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, to have them grab random people on the street, shake them and say, “Have you read this yet?”

I was held fast by forces I could not then understand. I knew that there was something different in the storytelling, something in its style, that pulled me toward it with the gravity of a star, until I was there,

Because as much as stories could explain my world, they could also allow me to escape into others.

To write like this, to imagine the enslaved, the colonized, the conquered as human beings has always been a political act. For Black writers it has been so often employed that it amounts to a tradition—one that I returned to that summer in Virginia with you.

I think this tradition of writing, of drawing out a common humanity, is indispensable to our future, if only because what must be cultivated and cared for must first be seen.

A belief in genius is a large part of what plagues us, and I have found that people widely praised for the power of their intellect are as likely to illuminate as they are to confound. “Genius” may or may not help a writer whose job is, above all else, to clarify.

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized.

You cannot act upon what you cannot see. And we are plagued by dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world. And it is not enough to stand against these dissemblers. There has to be something in you, something that hungers for clarity. And you will need that hunger, because if you follow that path, soon enough you will find yourself confronting not just their myths, not just their stories, but your own.

The systems we oppose are systems of oppression, and thus inherently systems of cowardice. They work best in the dark, their essence tucked away and as unexamined as the great American pastime was once to me. But then a writer told me a story and I saw something essential and terrible about the world. 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.

I think if he tried to describe the forces shaping his life, my father would see his own actions first: his credits, his mistakes. But if he widened the aperture to the world around him, he would see that some people’s credits earned them more, and their mistakes cost them less. And those people who took more and paid less lived in a world of iniquitous wealth, while his own people lived in a world of terrifying want.

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.

The problem of “common origin” was the problem of “common humanity,” and common humanity invalidated the warrant for African enslavement.

But I think human dignity is in the mind and body and not in stone. And I think the moment we root our worth in castes and kingdoms, in “civilization,” we have accepted the precepts of those whose whole entire legacy is the burning and flooding of a planet. And then we have already lost.

What I am saying is that, like many people, I best remember a concept when I can analyze it and place it in the real world. In this, I am fortunate to have found writing, a form that must make the abstract and distant into something tangible and felt.

Paulo Freire wrote of 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. A teacher delivers the student information and the student succeeds by repeating it.

But I think many of us who are teachers and professors have forgotten that the syllabus serves the student, and all around us are teachers, administrators, and columnists who seem to believe that material should be hard for the sake of it and that education itself is best when rendered not in wonder but in force.

I guess it’s worth pointing out the obvious—that the very governors and politicians who loudly exalt the values of free speech are among the most aggressive prosecutors of “divisive concepts.” And I guess it should be noted that what these politicians—and even some writers—dubbed “critical race theory” bore little resemblance to that theory’s actual study and practice.

But the simple fact is that these people were liars, and to take them seriously, to press a case of hypocrisy or misreading, is to be distracted again. “The goal,” as their most prominent activist helpfully explained, “is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and think ‘critical race theory.’ ” It worked. Today, some four years after the signing of 13950, half the country’s schoolchildren have been protected, by the state, from “critical race theory” and other “divisive concepts.”

A political order is premised not just on who can vote but on what they can vote for, which is to say on what can be imagined. And our political imagination is rooted in our history, our culture, and our myths.

What these adults are ultimately seeking is not simply the reinstatement of their preferred dates and interpretations but the preservation of a whole manner of learning, austere and authoritarian, that privileges the apprehension of national dogmas over the questioning of them. The danger we present, as writers, is not that we will simply convince their children of a different dogma but that we will convince them that they have the power to form their own.

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.

The statues and pageantry can fool you. They look like symbols of wars long settled, fought on behalf of men long dead. But their Redemption is not about honoring a past. It’s about killing a future.

I want to tell you I was wrong. 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. I learned that here. In Haifa. In Ramallah. And especially here at Yad Vashem. So this is another story about writing, about power, about settling accounts, a story not of redemption but of reparation.

