The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

For you there can be no real distance between writing and politics. And when I saw that in you, I saw myself.

we are plagued by dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world.

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.

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.

We are, Black people, here and there, victims of the West—a people held just outside its liberal declarations, but kept close enough to be enchanted with its promises. We know the beauty of this house—its limestone steps, its wainscoting, its marble baths. But more, we know that the house is haunted, that there is blood in the bricks and ghosts in the attic.

There I was on the other side, among family divided from each other by centuries. I had come back. But my own writing had gotten here first.

So I don’t really worry about the young, whose excesses are confined to lecture halls and quadrangles, so much as I fear the old, whose tyrannies are legislative.

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.

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.

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.

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.