The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

organization of words, silences, and sound into stories. And to that I added the employment of particular verbs, the playful placement of punctuation, and the private ecstasy it all brought to me.

but there were many moons pulling at the tides of my mind.

I think if he tried to describe the forces shaping his life, my father would see his own actions first: his credits, his mistakes. But if he widened the aperture to the world around him, he would see that some people’s credits earned them more, and their mistakes cost them less. And those people who took more and paid less lived in a world of iniquitous wealth, while his own people lived in a world of terrifying want.

It may seem strange that people who have already attained a position of power through violence invest so much time in justifying their plunder with words.

I think that what we were being taught was less a body of knowledge than a way to be in the world: orderly, organized, attentive to direction.

When you are erased from the argument and purged from the narrative, you do not exist.

Israel’s own leaders have long seen apartheid as well within the range of possibilities for its government. In 2007, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert warned that without a “two-state solution” Israel would “face a South African–style struggle for equal voting rights.” The result of that struggle in Olmert’s mind would be grim—“the state of Israel [would be] finished.”