The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

My case for reparations was built on a chain of cases stretching back through James Forman, Queen Mother Moore, and Callie House, all the way back to Belinda Royall at the very founding of the United States. In this sense, the case was not even mine; it was ancestral. And its target was one of the world’s most malevolent inventions—racialized slavery and everything that flowed from it.

Very often, before I sit down to write, I read back through those words—through slave narratives, letters from freedmen, memoirs, or poems. I read the words aloud like an incantation: “Dear Dangerfield you cannot imagine how much I want to see you. Come as soon as you can…” “I had a constant dread that Mrs. Moore, her mistress, would be in want of money and sell my dear wife…” “I would much rather you would get married to some good man, for every time I gits a letter from you it tears me all to pieces…” And I feel a portion of what they felt—a portion of their love, rage, hope, despair—and that portion is the power I try to convey in my own writing. I am not alone. I am in a tradition.

It was my sixth day in Palestine, but I felt like I had been here for months. The days were filled with tours, the nights with talks—even the meals felt like seminars. Some of this is just being abroad somewhere far from home. But most of it was the specificity of this place—how much it seemed to embody the West and its contradictions, its claims of democracy, its foundations in exploitation. Of all the worlds I have ever explored, I don’t think any shone so bright, so intense, so immediately as Palestine.

So much seemed obvious. I now noted a symmetry in the bromides—that those who claimed Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East were just as likely to claim that America was the oldest democracy in the world. And both claims relied on excluding whole swaths of the population living under the rule of the state.

Openly racist appeals are the norm, as when Benjamin Netanyahu warned in 2015 that “the right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves.” For all my talk of being fooled by the language of “Jewish democracy,” it had been right there the whole time. The phrase means what it says—a democracy for the Jewish people and the Jewish people alone.

If the language I’d heard all my professional life had been wrong, had been deceptive even, then what was the language to describe the project I now saw? It’s true that “Jim Crow” was the first thing that came to mind, if only because “Jim Crow” is a phrase that connotes an injustice, a sorting of human beings, the awarding and stripping of the rights of a population. Certainly, that was some part of what I saw in Hebron, in Jerusalem, in Lydd. But it was not just the literal meaning of “Jim Crow,” it was the feeling of the thing too. I say the words “Jim Crow” and a casket opens before me, and inside is a boy beaten out of his own humanity. I say “Jim Crow” and I see the flag of slavery waving above a state capitol. I say “Jim Crow” and I see men on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel pointing toward the shot. I say “Jim Crow” and Detroit Red turns to me and asks, “Who taught you to hate?” I say “Jim Crow” and I hear “poll tax,” “redlining,” “grandfather clause,” “whites only,” and each of these phrases conjures additional images too. But “Jim Crow” was the language of analogy, of translation, not the thing itself. As much as anything, my mission in Palestine was to grow new roots, to describe this new world, not as a satellite of my old world but as a world in and of itself.

I remember walking up an inclining street in Hebron and reaching a large metal fence with a revolving gate. At the top of the gate was a device about the size of a shoebox with a tube protruding from it. It looked like a camera. In fact, it was a turret designed to lock on and immobilize a target using “nonlethal” rounds fired via remote control. The device’s name—“Smart Shooter”—was written on the side. This was oppression’s avant-garde—the first initial steps to automated imperial dominance—and I had little reason to feel that such trailblazing efforts would remain in Palestine. And at that I despaired.

I had no interest in hearing defenses of the occupation and what struck me then as segregation. 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.

the first duty of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so forth is the framing of who is human and who is not.

What I have always wanted is to expand the frame of humanity, to shift the brackets of images and ideas. So that in thinking about my trip, in setting my sides upon the field, my frame excluded any defense of the patently immoral. And I would sooner hear a defense of cannibalism than I would hear any brief for what I saw with my own eyes in Hebron.

The tools of control are diverse—drones and observation towers surveil from above; earth mounds and trenches block the roads below. Gates enclose. Checkpoints inspect. Nothing is predictable. A road that was free yesterday is now suddenly impeded by a “flying checkpoint,” a mobile gate and a squad of soldiers requesting permits and papers. But the randomness is intentional. The point is to make Palestinians feel the hand of occupation constantly—in Israel, in East Jerusalem, Area A, B, or C. “It’s not just ‘We’re here and you’re there,’ ” Avner told me, describing the relationship between the IDF and Palestinians in every jurisdiction. “It’s ‘We’re here, and we’re there.’ ”

Sometimes I would be riding past a checkpoint and look out and, to my shock, see a young soldier with his rifle pointed at the road, which is to say at me. As soon as I would see this, I would search for a good reason, a justification, but eventually I started to realize there never was one. Even as I listened to Avner talk, even as we sped easily and unimpeded down roads that Palestinians on the West Bank cannot use, part of me was still searching. I did this because the weight of evil is so great. I did this because if the worst was true, if I was forced to see it square, then I knew what must come next. I did this because “a good reason” is also a way out. The weakness in me is always talking. But so are my ancestors.

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.

Whatever connections formed in my mind between the Israeli oppression and American segregation, Israel’s version did not make the case for itself in the language of Jim Crow but in the dialect of liberal expansionism—with its descriptions of barbaric natives and promises of the great improvements brought to the savages by their betters.

The father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, first considered Argentina, believing that it would be in that “sparsely populated” country’s “highest interest…to cede us a portion of its territory.” When Herzl turned to Palestine, he viewed Palestinians, as historian Benny Morris puts it, as little more than “part of the scenery.” The scenery was savage: “We should form a portion of a rampart of Europe against A...

The notion that a colonialist Zionism exists merely in the hallucinations of leftist professors and the chants of their wayward students ignores a crucial source—the very words of Zionists themselves. But Herzl, Jabotinsky, and Ben-Yehuda were of a time when it was still possible for the West to propagate an untrammeled image of a noble colonialism. That is no longer the case. We say “colonialism” and an American colonel replies, “I have come to kill Indians…. Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.” We say “colonialism” and Cecil Rhodes strides across an entire continent. We say “colonialism” and a French interrogator attaches electrodes to the private parts of an Algerian man. We say “colonialism” and the settlers of Kiryat Arba materialize before us, giving thanks and praises for mass murder.

And after that display of the Confederate flag, what my hosts seemed to fear the most had less to do with the flag of slavery and more to do with some sense that they, as white Southerners, had appeared in the exact manner that “Yankees” expected—as ignorant, uncouth, or ill-bred. They didn’t have to worry. I’ve known too many “Yankee” racists and well-bred fools. And it was good for me to see them as they would be without me—the comfort they showed with a flag that only a few years later would be claimed by Dylann Roof.

Sometimes, you are blessed with a moment where all the dissembling, all the shame, all the politesse are stripped, and evil speaks with clarity. Sometimes it’s in a park named for a nineteenth-century slave trader. And sometimes it’s in a settlement that honors a twentieth-century advocate of that same system. In either case, the clarity is a gift and we should listen close. In this memorial to Meir Kahane and his disciple, the gift spoke of Israel’s deeper designs.

When I was young, I felt the physical weight of race constantly. We had less. Our lives were more violent. And whether by genes, culture, or divine judgment, this was said to be our fault. The only tool to escape this damnation—for a lucky few—was school. 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.