The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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-...