people, were living under a lie. More, they were, in some profound way, suffering for the lie. They had seen more of the world than I had—but not more of humanity itself. Most stunningly, I realized that they were deeply ignorant of their own country’s history, and thus they had no intimate sense of how far their country could fall. 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...

casus belli.

I felt a mix of astonishment, betrayal, and anger. The astonishment was for me—for my own ignorance, for my own incuriosity, for the limits of my sense of reparations. The betrayal was for my colleagues in journalism—betrayal for the way they reported, for the way they’d laundered open discrimination, for the voices they’d erased. And the anger was for my own past—for Black Bottom, for Rosewood, for Tulsa—which I could not help but feel being evoked here.

The plaque bore the flag of the United States and the name of one of its former ambassadors to Israel. I moved closer to read the inscription: “The City of David brings Biblical Jerusalem to life at the very place where the kings and the prophets of the Bible walked,” read the plaque. “The spiritual bedrock of our values as a nation comes from Jerusalem. It is upon these ideals that the American republic was founded, and the unbreakable bond between the United States and Israel was formed.” Here Alon abandoned his clinical disposition and raised his voice. The City of David “managed to get so mainstream that the American ambassador comes here and declares that this place is part of the glorious heritage of the United States of America abroad,” he said. “Now there is an American heritage abroad. It’s usually cemeteries in Normandy. Yeah, that’s American heritage abroad. City of David is not. And when you talk about white supremacy and when you talk about how things look here, this is why I think that the Evangelical church and the settlers found each other as a perfect match. Their mindset is the same. They do other things, but their mindset is the same—” I interrupted Alon: “I gotta take a second. Let me just sit down.” I walked away and found a seat in the shade, away from everyone. At this moment, all that I had seen across the days began to avalanche—the cave evictions, the massacre in Hebron, the monuments to genocide, the checkpoints, the wall of devouring, and so muc...

I’m not sure when, exactly, during my visit I first heard the term the Nakba. Perhaps it was after being held at bay at the Lion’s Gate. Perhaps it was while touring the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, where I saw the bulk trash that settlers from Long Island had tossed into the yards of Palestinian families. The phrase, which means “the catastrophe,” originates in the driving of some seven hundred thousand Palestinians from their homes in 1948 and continues in the perpetual process of ethnic cleansing I saw in my ten days. By the end of my visit, I understood the Nakba as a particular thing, ranging even beyond any analogies with Jim Crow, colonialism, or apartheid. 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:

The group spoke about politics in a manner of communal intimacy—the way my people speak when no white people are around.