The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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...