The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

American history is filled with men and women who were as lethal as they were ridiculous.

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.

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 strategy banks on the limited amount of time possessed by most readers and listeners and aims to communicate via shorthand that is just as often sleight of hand. It’s not surprising that everyday people grappling with laundry, PTA meetings, and bills do not always see the device and the deception.

The arts tell us what is possible and what is not, because, among other things, they tell us who is human and who is not.

Making a charge according to the law of those you indict is a dangerous business. However much you try to remember your own motives, however much you may feel yourself to have succeeded, you are ultimately in their world and are thus compelled to speak to them through their symbols and stories. The need is even greater when you are a stranger to them, an adversary even, because your claims are always viewed with more skepticism.

They were raised under the story that the Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been confronted with an incredible truth—that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing.