The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized.

Self-reflection/examination influences our worldview, efforts, and impact.

I remember one man, Josh Gray, a professor of math at the University of South Carolina, standing up, his hair pulled back in a ponytail, and bringing this self-inflicted humiliation into view in a way that would never have occurred to me. “I can tell you, as a redneck who’s worked all over the world and met people from all over the world,” he said, “don’t make the perception that [the students] have to compete against worse by actions like this that do not reflect well on our community.”

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.

The separate and unequal nature of Israeli rule is both intense and omnipresent—something I saw directly. The roads and highways we traveled were marked off for license plates of different colors—yellow, used mostly by those who are Jewish, and white with green lettering, used almost entirely by those who are not. As we drove these roads along the West Bank, our guide pointed out settlements—a word that I had always taken to refer to rugged camps staked out in the desert but in fact the settlements are more akin to American subdivisions, distinguished from the villages of the Palestinians by homes with large red roofs, as surely as a white picket fence denoted the suburbs of twentieth-century America and not its teeming cities.

Apartheid by any other name or unnamed is still apartheid

The upshot is predictable—water consumption for Israelis is nearly four times that of Palestinians living under occupation. And in those West Bank settlements which I once took as mere outposts, you can find country clubs furnished with large swimming pools. On seeing these cisterns, it occurred to me that Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself. And more, it occurred to me that there was still one place on the planet—under American patronage—that resembled the world that my parents were born into.

Water is even segregated, with access to it adjudicated by the state.

The courts are a tool of the oppressor, a tool of the occupation.”