The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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.

I think the only way I ultimately survived was through stories. Because as much as stories could explain my world, they could also allow me to escape into others.

words are powerful, but more so when organized to tell stories. And stories, because of their power, demanded rigorous reading, interpretation, and investigation.

to imagine the enslaved, the colonized, the conquered as human beings has always been a political act.

I think this tradition of writing, of drawing out a common humanity, is indispensable to our future, if only because what must be cultivated and cared for must first be seen.

and I tasting a new geography took off my shoes let my feet grow in the new dance of growth and the dance was new and my thighs burning like chords left a trail for others to follow when they returned home as all must surely do to make past future tense. Sonia Sanchez, “Rebirth”

But I think human dignity is in the mind and body and not in stone. And I think the moment we root our worth in castes and kingdoms, in “civilization,” we have accepted the precepts of those whose whole entire legacy is the burning and flooding of a planet. And then we have already lost.

life must be seen and felt so that the space in your mind, gray, automatic, and square, fills with angle, color, and curve—the potholes, the dented fenders, the fried bread, the walls of fabric, the heaping plate of rice and fish. But the color is not just in the physical world you observe but in the unique interaction between that world and your consciousness—in your interpretation, your subjectivity, the things you notice in yourself.

We have a right to that memory, to choose the rock of Gorée, to consecrate it, to cry before it, to mourn its meaning. And we have a right to imagine ourselves as pharaohs, and then again the responsibility to ask if a pharaoh is even worthy of our needs, our dreams, our imagination.

seeing the world clearly allows for clearer action.

the medium is the message:

The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.

There seems to be an opportunity here, for comradeship, an invitation to allow for a more conversational literature, to revisit accepted ideas of voice and authority, to recognize that students are humans to be challenged, not animals to be broken and tamed.

I needed to feel safe. I was living in an unsafe country, one whose culture and policies I hoped to someday write against. I needed to be surrounded by professors, students, and young writers who understood my mission—even if they didn’t agree with it.

A political order is premised not just on who can vote but on what they can vote for, which is to say on what can be imagined.

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.

My work is to set the table, craft the argument, render the world as I imagine it, and then go.

policy change is an end point, not an origin. The cradle of material change is in our imagination and ideas.

South Carolina had been a majority-Black state, and at the height of Reconstruction, before its undoing in Redemption, the state was home to an emancipated working class and a multiracial democracy.

Novels, memoirs, paintings, sculptures, statues, monuments, films, miniseries, advertisements, and journalism all order our reality.

The arts tell us what is possible and what is not,

Griffith used texts from Woodrow Wilson’s ten-volume History of the American People throughout the film. In turn, Wilson screened the film at the White House. This was art as politics,

This is why Trump wants to run the Kennedy Center and has fired Carla, the Black woman who runs the Library of Congress, and why they are trying to control what exhibits can be shown in the NMAAHC

It is about writers to come—the boundaries of their imagination, the angle of their thinking, the depth of their questions.

The persistence of our want was matched exactly to the persistence of our plunder.

But passport stamps and wide vocabularies are neither wisdom nor morality. As it happens, you can see the world and still never see the people in it.

those who claimed Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East were just as likely to claim that America was the oldest democracy in the world. And both claims relied on excluding whole swaths of the population living under the rule of the state.

Palestinians living in Israel have shorter lives, are poorer, and live in more violent neighborhoods. Certain neighborhoods in Israel are allowed to discriminate legally against Palestinian citizens by setting “admission committees.” The committees, operating in 41 percent of all Israeli localities, are free to bar anyone lacking “social suitability” or “compatibility with the social and cultural fabric.”

my mission in Palestine was to grow new roots, to describe this new world, not as a satellite of my old world but as a world in and of itself.

and I had little reason to feel that such trailblazing efforts would remain in Palestine. And at that I despaired.

But why is this despair at the thought of it happening elsewhere - somewhere closer to you and not that it exists at all?

What I have always wanted is to expand the frame of humanity, to shift the brackets of images and ideas.

Every house in the Occupied Territories has a number. The number gives you basic intel on the people inside the house. If the people inside the house are somehow involved in any resistance, if someone in the family was imprisoned, if anyone was even blacklisted, that’s a house you will not take, because then you’re risking your troops. So you enter houses of people you know in advance are innocent. Now, we never called Palestinians “innocent.” They were always “involved” or “not involved,” because no one’s “innocent.”

