The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

There was a sense in the room that avoiding “divisive concepts” was not just wrong on moral grounds but that it represented a lowering of standards; that to ban a book was to erect a kind of South Carolina exception for advanced placement—one that validated the worst caricatures of Southern whiteness often bandied by the kind of Northerner who thinks “we should have just let them secede.” The room was embarrassed. I remember one man, Josh Gray, a professor of math at the University of South Carolina, standing up, his hair pulled back in a ponytail, and bringing this self-inflicted humiliation into view in a way that would never have occurred to me. “I can tell you, as a redneck who’s worked all over the world and met people from all over the world,” he said, “don’t make the perception that [the students] have to compete against worse by actions like this that do not reflect well on our community.”