The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

All of our work dealt with the kind of small particulars of being human that literature generally deals with. But when you live as we have, among a people whose humanity is ever in doubt, even the small and particular—especially the small and particular—becomes political.

haunt if you want, the style I possess. And I was haunted—by a style, by language. And, dimly, instinctually, I understood that the only exorcism lay in more words.

Armed with those raw sources and my own sense of how words might be organized—a style I possessed—maybe I could go from the haunted to the ghost, from reader to writer, and I too could have the stars, and their undeniable gravity, at my disposal. It was clear that such power must serve something beyond my amusement—that it should do the work of illuminating, of confronting and undoing, the violence I saw around me, that beauty must be joined to politics, that style possessed must meet struggle demanded:

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

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.

It was not news to me that I was privileged, as a man, but I now felt that privilege with new horror.

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.

so much of our myth-making was done in service of liberation, in doing whatever we could to dig our way out of the pit into which we were cast. And above us stand the very people who did the casting, jeering, tossing soil into our eyes and yelling down at us, “You’re doing it wrong.” But we are not them, and the standards of enslavers, colonizers, and villains simply will not do. We require another standard—one that sees the sharpening of our writing as the sharpening of our quality of light.

This reminds me of Ralph Ellison’s quote of “man without myth” from Shadow and Act.

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.

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.

For men like Nott, who sought not to plunder toys or kicks but whole nations, the need was manifestly greater. It was not just the conscience of the enslaver that had to be soothed but multiple consciences beyond his: the slave drivers and slave breakers, slave hunters and slave ship captains, lords and congressmen, kings and queens, priests, presidents, and everyday people with no real love for the slave but with human eyes and human ears nonetheless. For such a grand system, a grand theory had to be crafted and an array of warrants produced, all of them rooted in a simple assertion of fact: The African was barely human at all. Josiah Nott looked out at the world and saw great land masses, and to each he assigned a race and to each race he pinned an exclusive ancestor whose descendants were fit to rule or be ruled.

The problem of “common origin” was the problem of “common humanity,” and common humanity invalidated the warrant for African enslavement. For if we were all descended from the same parent, why, then, was one branch made solely for enslavement? This want of a specific warrant to plunder specific humans is as old as “race” itself. In fact, it is the whole reason race was invented. Africans had to either be excised from humanity or cast into the lower reaches to justify their exploitation. But evidence for this banishment has been generally wanting, while proof of the contrary is everywhere around us.

“We need not resort to any long-drawn arguments to defend negro-Ethnography against the Notts and Gliddons of our day,” wrote Black nationalist James Theodore Holly in 1859. “Let them prove, if they can, to the full satisfaction of their narrow souls and gangrened hearts, that the Black faced, woolly haired, thick lipped and flat nosed Egyptians of ancient times did not belong to the same branch of the human family that those negroes do who have been the victims of the African Slave-trade for the past four centuries.”

That was how I got my African name—“Ta-Nehisi,” a designation in Ancient Egyptian for the kingdom of Nubia, sometimes translated as “Land of the Blacks.” I was born into what the historian St. Clair Drake calls the “vindicationist tradition,” that is, to Black people who sought to reclaim the very history weaponized against them and turn it back against their tormentors. If a “Black Egypt” was what the Niggerologists feared, then we would insist on its truth and take it to its logical conclusion: We were born not to be slaves but to be royalty. That explains our veneration of Black pharaohs and African kingdoms. The point was to tell a different story than the one imposed on us—an understandable response, but one that I’ve never made peace with.

One of the overarching themes of this book is found here.

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. I am trying to urge you toward something new—not simply against their myths of conquest, but against the urge to craft your own.

The most banal details opened into a world of questions. A truck would speed by with men hanging off the side, and I would find myself wondering if anyone ever fell and if that would cause the men to rethink the practice.

LOL, you can tell Ta-Nehisi’s not from the rural United States.

I have always thought of myself as an anti-thrill-seeker. I am afraid of heights. I hate roller coasters. Gambling is lost on me, as are horror movies with their jump scares.

Comrade!

We ate at a small, quiet restaurant on the coast. A line of pebbled steps led from the dining area to the ocean. Again, my mind flashed back to the other side of this dark ocean, and I saw myself with the blue-and-yellow raft, and I felt something pulling me down to the water. And so I walked down the steps until I was right at the edge of the ocean, the water lapping against the stony shore. I bent down, and when I felt the water rush between fingers, a joy came with the cold of the wave, and I heard the ghosts singing. I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced a deeper sense of triumph in my life. I felt that I had somehow beaten history itself. I thought of all my exponential grandmothers taken from this side of the world and into the vast ocean. I thought of their frustrated dreams of getting back home. I thought of the home they tried to make on the other side, despite it all. I carried a part of all of them with me, every one of them. And I had come back. And looking out on that rocky beach, I felt the whole of the land speak to me, and it said, What took you so long? What indeed.