You go into a house of that family and you basically use that house as your own as a military post. It’s elevated, it’s protected, but it’s also sort of the eye in the sky for the soldiers on the ground. There’s no privacy. There’s obviously no warrant. You don’t need to ask in advance. You don’t call in advance. You don’t send an email. You just barge in and usually handcuff and blindfold the head of the family. If there’s a teenager who looks at you the wrong way or an uncle who looks big enough that he could threaten you, you do the same…. You disconnect the phones, close the curtains, so they won’t tell anyone that you’re there with them and they sit inside scared, petrified with their heads down.

The tools of control are diverse—drones and observation towers surveil from above; earth mounds and trenches block the roads below. Gates enclose. Checkpoints inspect. Nothing is predictable. A road that was free yesterday is now suddenly impeded by a “flying checkpoint,” a mobile gate and a squad of soldiers requesting permits and papers. But the randomness is intentional. The point is to make Palestinians feel the hand of occupation constantly—in

Zionism demands, as Levi Eshkol, prime minister of Israel during the 1960s, once put it, “the dowry, not the bride”—that is to say, the land without the Palestinians on it.

American Colonization Society was formed with the explicit goal of shipping as many Blacks as possible back to their national home—Africa. The ACS garnered some support in Black communities, terrorized by racist whites much as the Jews of Europe were terrorized by antisemitic Europeans. And much as Jewish Zionists saw themselves bringing the boon of “civilization” to Palestine, Black American colonizers of Africa believed they would do the same. Thus Liberia was born—and plagued, for much of its history, by its colonial past.

In the settlements, first-time homebuyers are eligible for subsidized mortgages at low interest rates to build houses on land they lease at discounted rates—a discount made possible on account of the land being stolen. Factories and farms are propped by a similar array of discounts and subsidies. All infrastructure—roads, water, power, public synagogues, and mikvahs—is heavily subsidized by the state. In this web of subsidies is an incentive to further colonize the land of Palestinians, because further colonization advances a primary interest of the Israeli state—the erosion of any grounds for a future Palestinian state.

They had seen more of the world than I had—but not more of humanity itself. Most stunningly, I realized that they were deeply ignorant of their own country’s history, and thus they had no intimate sense of how far their country could fall.

What I was beginning to see was an arsenal of weaponry—highway construction, water restriction, gated villages, forbidden streets, checkpoints, soldiers, settlers—all employed to part the dowry from the bride.

Congress passed an immigration bill in 1948 that employed geographical and time restrictions in the hopes of keeping Jewish immigration to a minimum. That same year, the United States became the first country to recognize Israeli independence. The cause of Jewish whiteness was thus advanced by keeping “them over there”—and better still, over there warring against natives and savages.

By 1948, Israel no longer had to consider what “the Arabs” might want. Over seven hundred thousand Palestinians were uprooted from their own lands and banished by the advancing Israeli Army. Many of these people believed that they would be able to return to their homes after the war. But such a return would destroy the Israeli state project by turning Jews into a minority—the very thing Zionists sought to prevent. So the Palestinians were denied the “right of return,” and their land was confiscated by the state and handed over to other Israelis.

Before the establishment of the Israeli state, Palestinians owned 90 percent of all land in Mandatory Palestine. Most of this land was seized and incorporated into Israel. “From 1948 to 1953, the five years following the establishment of the state, 350 (out of a total of 370) new Jewish settlements were built on land owned by Palestinians,” writes Noura Erakat in her book Justice for Some.

By the time Menachem Begin took office in the late 1970s, no single country was buying more Israeli arms than South Africa. The money for those guns was plundered from Black South Africans deprived of their rights and then used to fund a Zionist order that subsequently deprived Palestinians of theirs.

Through a fifty-year period stretching from 1970 to 2019, Nassar found that less than 2 percent of all opinion pieces discussing Palestinians had Palestinian authors. The Washington Post ranked at a dismal 1 percent. The New Republic during this period did not publish a single piece on Palestine from the perspective of Palestinians.

This elevation of complexity over justice is part and parcel of the effort to forge a story of Palestine told solely by the colonizer,

I see that land, its peoples, and its struggles through a kind of translation—through analogy and the haze of my own experience—and that is not enough. If Palestinians are to be truly seen, it will be through stories woven by their own hands—not by their plunderers, not even by their comrades.