The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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.

We needed more writers, and I had a responsibility to help them as a reader, to be an active audience for the stories they wanted to tell, or as a teacher, so that they could learn to tell them better, to reach deeper into their own truth in the same way that brought me euphoria, and reach into the hearts of readers and set them on fire, as Mary had been set on fire since college: by words on a page.

writing has taught me the virtue of facing horror with no demand for a cheap and easy hope. But

that race is a species of power and nothing else.