The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

My first instinct is to laugh, but then I remember that American history is filled with men and women who were as lethal as they were ridiculous.

Whatever the attempt to ape the language of college students, it was neither “anguish” nor “discomfort” that these people were trying to prohibit. It was enlightenment.

Given the kind of loud virtue signaling that followed 2020, I understand the question. But virtues should be signaled, and the signalers should act to make their virtues manifest.

when lost lives spiral into the hundreds, then thousands, and then millions, when murder becomes a wide, seemingly unending mass, we lose our ability to see its victims as anything more than an abstract, almost theoretical, collection of lives.

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.

Journalists claim to be hearing “both sides” as though a binary opposition had been set down by some disinterested god. But it is the journalists themselves who are playing god—it is the journalists who decide which sides are legitimate and which are not, which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame. And this power is an extension of the power of other curators of the culture—network execs, producers, publishers—whose core job is deciding which stories get told and which do not. When you are erased from the argument and purged from the narrative, you do not exist. Thus the complex of curators is doing more than setting pub dates and greenlighting—they are establishing and monitoring a criterion for humanity.

my frame excluded any defense of the patently immoral. And I would sooner hear a defense of cannibalism than I would hear any brief for what I saw with my own eyes in Hebron.

The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else.

“He would sit us all down, all his grandkids, and keep telling us that our liberation was through our education and that we couldn’t forget. Because when Palestine was colonized, what they said was they’ll grow old and their children will forget.”