The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Haunt. You’ve heard me say this word a lot. It is never enough for the reader of your words to be convinced. 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,

I am writing in the wake of #MeToo, which was, among everything else, a movement birthed by words. For it is one thing to sketch a world where “sexual assault is a problem in the workplace” and quite another to detail Manhattan offices with rape doors, or star anchors ambushing assistants on vacation, or actors who claim to be “male feminists” but leave a trail of abuse behind them.

All our conversations of technique, of rhythm and metaphor, ultimately come down to this—to the stories we tell, to the need to haunt, which is to say to make people feel all that is now at stake.

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.

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.

The remarking on Senegalese beauty, the tone of it, betrays a deep insecurity, a shock that the deepest and blackest part of us is really beautiful. And this too is the shade of Niggerology. For Africa is not just the geographic origin of our ordeal; it is the anchor of the idea, the warrant, that justified the ordeal. America’s master race practiced, in their words, “African slavery,” and when they went to war to save this institution, they went with a story on their lips and a warrant in their hand: Slavery must endure and the races must be separated to save their “wives and daughters” from “pollution and violation” on account of “the lust of half-civilized Africans.” Before that war, they had already transfigured slaveholding into the work of God, which sought to save “the African, coming from a barbarous state and from a tropical climate,” and transform these captives into “the happiest set of people on the face of the globe.” Teddy Roosevelt, reporting on his voyage to Africa, described a continent of “ape-like savages” whose brightest lights had only “advanced to the upper stages of barbarism” and had thus developed “a very primitive kind of semi-civilization.” It was not narrow prejudice that Roosevelt wielded but something broader, a story that would make his reader understand that “progress and development in this particular kind of new land depend exclusively upon the masterful leadership of the whites.” And from this foundational notion of “ape-like men,” “half-...

Khanata pointed out that in Senegal this “mixed” look is treasured. Black Americans are seen as cool, glamorous, and even beautiful because we are mixed. And many of the Senegalese women take steps—from straightening hair to lightening skin—to get that “Black American/mixed” look.

the “banking” system of education, in which students are treated as receptacles for information and judged on how efficiently—how “meekly”—they “receive, memorize, and repeat” that information.

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.

Those protests succeeded in implanting some skepticism in people who were raised on the idea of Officer Friendly. I think that is what the white supremacists feared most—the spreading realization that the cops were not knights and the creeping sense that there was something rotten not just in law enforcement but maybe also in the law itself. That fear explains the violent response to the protests, but even that violence redounded to the benefit of the protesters because it confirmed their critique.

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

The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students’ creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors use their “humanitarianism” to preserve a profitable situation. Thus they react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality but always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another.

see politicians in Colorado, in Tennessee, in South Carolina moving against my own work, tossing books I’ve authored out of libraries, banning them from classes, and I feel snatched out of the present and dropped into an age of pitchforks and book-burning bonfires.

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.

There was a sense in the room that avoiding “divisive concepts” was not just wrong on moral grounds but that it represented a lowering of standards; that to ban a book was to erect a kind of South Carolina exception for advanced placement—one that validated the worst caricatures of Southern whiteness often bandied by the kind of Northerner who thinks “we should have just let them secede.”

Jesse James is America’s own Robin Hood, an outlaw hailed in novels, film, and music for standing against the great forces of industrial capitalism, the railroads, and the robber barons of the North. Art hides the truth of Jesse James—that he was the scion of a slaveholding family, that he fought on the side of slavery and then against Reconstruction, and that in his first train robbery he wore a Ku Klux Klan mask. In time, even that symbol of terrorism would itself be redeemed.

As we walked the grounds of the State House, I thought about what it meant for a young student to visit these same grounds. I thought about what it must mean to walk amongst these Klansmen, enslavers, and segregationists raised up on their platforms to the status of titans. I thought about what it means to go back to the schools, where work questioning this beatification is slowly being pushed out, to the libraries that are being bleached of discomforting stories. And I thought how it all works not simply to misinform but to miseducate; not just to assure the right answers are memorized but that the wrong questions are never asked.

That America gives more attention to the genocides abroad than to the genocides at home might fool you into a quasi-denialism, where you might think the Holocaust’s evils are exaggerated for effect. This is wrong.

walked out to buy some goods from a shopkeeper. But before I could get there, a soldier walked out from a checkpoint, blocked my path, and asked me to state my religion. He looked at me skeptically when I told him I did not have one and asked for my parents’ religion. When I told him they were not religious either, he rolled his eyes and asked about my grandparents. When I told him they were Christian, he allowed me to pass. If this had happened in America, I would have told you that the soldier who stopped me was Black, and I guess he was here too. In fact, there were “Black” soldiers everywhere lording their power over the Palestinians, many of whom would, in America, have been seen as “white.” 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

For as sure as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man, Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere.

