The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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?”

But back then, in an unwired world, stories, words, histories—none of it could be gotten on demand. If you bore witness to such a feat—as I did with Allen—it lived in memory until the broadcast gods decided you could see it again.

the paradox of a game that valorizes violence and then is horrified by its consequences.

I think the only way I ultimately survived was through stories.

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.

He is thirty-two, and maybe now he can feel the dread that strikes you at that age—a realization that the years really can slip away, like all those dreams of revolution, without leaving a trace.

It may seem strange that people who have already attained a position of power through violence invest so much time in justifying their plunder with words. But even plunderers are human beings whose violent ambitions must contend with the guilt that gnaws at them when they meet the eyes of their victims. And so a story must be told,

one that raises a wall between themselves and those they seek to throttle and rob.

I was born into what the historian St. Clair Drake calls the “vindicationist tradition,” that is, to Black people who sought to reclaim the very history weaponized against them and turn it back against their tormentors.

And I realized I was sad, not because I was alone but because I was not. I had indeed come home, and ghosts had come back with me.

The sea of sadness closed in on itself, and now I felt like a child again, filled with questions about the smallest details of the world around me.

I thought of the home they tried to make on the other side, despite it all.

I carried a part of all of them with me, every one of them. And I had come back. And looking out on that rocky beach, I felt the whole of the land speak to me, and it said, What took you so long?

I began to feel there was something deeply incurious in the approach of a man who insists on walking through the rooms of his childhood home to commune with ghosts, heedless of the people making their home there now.

The first word written on the warrant of plunder is Africa.

But my own writing had gotten here first.

I’ve always been ashamed of this sense that I did less with more, that I had one job and could not complete it.

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.

that is what the white supremacists feared most—the spreading realization that the cops were not knights and the creeping sense that there was something rotten not just in law enforcement

but maybe also in the law itself.

If American history really does begin in enslavement, in genocide, then the lies, and the policies that attack writing from beyond the order, must not just be deemed possible. They must be expected.

The danger we present, as writers, is not that we will simply convince their children of a different dogma but that we will convince them that they have the power to form their own.

The late Jamal Khashoggi was fond of the Arabic proverb “Say your word, then leave.” I try to live by that, because I am at my worst out there defending my children, and at my best making more of them.

Oppressive power is preserved in the smoke and fog, and sometimes it is smuggled in the unexamined shadows of the language of the oppressed themselves.

Literature is anguish. Even small children know this.

Writing and rewriting is the attempt to communicate not just a truth but the ecstasy of a truth.

The cradle of material change is in our imagination and ideas.

we have the burden of crafting new language and stories that allow people to imagine that new policies are possible.

Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates

the possible of politics.

The arts tell us what is possible and what is not, because, among other things, they tell us who is human and who is not.

We have lived under a class of people who ruled American culture with a flaming cross for so long that we regularly cease to notice the import of being ruled at all.

Much of the current hoopla about “book bans” and “censorship” gets it wrong. This is not about me or any writer of the moment. It is about writers to come—the boundaries of their imagination, the angle of their thinking, the depth of their questions.

I thought about what it means to go back to the schools, where work questioning this beatification is slowly being pushed out, to the libraries that are being bleached of discomforting stories. And I thought how it all works not simply to misinform but to miseducate; not just to assure the right answers are memorized but that the wrong questions are never asked.

The statues and pageantry can fool you. They look like symbols of wars long settled, fought on behalf of men long dead. But their Redemption is not about honoring a past. It’s about killing a future.

The human mind can only conceive of so much tragedy at once—and when lost lives spiral into the hundreds, then thousands, and then millions, when murder becomes a wide, seemingly unending mass, we lose our ability to see its victims as anything more than an abstract, almost theoretical, collection of lives. In this way, a second crime is perpetrated: Human beings are reduced to a gruel of misery.

race is a species of power and nothing else.

Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere. This fact is not hard to discern.

Jewish Israelis who marry Jews from abroad needn’t worry about their spouses’ citizenship. But Israel tracks Palestinian noncitizens through a population registry, and it bars Palestinian citizens from passing on their status to anyone on that registry—abroad or in the West Bank. Jewish Israelis in Jerusalem are citizens of the state; Palestinians in the city are merely “permanent residents,” a kind of sub-citizenship with a reduced set of rights and privileges.

These cisterns were almost certainly illegal—the Israeli state’s hold on the West Bank includes control of the aquifers in the ground and the rainwater that falls from above.

water consumption for Israelis is nearly four times that of Palestinians living under occupation.

Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself.

When I think of my earliest days as a writer, what I recall is a kind of longing—I felt everything I wished to say, even if I didn’t exactly know it. There was so much I did not understand, and what I did understand I could never say with all the layers and color that would truly convey that understanding to my reader.

In 1937, the site was purchased from a farming family by Daoud Zalatimo, the Palestinian artist and educator. Zalatimo would host his family here for three months in the summer, and drew inspiration from the site’s vistas. In one of his paintings, his young son, Ibrahim, is seated in a red toy car, looking out placidly, a verdant garden blooming in the background. Contemplating this work, the art historian John Halaka wondered, “Why does this unassuming painting feel like a ghost haunting me?” In 1948, as Palestinians were being driven from their land, Zalatimo sheltered his family on his estate. And then, in 1967, Zalatimo too was driven out by Israeli forces. He and his family were banned from returning, except for day visits. Zalatimo died in 2001.

We stopped halfway up the hill and beheld a Greek strawberry tree, its great brownish-red branches spraying out like a hydra’s head. It was magnificent, and for a moment we just stared at this beautiful thing. Then Sahar directed our attention to the glyphs carved in its trunk: the calling card of a local Israeli militia. Sahar explained that these militiamen come as the feeling strikes them, vandalizing the land they believe to be their homeland, given to them by God.

One night, Sahar and Nida were awakened by noises. They thought it might be a group of kids, but then the noises got louder, and when they went outside they saw that their house was surrounded by

twenty or so settlers. The settlers ran when they saw Nida. But they had already done their work—tools had been stolen, an oven destroyed, fish killed. Later, when I asked Sahar how she and Nida live with this constant threat to property and safety, she said: It is a precarious life. At the same time, there is a strong will to stay and keep working. There are communities whose villages are destroyed eighty times and they come back. It becomes part of how you live. It’...

I thought back to our tour of Lydd, a city inside the borders of Israel where in 1948 the nascent Israeli Defense Forces massacred a group of Palestinians by, among other means, tossing grenades into a mosque. Our guide there, Umar al-Ghubari, was concerned with the story of the massacre and was also interested that it ran counter to Israel’s own noble creation myth. The import of this counternarrative, of Palestinian vindicationism, became clear once we reached the site of the massacre. We stood on a traffic island across from the mosque, as our guide narrated the events, citing the words of the Israeli soldiers themselves. I looked over and saw an Israeli man in dark glasses standing off to the side of our little group. I knew he was Israeli only because of how he glared at our guide as he recited the history of the site. At first, I had the same semi-shocked reaction I have back home when those in power so violently object to words. It seemed absurd. Umar did not have any guns or knives. And he was standing on land firmly under Israel’s rule. Nevertheless, Umar presented a threat—the threat of the storyteller who can, through words, erode the claims of the powerful.

“Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others,” writes Edward Said. That its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.