Khanata pointed out that in Senegal this “mixed” look is treasured. Black Americans are seen as cool, glamorous, and even beautiful because we are mixed. And many of the Senegalese women take steps—from straightening hair to lightening skin—to get that “Black American/mixed” look. This did surprise me. The one-drop rule had shaped us and then reached across the ocean to shape them, so that even here in Senegal, Pauline was pining for Jean Harlow. Except the Jean Harlow was us. And as I sat there with my lost siblings, listening to Khanata, it occurred to me that the “mixed” look they treasure here is itself a marker of the ordeal, an inheritance of the mass rape that shadows all those DNA jokes I make with my friends. The valuing of light skin was obviously not new to me as a Black American, but to encounter the idea here, to know that even “back home” Pauline would not be safe, was chilling. I had come back to the origin point of all of us to see my lost siblings, the ones who had evaded sale and slavery. But, of course, the warrant had gotten there first.

The reference here is to the character Pauline in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

“I don’t think we are going to get back to Africa.” My father did not mean this physically. He meant the Africa of our imagination, that glorious Eden we conjured up as exiles, a place without the Mayflower, Founding Fathers, conquistadors, and the assorted corruptions they had imposed on us. That Africa could no longer even be supported in his imagination because the corruption was not imposed at all but was in us, was part of the very humanity that had been denied us. That is where his skeptical searching landed him—not on the shores of a lost utopia but in the cold fact of human fallibility. And yet here I was, on this boat from Gorée, my eyes welling up, grieving for something, in the grips of some feeling I am still, even as I write this, struggling to name.

Here is what I think: We have a right to our imagined traditions, to our imagined places, and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess that they are imagined. Gorée is the name of a place my people have proclaimed as sacred, a symbolic representation of our last stop before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage, before, as Robert Hayden once wrote, our “voyage through death / to life upon these shores.” We have a right to that memory, to choose the rock of Gorée, to consecrate it, to cry before it, to mourn its meaning. And we have a right to imagine ourselves as pharaohs, and then again the responsibility to ask if a pharaoh is even worthy of our needs, our dreams, our imagination.

Ralph Ellison: “For man without myth is Othello with Desdemona gone: chaos descends, faith vanishes and superstitions prowl in the mind.”

Besides Hamidou, Khanata, and their darling kids, I had spent my trip alone, walking and wandering, grieving and marveling, so that the Dakar I saw was not so much a city of people but, like Gorée itself, a monument to the Last Stop before we were remade. It occurs to me now that I had come to see a part of Africa but not Africans. Indeed, almost every encounter I had with actual people found me, as I was back at Gorée, seeking out the solace of my own reflection. Toward the end of my trip, the limits of this approach were becoming clear. I began to feel there was something deeply incurious in the approach of a man who insists on walking through the rooms of his childhood home to commune with ghosts, heedless of the people making their home there now.

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. We know that there is both tragedy and comedy in this condition. Our own lives and culture—our music, our dance, our writing—were all crafted in this absurd space beyond the walls of “civilization.”

Ahh…the “here and there” is a reference to St. Claire Drake the historian and his book.

Our own Alain Locke, the great curator of the Harlem Renaissance, called this position our “spiritual advantage,” but I like the phrase he uses a paragraph later—our “vast spiritual endowment from which our best developments have come and must come.” I find the highest meaning in communing with those with whom the endowment is shared, with those who well comprehend the fire that sets our words alight.

jargon makes the mind go gray.

I wish more people understood this!

I don’t really care much for hearing “both sides” or “opposing points of view,” so much as I care about understanding the literary tools deployed to advance those views—the discipline of voice, the use of verbs, the length and brevity of sentences, and the curiosity of mind behind those sentences. It is this last I find so often lacking. Great canons angle toward great power, and the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it.

This insight comes straight from Toni Morrison.

White supremacists came to understand this, too, and though violence was never forsworn, by the end of the summer they had learned a lesson: The war might be raging in the streets, but it could never be defeated there, because what they were ultimately fighting was the word.

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. So I will note it. 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.” It may seem strange that a fight that began in the streets has now moved to the library, that a counterrevolution in defense of brutal policing has now transformed itself into a war over scholarship and art.

It is very hard to be a writer from any community held outside of the promises of an order and be “content with a partial view of reality.” It is impossible to write truthfully of Black people, in all our genius and folly, in all our joy and anguish, and not disturb those who “care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed.” So it was with Phillis Wheatley and Thomas Jefferson. So it is with Nikole Hannah-Jones and Donald Trump. In between Wheatley and Hannah-Jones, we are David Walker disappeared, Frederick Douglass brawling through the lecture circuit, Ida B. Wells run out of Memphis, and bookstores surveilled by the FBI. If American history really does begin in enslavement, in genocide, then the lies, and the policies that attack writing from beyond the order, must not just be deemed possible. They must be expected.

Film, music, the theater—all can be experienced amidst the whooping, clapping, and cheering of the crowd. But books work when no one else is looking, mind-melding author and audience, forging an imagined world that only the reader can see. Their power is so intimate, so insidious, that even its authors don’t always comprehend it.

