The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

I haunt if you want, the style I possess. And I was haunted—by a style, by language. And, dimly, instinctually, I understood that the only exorcism lay in more words.

Bad things did happen, if only for the simple reason that they could. Disturbing as this knowledge was, it made me stronger because it made me wiser.

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

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.

The point, even at such a young age, was the suppression of the network of neurons that houses the soft, humane parts of us.

It was not just the conscience of the enslaver that had to be soothed but multiple consciences beyond his:

This is about the forest again—about the limits of genius, about the need to walk the land, as opposed to intuit and hypothesize from the edge.

In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap.

For Schulz the first step is relegating jargon—“plate tectonics,” “continental shelf,” “subduction”—to the background, because jargon makes the mind go gray. Instead, Schulz clarifies the concepts behind the jargon with the phenomena of our everyday world. In her piece, earthquakes are not just measured on a Richter scale but also by the hands of a ticking watch, and they are rendered with all the violence befitting the subject.

But the medium is the message: What is being learned by students is not just the facts they memorize but the purpose of this knowledge:

And there’s nothing high-minded about this. I don’t really care much for hearing “both sides” or “opposing points of view,” so much as I care about understanding the literary tools deployed to advance those views—the discipline of voice, the use of verbs, the length and brevity of sentences, and the curiosity of mind behind those sentences.

the creeping sense that there was something rotten not just in law enforcement but maybe also in the law itself.

fight that began in the streets has now moved to the library,

Thus they react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality

it represented a lowering of standards; that to ban a book was to erect a kind of South Carolina exception for advanced placement—one that validated the worst caricatures of Southern whiteness often bandied by the kind of Northerner who thinks “we should have just let them secede.”

to assure the right answers are memorized but that the wrong questions are never asked.

I want to tell you that your oppression will not save you, that being a victim will not enlighten you, that it can just as easily deceive you.

However much you try to remember your own motives, however much you may feel yourself to have succeeded, you are ultimately in their world and are thus compelled to speak to them through their symbols and stories.

is the journalists themselves who are playing god—it is the journalists who decide which sides are legitimate and which are not, which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame.

The Trump years amazed a certain kind of white person; they had no reference for national vulgarity, for such broad corruption and venality, until it was too late.

The Palestinians, lacking such a state, had no right to the land and perhaps no rights at all. The

Thus, the Jewish people could restore the honor lost to the Nazis by warring against Arabs in the breach.

a memorial to genocide was built within walking distance of a massacre that had made that memorial possible,

“He would sit us all down, all his grandkids, and keep telling us that our liberation was through our education and that we couldn’t forget. Because when Palestine was colonized, what they said was they’ll grow old and their children will forget.”

I do not believe that this is a conspiracy. But more important, I do not think it is a coincidence.

Editors and writers like to think they are not part of such systems, that they are independent, objective, and arrive at their conclusions solely by dint of their reporting and research. But the Palestine I saw bore so little likeness to the stories I read, and so much resemblance to the systems I’ve known, that I am left believing that at least here, this objectivity is self-delusion.

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.