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.

now noted a symmetry in the bromides—that those who claimed Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East were just as likely to claim that America was the oldest democracy in the world. And both claims relied on excluding whole swaths of the population living under the rule of the state.

For much of this leg, Guy was silent as Avner described his time in the Israeli Defense Forces enforcing the occupation. I now hear this word—occupation—in the same way I might hear a middle-aged man speak of his “medical procedure” when what he means is “colonoscopy.”

I followed Avner out into Kahane Park—a small garden named for Meir Kahane, the Jewish supremacist who as leader of the Kahanist movement (and a member of the Knesset) promoted the permanent annexation of the West Bank and Gaza and the enslavement of Palestinians. Kahane’s political party was banned by the government in 1985, and he was assassinated in New York in 1990, but his disciple Baruch Goldstein took up his mantle. Four years after Kahane’s death, Goldstein entered the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron and gunned down twenty-nine Muslims while they were worshipping.

martyr. Kahane and Goldstein were both officially pariahs—Kahane was shot in Manhattan, and Goldstein’s mass murder was condemned by the Israeli government. But whatever one wishes to make of the official denunciations of Kahane and Goldstein, I was standing in a park bearing Kahane’s name in which he and his mass-murdering acolyte were memorialized, a park that rested in a settlement sanctioned and subsidized by the state that claims to denounce him.

The father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, first considered Argentina, believing that it would be in that “sparsely populated” country’s “highest interest…to cede us a portion of its territory.” When Herzl turned to Palestine, he viewed Palestinians, as historian Benny Morris puts it, as little more than “part of the scenery.” The scenery was savage: “We should form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia,” Herzl wrote in his 1896 manifesto, The Jewish State. “An outpost of civilization against barbarism.”

But “the native population” was savage, and Jabotinsky saw a clear difference between the Jewish colonizer and the Arabs to be colonized. “Culturally they are five hundred years behind us,” wrote Jabotinsky. “They have neither our endurance nor our determination.” The early Zionists might have considered the land of Palestine as their rightful homeland, but they never imagined themselves as “natives.” Natives, in colonial discourse, were savages with no capacity to improve the land and thus no right to it. In 1943, as Zionist terrorist groups led an insurgency against British rule, their commander and the future prime minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, learned that one of their soldiers had been flogged by the British. “Jews are not Zulus,” wrote Begin. “You will not whip Jews in their homeland.”

one evening, after a long day, I showed up to dinner and saw a group brandishing the Confederate battle flag. I don’t know what got ahold of me. I don’t know why it was right then. But I understood that this was a matter not of public history but of deep belief. I quietly excused myself and went to my room. Even then I remember not wanting to make a scene or in any way disturb my hosts. But the next morning, they apologized profusely. They knew.

fought. And after that display of the Confederate flag, what my hosts seemed to fear the most had less to do with the flag of slavery and more to do with some sense that they, as white Southerners, had appeared in the exact manner that “Yankees” expected—as ignorant, uncouth, or ill-bred.

Back in America these protests enjoyed positive coverage and were taken as evidence of the vitality and mettle of “the only democracy in the Middle East.” But by then I knew that “the only democracy in the Middle East” was essentially a tagline which, like “the Breakfast of Champions” or “Just do it,” depended less on logic or observed reality than a form of word association.

For just as the vulgar caricature of Black people served the cause of white Redemption, so too did the Arabs in Exodus serve the cause of Zionism.

As early as 1905, the German conquerors of South West Africa instituted antimiscegenation laws—laws they’d adopted from their studies of the American South.

Righteous violence vented on some brutish, blighted lower caste has always been the key to entry into the fraternity of Western nations.

The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which “weak Jews” who went “like lambs to slaughter” were supplanted by Israelis who would “fight back.” Thus a redemption of a different kind was affected: By routing the savage “Arab,” by murdering his leaders, by confining him to the Bantustans of Tuba, or the reservations of Gaza, or the ghettoes of Lydd, Jewish national honor was restored in the traditional manner of Western European powers.

for that is the way by which the Jews would gradually become the majority, and then a Jewish Government would follow automatically, and the future of the Arab minority would depend on the goodwill of the Jews; and a minority status is not a good thing, as the Jews themselves are never tired of pointing out. So there is no “misunderstanding.” The Zionists want only one thing, Jewish immigration; and this Jewish immigration is what the Arabs do not want.

I knew enough to understand that the prime purpose of any “settler organization” was to push Palestinians out and to move Jewish Israelis in. One method of effecting this was to declare a piece of land to be an archaeological site, thus allowing the state to assert an interest in how that site is used.

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.

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.

In search of the pool, the City of David, along with the Israeli government, seized and destroyed the orchard of a Palestinian family. Evidence of the pool’s existence and miraculous powers had yet to emerge.

I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel.

Through all those critical years, Israel was not just an ally of South Africa; it was the very arsenal of apartheid.