Nevertheless, Umar presented a threat—the threat of the storyteller who can, through words, erode the claims of the powerful.

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.

they are establishing and monitoring a criterion for humanity. Without this criterion, there can be no oppressive power, because the first duty of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so forth is the framing of who is human and who is not.

This struck me as something out of a horror movie—a family held hostage not for ransom but as a show of the kind of dominance that is essential to Israeli rule. When the two-state solution seemed at hand, the thought was that Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank would be the territorial basis of a Palestinian state. The West Bank was subsequently divided into three zones—Area A, where Palestinians governed the civil authorities and enforced the law; Area B, which was to be governed jointly; and Area C, which would remain under Israeli control. This all sounds civilized enough, but that notion could not survive contact with a map.

The fact is that the West Bank is occupied, meaning Israel exercises its will wherever it chooses.

In this way, a people is sundered from itself, and old communal bonds are eroded.

Goldstein and the subsequent Israeli reaction to Palestinian unrest in Hebron are manifestations of an uncomfortable reality: This putative “Jewish democracy” is, like its American patron, an expansionist power. Zionism demands, as Levi Eshkol, prime minister of Israel during the 1960s, once put it, “the dowry, not the bride”—that is to say, the land without the Palestinians on it. And every expansionist power needs a good story to justify its plunder.

It was all propaganda, and I knew it. But I had not yet learned the lesson I brought with me to Palestine. I did not yet understand my own faculties, that I had the right to set my brackets as I would in Palestine and shove bullshit—no matter how politely articulated, no matter how elegantly crafted—out of the frame.

Later I went out into the world and saw the other side, those who allegedly, by genes, culture, or divine judgment, had more but—as I came to understand—knew less. These people, white people, were living under a lie. More, they were, in some profound way, suffering for the lie. They had seen more of the world than I had—but not more of humanity itself. Most stunningly, I realized that they were deeply ignorant of their own country’s history, and thus they had no intimate sense of how far their country could fall. A system of supremacy justifies itself through illusion, so that those moments when the illusion can no longer hold always come as a great shock.

The least reflective of them say, “This is not America.” But some of them suspect that it is America, and there is great pain in understanding that, without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime, in learning that the whole game was rigged in your favor, that there are nations within your nation who have spent all of their collective lives in the Trump years. The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else.

“There’s no justice for Palestinians,” Nasser said in reference to the courts. “It’s the opposite. Lack of justice. The courts are a tool of the oppressor, a tool of the occupation.”

I thought back to my conversation with Avner and Guy and how hard it is to truly acknowledge your place in a system whose actions indict your conscience. But now, seeing the shape of my travels these past couple of years, I think of Josiah Nott, of D. W. Griffith, of all the literature assembled to hide the truth of an oppressive class from itself, to assure itself that it is indeed right with the universe.

“Purity of Arms” holds that Israeli soldiers are particularly noble when fighting with restraint and maintaining their “humanity even in combat.”

In the 1930s, when the Nazis sought precedent for their battery of antisemitic laws, they found it in America—the world’s “leading racist jurisdiction,” writes historian James Q. Whitman.

Hitler “saw the entire world as an ‘Africa,’ ” writes historian Timothy Snyder. “And everyone, including Europeans, in racial terms.” Ukrainians and Poles were derided as “blacks.” Slavs were said to fight “like Indians.” And the Germans imagined themselves as heroic colonizers, “tamers of distant lands,” writes Snyder. Among those nations under Hitler’s boot, the message was not missed. “We are like slaves,” a Ukrainian woman wrote in her diary. “Often the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin comes to mind. Once we shed tears over those Negroes, now obviously we ourselves are experiencing the same thing.”