I see something familiar: an attempt by adults to break the young minds entrusted to them and remake them in a more orderly and pliable form.

W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Propaganda of History”

Still, for the first time I began to think about the vocabulary being employed—discomfort, shame, anguish—and how it read like a caricature of the vocabulary of safety that had become popular on campuses around the country. I suspect this was intentional. Oppressive power is preserved in the smoke and fog, and sometimes it is smuggled in the unexamined shadows of the language of the oppressed themselves.

It is quite obvious that our enemies are using our words to be the chosen tools of our persecution.

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.”

And I doubt that anyone ever parts with power in the name of charity. In this case, self-interest meant that here in the heart of Jim Crow and Redemption, ideas to the contrary could not be driven from the public square. And that is progress. It just isn’t inevitable that such progress continues.

Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics.

Jim Crow segregation—with its signage and cap-doffing rituals—was both policy and a kind of public theater. The arts tell us what is possible and what is not, because, among other things, they tell us who is human and who is not. All the Gold Dust Twins and Korn Kinks, all the Sambos and Niggerheads, all the spooks and coons, all the Uncle Bens and Aunt Jemimas, all the Nigger-Dies-First and Black-Bitch-Craves-Dick are, at their core, the founding myths of an empire.

But the “losers” of the Civil War were not victims. In fact, Birth of a Nation shared its worldview with the president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson. Griffith used texts from Woodrow Wilson’s ten-volume History of the American People throughout the film. In turn, Wilson screened the film at the White House. This was art as politics, and it was monstrously successful. It remade the business of cinema, the art of film, and American history. Inspired by Birth of a Nation, the second Ku Klux Klan was born, taking their rituals—which haunt us to this day—directly from the film. And then in 1919, four years after the film’s premiere, the Red Summer and the scourge of lynching swept the country. Life imitated art, and Black people were left fleeing and fighting for their lives.

It is not a mistake that Mary teaches writing at its most advanced level and has found herself a target. Much of the current hoopla about “book bans” and “censorship” gets it wrong. This is not about me or any writer of the moment. It is about writers to come—the boundaries of their imagination, the angle of their thinking, the depth of their questions. I

I was saved by the books in my house, by the implicit message that learning does not belong exclusively in schools.

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.

race is a species of power and nothing else.

For as sure as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man, Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere. This fact is not hard to discern. Beyond my own initial impressions, there is the law itself, which clearly and directly calls for a two-tier society.

we drove these roads along the West Bank, our guide pointed out settlements—a word that I had always taken to refer to rugged camps staked out in the desert but in fact the settlements are more akin to American subdivisions, distinguished from the villages of the Palestinians by homes with large red roofs, as surely as a white picket fence denoted the suburbs of twentieth-century America and not its teeming cities.

Any structure designed for gathering water requires a permit from the occupying power, and such permits are rarely given to Palestinians. The upshot is predictable—water consumption for Israelis is nearly four times that of Palestinians living under occupation. And in those West Bank settlements which I once took as mere outposts, you can find country clubs furnished with large swimming pools. On seeing these cisterns, it occurred to me that Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself. And more, it occurred to me that there was still one place on the planet—under American patronage—that resembled the world that my parents were born into.

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.

Making a charge according to the law of those you indict is a dangerous business. However much you try to remember your own motives, however much you may feel yourself to have succeeded, you are ultimately in their world and are thus compelled to speak to them through their symbols and stories. The need is even greater when you are a stranger to them, an adversary even, because your claims are always viewed with more skepticism.

As it happens, you can see the world and still never see the people in it. Empires are founded by travelers, and the claim of some exclusive knowledge of the native is their mark.

my prototype was not reparations from a genocidal empire to its Jewish victims, but from that empire to a Jewish state. And what my young eyes now saw of that state was a world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy. I was seeking a world beyond plunder—but my proof of concept was just more plunder.

One night, Sahar and Nida were awakened by noises. They thought it might be a group of kids, but then the noises got louder, and when they went outside they saw that their house was surrounded by twenty or so settlers. The settlers ran when they saw Nida. But they had already done their work—tools had been stolen, an oven destroyed, fish killed. Later, when I asked Sahar how she and Nida live with this constant threat to property and safety, she said: It is a precarious life. At the same time, there is a strong will to stay and keep working. There are communities whose villages are destroyed eighty times and they come back. It becomes part of how you live. It’s a mode of survival. This is how you live on the land. We will keep going back, building the things they keep destroying.

This shit is literally the Deep South in the Levant.

I looked over and saw an Israeli man in dark glasses standing off to the side of our little group. I knew he was Israeli only because of how he glared at our guide as he recited the history of the site. At first, I had the same semi-shocked reaction I have back home when those in power so violently object to words. It seemed absurd. Umar did not have any guns or knives. And he was standing on land firmly under Israel’s rule. Nevertheless, Umar presented a threat—the threat of the storyteller who can, through words, erode the claims of the powerful. “Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others,” writes Edward Said. That its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.