The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

You cannot act upon what you cannot see.

School was not just a place of instruction—it was a first and last chance. Black boys who failed at school did not, from what I saw, generally go on to better things. More often, they did not go on at all.

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.