If the average American was less rabid in their antisemitism, that spelled no great sympathy for the Holocaust’s survivors. In a 1945 poll, only 5 percent of Americans believed that immigration should be increased, while 37 percent believed immigration should be further restricted. When Congress, at President Truman’s behest, attempted to adjust its immigration laws to allow for more Displaced Persons to enter the country, Texas Congressman Ed Gossett denounced them as “the refuse of Europe.” His office was then flooded with a wave of antisemitic vitriol denouncing the “Jew dominated legislation,” inveighing against the “Jew Deal,” asserting that America had “fought on the wrong side” and that Jews had “ruined every country they ever entered including Germany,” and were “already ruining the USA.” Against this backdrop, Congress passed an immigration bill in 1948 that employed geographical and time restrictions in the hopes of keeping Jewish immigration to a minimum.

Righteous violence vented on some brutish, blighted lower caste has always been the key to entry into the fraternity of Western nations. And when those nations feel themselves humiliated, when their national honor is stained, then that venting is at its most terrible.

Having vanquished its Arab foes and established itself as a state, Israel began the process of securing as much land as possible for its new state while keeping as many Palestinians as possible beyond that state’s borders. This ethnocratic approach to state-building had deep roots in Zionism, which held that majority status within a strong Jewish state was the only true bulwark against antisemitism. Implanting this majority presented an obvious problem—the Palestinians.

We walked on until we reached an outdoor welcoming area, where Alon pointed me toward a plaque engraved in the wall. The plaque bore the flag of the United States and the name of one of its former ambassadors to Israel. I moved closer to read the inscription: “The City of David brings Biblical Jerusalem to life at the very place where the kings and the prophets of the Bible walked,” read the plaque. “The spiritual bedrock of our values as a nation comes from Jerusalem. It is upon these ideals that the American republic was founded, and the unbreakable bond between the United States and Israel was formed.”

Here Alon abandoned his clinical disposition and raised his voice. The City of David “managed to get so mainstream that the American ambassador comes here and declares that this place is part of the glorious heritage of the United States of America abroad,” he said. “Now there is an American heritage abroad. It’s usually cemeteries in Normandy. Yeah, that’s American heritage abroad. City of David is not. And when you talk about white supremacy and when you talk about how things look here, this is why I think that the Evangelical church and the settlers found each other as a perfect match. Their mindset is the same. They do other things, but their mindset is the same—”

In some sense, my trip to the Land of Palestine was a journey backward toward that instinct I’d lost, an ancestral gift I’d forgotten. The gift is not in the blood but in the stories, the axioms, the experiences garnered from centuries of living on the outskirts of a dubious democracy.

During World War II, the Afrikaner politician John Vorster lobbied for his country to enter the war on the side of Nazi Germany, despite South Africa’s historical ties to the United Kingdom. “We stand for Christian Nationalism, which is an ally of National Socialism,” Vorster said. “In Italy it is called Fascism, in Germany National Socialism, and in South Africa Christian Nationalism.”

But the security of Israel did not just require an agreement with apartheid—it required that Israel practice apartheid itself. Israel’s defenders claim that the apartheid charge, like the charge of colonialism, is little more than ad hominem seeking to undermine that last redoubt of the Jewish people. Human rights groups disagree and point to the definition enshrined in international law, which defines the crime of apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”

The link is colonialism, which has always had a racist cynicism at its core—a belief that the world is not just savage, but that the most dangerous savages tend to live beyond the borders of the West. Zionism—which from the outset sought to position itself as “an outpost of civilization against barbarism”—has never rejected these precepts.

In a 2004 interview with Haaretz, Morris described Palestinians as “barbarians who want to take our lives.” There was but one way to constrain the threat: “Something like a cage has to be built for them…. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another.” Pushed to reflect on the fate of those to be “locked up,” Morris could barely muster a shrug. Instead, Morris approvingly invoked a genocide. “Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians.”

“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.”

This has happened despite a concerted effort to deny Black writers access to leading journals and publishers, to assault their schools and libraries, to outlaw reading and writing itself, and thus deny their access to this tool which is not just powerful but nonviolent. This is important—forced to match sword for sword, or gun for gun, slaveholders and white supremacists could be confident in victory, if only because their vast wealth assured them an unmatched arsenal.