The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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.