The Message

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Part I: Journalism Is Not a Luxury

Page: 3 (2.70%) @ 09 Nov 2024 08:59:58 PM

Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.
—James Baldwin

Page: 5 (4.50%) @ 09 Nov 2024 09:04:11 PM

Haunt. You’ve heard me say this word a lot. It is never enough for the reader of your words to be convinced. The goal is to haunt—to have them think about your words before bed, see them manifest in their dreams, tell their partner about them the next morning, to have them grab random people on the street, shake them and say, “Have you read this yet?”

Part II: On Pharaohs

Page: 28 (25.23%) @ 10 Nov 2024 12:59:30 AM

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.

Page: 29 (26.13%) @ 10 Nov 2024 01:01:40 AM

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. 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. And so a story must be told, one that raises a wall between themselves and those they seek to throttle and rob.

Page: 34 (30.63%) @ 12 Nov 2024 01:17:13 AM

That was how I got my African name—“Ta-Nehisi,” a designation in Ancient Egyptian for the kingdom of Nubia, sometimes translated as “Land of the Blacks.” I was born into what the historian St. Clair Drake calls the “vindicationist tradition,” that is, to Black people who sought to reclaim the very history weaponized against them and turn it back against their tormentors. If a “Black Egypt” was what the Niggerologists feared, then we would insist on its truth and take it to its logical conclusion: We were born not to be slaves but to be royalty. That explains our veneration of Black pharaohs and African kingdoms. The point was to tell a different story than the one imposed on us—an understandable response, but one that I’ve never made peace with.

Page: 35 (31.53%) @ 12 Nov 2024 01:18:39 AM

My name is not meant simply to evoke a historical entity but to conjure the idea of a Black civilization—which is to say human beings filed away in a hierarchy of nobles, seers, commoners, and slaves who through their construction of monuments, recording of literature, and waging of war can rightfully be considered full human beings. But I think human dignity is in the mind and body and not in stone. And I think the moment we root our worth in castes and kingdoms, in “civilization,” we have accepted the precepts of those whose whole entire legacy is the burning and flooding of a planet. And then we have already lost.

Page: 39 (35.14%) @ 12 Nov 2024 01:32:05 AM

I felt the sadness now increase, expanding from a pinhole until it was wide as the sea itself, rippling with each wave that crested and fell on this African shore. I had traveled back to a kind of Big Bang. A universe would be born on the other side of the water, but first countless worlds would have to die. And I realized I was sad, not because I was alone but because I was not. I had indeed come home, and ghosts had come back with me.

Page: 54 (48.65%) @ 12 Nov 2024 04:17:47 PM

I walked south down a cobblestone road, listening to the goats bleating and roosters crowing in the distance. I felt a deep calm. And then, at the end of the street, I found a hill and climbed it, and from that vantage point I looked out at the sea. I saw the waves crashing, and the familiar sadness that I’d felt that entire trip every time I looked out into the sea came over me again. In my mind, I was traveling across an epic dating back some five hundred years, when the first of us were carried off. Entire worldviews, systems of study, political movements, wars, and literature were birthed by that one act. And such deep suffering. Standing on that hill, I felt it all personally. My mind returned to Baltimore, to the sketch, to my father trying to read his way out.

Page: 57 (51.35%) @ 12 Nov 2024 04:21:14 PM

Here is what I think: We have a right to our imagined traditions, to our imagined places, and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess that they are imagined. Gorée is the name of a place my people have proclaimed as sacred, a symbolic representation of our last stop before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage, before, as Robert Hayden once wrote, our “voyage through death / to life upon these shores.” We have a right to that memory, to choose the rock of Gorée, to consecrate it, to cry before it, to mourn its meaning. And we have a right to imagine ourselves as pharaohs, and then again the responsibility to ask if a pharaoh is even worthy of our needs, our dreams, our imagination.

Part III: Bearing the Flaming Cross

Page: 71 (63.96%) @ 12 Nov 2024 06:36:56 PM

And then Schulz sketches the future to make us feel what we might if a tsunami struck:
If it happens at night, the ensuing catastrophe will unfold in darkness…. Nonchalance will shatter instantly. So will everything made of glass…. Refrigerators will walk out of kitchens, unplugging themselves and toppling over…. Unmoored on the undulating ground, the homes will begin to collapse.

