The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

A belief in genius is a large part of what plagues us, and I have found that people widely praised for the power of their intellect are as likely to illuminate as they are to confound. “Genius” may or may not help a writer whose job is, above all else, to clarify.

he was confronted not just by the yawning chasm between wealth and want, but by the stories that sought to inscribe that chasm as natural.

fugacious

I had traveled enough in my life to be familiar with the amazement that comes upon you when the country becomes real.

when I’m traveling, I live for these awkward moments, when I need something,

The answer to everything was in a book, he believed, which is to say in the record.

that I must write in capital letters so that the words are legible to me later,

This amenable portion of knowledge has great value, but removed from everyday life, it’s just theory. Imagine learning to swim by reading and memorizing the steps of a front crawl but never jumping into a pool.

A teacher delivers the student information and the student succeeds by repeating it. 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:

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.

I have never formally issued a “trigger warning” or explicitly carved out a “safe space.” But I know that all readers do not come to a text equally.

for much of my time as a journalist, I have been surrounded by people who, on some level, think of me as an exception that does not disprove their theories of white supremacy.

I don’t really worry about the young, whose excesses are confined to lecture halls and quadrangles, so much as I fear the old, whose tyrannies are legislative.

“The goal,” as their most prominent activist helpfully explained, “is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and think ‘critical race theory.’ ”

History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates or justifies political order.

American history is filled with men and women who were as lethal as they were ridiculous.

attempt by adults to break the young minds entrusted to them and remake them in a more orderly and pliable form.

What these adults are ultimately seeking is not simply the reinstatement of their preferred dates and interpretations but the preservation of a whole manner of learning, austere and authoritarian, that privileges the ap...

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 tha...

Writing and rewriting is the attempt to communicate not just a truth but the ecstasy of a truth. It is not enough for me to convince the reader of my argument; I want them to feel that same private joy that I feel alone.

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

And I doubt that anyone ever parts with power in the name of charity.

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.

The fear instilled by this rising culture is not for what it does today but what it augurs for tomorrow—a different world in which the boundaries of humanity are not so easily drawn and enforced.

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.

their Redemption is not about honoring a past. It’s about killing a future.

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

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.

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. I would fall in love with some girl and find my emotions so dominated that the only vent I had was writing it down. But when I pulled out my black-and-white composition notebook and put pen to paper, what I saw instead were the words of a thousand other men who had gone before me. I had no voice, which is to say no cadence, no lexicon, no sense of beauty I could call my own.

know there are writers who can imagine a world from nothing. But I’m not one of them. The sense of beauty I was seeking had to emerge from knowledge.

you can see the world and still never see the people in

“Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others,” writes Edward Said.

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.”

“Jewish democracy,” it had been right there the whole time. The phrase means what it says—a democracy for the Jewish people and the Jewish people alone.

Journalists claim to be hearing “both sides” as though a binary opposition had been set down by some disinterested god. 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.

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.”

In 1993, when the Oslo Peace Accords were signed, the settler population was 111,000. Today it’s half a million.

This putative “Jewish democracy” is, like its American patron, an expansionist power.

The notion that a colonialist Zionism exists merely in the hallucinations of leftist professors and the chants of their wayward students ignores a crucial source—the very words of Zionists themselves.

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.

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 least reflective of them say, “This is not America.” But some of them suspect that it is America, and there is great pain in understanding that, without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime, in learning that the whole game was rigged in your favor, that there are nations within your nation who have spent all of their collective lives in the Trump years. The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else.

Buried in the claim is another notion—that the worth of a people is defined by their possession of a homeland incorporated as a state. The Palestinians, lacking such a state, had no right to the land and perhaps no rights at all.

early as 1905, the German conquerors of South West Africa instituted antimiscegenation laws—laws they’d adopted from their studies of the American South.

General George S. Patton, who commanded the Displaced Persons camps in Bavaria, fumed in his diary that “Harrison and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals.”

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,”

The Israeli writer and chronicler Amos Elon once described archaeology in Israel as “almost a national sport,” which had captivated a nation forever looking for “the reassurance of roots.”

One method of effecting this was to declare a piece of land to be an archaeological site, thus allowing the state to assert an interest in how that site is used.

the state had one message to the Palestinians within its borders. The message was: “You’d really be better off somewhere else.”

Archaeology was interpretive,

don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel.