The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This meant that we could never practice writing solely for the craft itself, but must necessarily believe our practice to be in service of that larger emancipatory mandate.

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?”

Evil did win, sometimes—maybe most times.

Bad things did happen, if only for the simple reason that they could.

rhapsodized

words are powerful, but more so when organized to tell stories.

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.

“Genius” may or may not help a writer whose job is, above all else, to clarify.

It is long before your time—1978. He is five years out of the Black Panther Party, and it is now clear that the revolution will not be televised, because the revolution will not be happening at all.

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. And what my father would have also seen is that he was confronted not just by the yawning chasm between wealth and want, but by the stories that sought to inscribe that chasm as natural. He would have pointed to the arsenal of histories, essays, novels, ethnographies, teleplays, treatments, and monographs, which were not white supremacy itself but its syllabus, its corpus, its canon. The weight of my first trip to Africa—the many years it took me to actually go—is directly tied to that canon and to the work of its luminaries, men like Josiah Nott, a nineteenth-century anthropologist, epidemiologist, and student of civilization. Nott was also a slaveholder, which meant that he profited from the trade and labor of the people he enslaved and then profited again by his chosen field of study. “My Niggerology, so far from harming me at home, has made me a greater man than I ever expected to be,” Nott wrote to his mentor, the anthropologist Samuel Morton, in 1847. “I am the big gun of the profession here.” That profession had but one aim—assembling all the knowledge...

fugacious

“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.”

“Ta-Nehisi,”

“Land of the ...

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.

empiricism

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.

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.

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.

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.” This is our collective power:

Alain Locke, the great curator of the Harlem Renaissance,