Page: 80 (72.07%) @ 12 Nov 2024 11:05:57 PM

Great canons angle toward great power, and the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it. That incuriosity is what afflicts the dullest critics of safe spaces and the like. But if these writers, teachers, and administrators could part with the privilege of their own ignorance, they would see that they too need safe spaces—and that, for their own sakes, they have made a safe space of nearly the entire world.

Page: 91 (81.98%) @ 13 Nov 2024 01:42:00 PM

Oppressive power is preserved in the smoke and fog, and sometimes it is smuggled in the unexamined shadows of the language of the oppressed themselves.

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Literature is anguish.

Page: 92 (82.88%) @ 13 Nov 2024 01:45:36 PM

I was not born into a religious home, but I knew that my peers had been raised on stories of God casting Adam and Eve from paradise for biting an apple, that He had destroyed all life save that contained in the ark, that He had condemned me and every other nonbeliever to eternal suffering. And this is the children’s literature of those who believe this to be a Christian nation. I suspect these believers would say that the anguish, this discomfort radiating out of their own gospel, is not incidental but is at the heart of its transformative power.

Page: 94 (84.68%) @ 13 Nov 2024 01:49:18 PM

I sat on the phone, silent, for eight seconds. Writing is all process to me, not finished work. It begins in the kind of anguish South Carolina sought to forbid, sometimes originating in something I’ve read, but more often in the world itself—in peoples and systems whose declared aims run contrary to their actions. And through reading, through reporting, I begin to comprehend a truth. That moment of comprehension is ecstatic. 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.

Page: 110 (99.10%) @ 16 Nov 2024 10:50:32 PM

Much of the current hoopla about “book bans” and “censorship” gets it wrong. This is not about me or any writer of the moment. It is about writers to come—the boundaries of their imagination, the angle of their thinking, the depth of their questions.

Part IV: The Gigantic Dream

Page: 126 (113.51%) @ 24 Nov 2024 04:02:44 PM

Again I felt the mental lens curving against the light and was reminded of something I have long known, something I’ve written and spoken about, but still was stunned to see here in such stark detail: that race is a species of power and nothing else.

Page: 127 (114.41%) @ 24 Nov 2024 04:05:52 PM

Throughout the West Bank, I saw cisterns used to harvest rainwater. These cisterns were almost certainly illegal—the Israeli state’s hold on the West Bank includes control of the aquifers in the ground and the rainwater that falls from above. Any structure designed for gathering water requires a permit from the occupying power, and such permits are rarely given to Palestinians. 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.

Page: 148 (133.33%) @ 05 Dec 2024 12:58:31 AM

Thus the complex of curators is doing more than setting pub dates and greenlighting—they are establishing and monitoring a criterion for humanity. Without this criterion, there can be no oppressive power, because the first duty of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so forth is the framing of who is human and who is not.

Page: 206 (185.59%) @ 05 Dec 2024 10:46:40 PM

I came to think of my trade—long-form magazine or new journalism—as a kind of scientific process that, when correctly applied, must necessarily reveal the truth.

Page: 216 (194.59%) @ 05 Dec 2024 11:22:16 PM

The link is colonialism, which has always had a racist cynicism at its core—a belief that the world is not just savage, but that the most dangerous savages tend to live beyond the borders of the West. Zionism—which from the outset sought to position itself as “an outpost of civilization against barbarism”—has never rejected these precepts.

Page: 229 (206.31%) @ 05 Dec 2024 11:43:00 PM

This is important—forced to match sword for sword, or gun for gun, slaveholders and white supremacists could be confident in victory, if only because their vast wealth assured them an unmatched arsenal. But the rules of writing are different, and great wealth has almost the same relationship to creating great writers as it does great basketball players. A literature fueled by a profound human experience must necessarily burn at a high flame, and thus a “material handicap” is transformed into a “spiritual advantage,” putting in the hands of the oppressed “the conditions of a classical art,” which is to say the power to haunt people, to move people, and expand the brackets of humanity. This is as true for those laboring under the shadow of enslavement as it is for those laboring under the shadow of apartheid.