The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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: All classes of a people under social pressure are permeated with a common experience; they are emotionally welded as others cannot be. With them, even ordinary living has epic depth and lyric intensity, and this, their material handicap, is their spiritual advantage. So, in a day when art has run to classes, cliques and coteries, and life lacks more and more a vital common background, the Negro artist, out of the depths of his group and personal experience, has to his hand almost the conditions of a classical art.