The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

With them, even ordinary living has epic depth and lyric intensity, and this, their material handicap, is their spiritual advantage. So, in a day when art has run to classes, cliques and coteries, and life lacks more and more a vital common background, the Negro artist, out of the depths of his group and personal experience, has to his hand almost the conditions of a classical art.

Now the amazement was my own: There I was on the other side, among family divided from each other by centuries. I had come back. But my own writing had gotten here first.

to recognize that students are humans to be challenged, not animals to be broken and tamed.

The cradle of material change is in our imagination and ideas. And whereas white supremacy, like any other status quo, can default to the clichéd claims and excuses for the world as it is—bad cops are rotten apples, America is guardian of the free world—we have the burden of crafting new language and stories that allow people to imagine that new policies are possible.

In this context, the Mom for Liberty shrieking “Think of the children!” must be taken seriously. What she is saying is that her right to the America she knows, her right to the biggest and greenest of lawns, to the most hulking and sturdiest SUVs, to an arsenal of infinite AR-15s, rests on a hierarchy, on an order, helpfully explained and sanctified by her country’s ideas, art, and methods of education.

For as sure as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man, Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere.

As it happens, you can see the world and still never see the people in it.

I am not alone, and I don’t just mean ancestors but the people I met every day living in abeyance of Israeli rule.

But it 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.

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.