> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://log.desipundit.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Message ★★★★★ - URL: https://log.desipundit.com/the-message/ - Published: 2026-10-28T21:38:09.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-28T21:38:09.000Z - Description: You cannot read Ta-Nehisi Coates for fun. In The Message, he moves from Senegal to the 2020 reckoning and to Palestine, and draws one line through all three. A difficult, necessary book. - Author: PM - Tags: Books You cannot read Ta-Nehisi Coates for fun, and I don’t think he intends for you to. He says as much in the book, framed in part as advice to young writers: > *It is never enough for the reader of your words to be convinced. The goal is to haunt*. By that measure, his latest book succeeds. It carries a modest title, *The Message*, but there is nothing modest about what it asks of the reader. Coates moves across three distinct subjects: his first trip to Africa, a visit to Senegal; the racial reckoning of 2020 and the “whitelash” that followed from people unsettled by a nation suddenly more aware of its sins; and his visit to Palestine, where he found a world very different from the one described on the evening news. The Senegal section is a travelogue that wanders, but it wanders with purpose. Coates is standing in the places where his ancestors’ suffering began, and you can watch the trip working on him. He describes Black people as “held just outside” the West’s liberal declarations, “but kept close enough to be enchanted with its promises.” He also turns that scrutiny on his own side, questioning the myths built to restore dignity to a plundered people: > *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*. These are not polished conclusions. They are the thoughts of a man recalibrating his sense of history while standing inside it. The middle section brings the argument home. The summer of 2020 forced a public conversation about race that many Americans had long avoided. What followed was a backlash from those who saw that new awareness as a threat to the old order. Coates is blunt about where the real danger lies: “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.” He is just as clear about what the fights over monuments and curricula are really about: > *The statues and pageantry can fool you. They look like symbols of wars long settled, fought on behalf of men long dead. But their Redemption is not about honoring a past. It’s about killing a future*. But the essay that made the news, and the one that will stay with me longest, is about Palestine. To say our opinions on this conflict have shifted since October 7, 2023 would be an understatement. People who thought they were firmly on one side began to doubt views they had held for years. I was one of them. Coates gives weight to that doubt. He doesn’t argue from a distance. He describes the ground as he found it and the people he met, many of whom had lost nearly everything. You can feel his internal conflict on the page. He admits he was wrong, and that his own history had not protected him from being wrong: > 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. He sees firsthand the pattern Isabel Wilkerson documented in *Caste*: the Nazis studied American race laws as they built their own system of persecution. Coates follows that thread to its uncomfortable end. The methods used to control and degrade the powerless have been studied, copied, and refined. Together they form a handbook for fascism and the oppression of the weak. The comparison to the segregated South comes up again and again, never more sharply than when he writes that Israel “*segregated not just the pools and the fountains, but the water itself.*” And because of America’s role, he refuses to treat it as someone else’s problem. It was, he concludes, “*an evil done in my name*.” Coates does not claim to offer solutions to complex problems. That is not his project. He is careful about the limits of his own view as a visitor, writing that “*if Palestinians are to be truly seen, it will be through stories woven by their own hands*.” What he offers instead is clarity about where the moral and ethical weight of this struggle lies, delivered through narrative rather than argument. He trusts the reader to see what he saw. What ties the book together is the line that runs from Dakar to Palestine and back to the United States. The slave trade, the American laws that later instructed fascists, the occupation he witnessed, and the reckoning and backlash at home are not separate stories. Coates presents them as chapters in the same long history. Read this way, connections that once seemed like a stretch now look obvious. This is not an easy book, and it isn’t supposed to be. It is a necessary one.. --- ## Edition Read - **Edition Type:** Hardcover - **Number of Pages:** 232 pages - **Date First Published:** October 1, 2024 - **Publisher:** One World - **ISBN10:** 0593230388 - **ASIN:** 0593230388 - **Language:** English ## Description > Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set off to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic Politics and the English Language, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities. > > The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk” city of “old traditions and new machinery,” but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream. > > He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning” of 2020\. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. > > And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating. > > Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths. *Source:* [GoodReads](https://www.goodreads.com/book/title?ref=log.desipundit.com) --- ## Notable Highlights > And our political imagination is rooted in our history, our culture, and our myths. That the country’s major magazines, newspapers, publishing houses, and social media were suddenly lending space to stories that questioned the agreed-upon narrative meant that Americans, as a whole, might begin to question them too. And a new narrative—and a new set of possibilities—might then be born. > I see politicians in Colorado, in Tennessee, in South Carolina, moving against my own work, tossing books I’ve authored out of library, banishing them from classes, and I feel snatched out of the present and dropped into an age of pitchforks and book- burning bonfires. My first instinct is to laugh, but then I remember that American history is filled with men and women who were as lethal as they were ridiculous. And when I force myself to take a serious look, I see something familiar: an attempt by adults to break the young minds entrusted to them and remake them in a more orderly and pliable form. > 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? > When you are erased from the argument and purged from the narrative, you do not exist. 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. > 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? > This meant that we could never practice writing solely for the craft itself, but must necessarily believe our practice to be in service of that larger emancipatory mandate. > I mean, this is deeply rooted within Israeli society, within Zionist ideology. There is a wish and a want for self-determination. I don’t think that’s inherently wrong. I think what’s inherently wrong is one nationality coming at the expense of the other. That’s sort of my attempt. > Thus a redemption of a different kind was affected: By routing the savage “Arab,” by murdering his leaders, by confining him to the Bantustans of Tuba, or the reservations of Gaza, or the ghettoes of Lydd, Jewish national honor was restored in the traditional manner of Western European powers. The “mass mutation” into whiteness was advanced, and “IDF,” “Mossad,” and “Shin Bet” all became synonyms for righteous manly violence. > There were no Palestinian writers or editors around me. But there were many writers, editors, and publishers who believed in the nobility of Zionism and had little regard for, or simply could not see, its victims. > 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. > The war might be raging in the streets, but it could never be defeated there, because what they were ultimately fighting was the word. > If American history really does begin in enslavement, in genocide, then the lies, and the policies that attack writing from beyond the order, must not just be deemed possible. They must be expected. > 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. > Jewish Israelis in Jerusalem are citizens of the state; Palestinians in the city are merely “permanent residents,” a kind of sub-citizenship with a reduced set of rights and privileges. In Hebron, Jewish settlers are subject to civil law, with all its rights and protections, while stateless Palestinians in the same city are subject to military courts, with all their summary power and skepticism. > 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. > I now noted a symmetry in the bromides—that those who claimed Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East were just as likely to claim that America was the oldest democracy in the world. And both claims relied on excluding whole swaths of the population living under the rule of the state. > All that week I listened to Palestinians invoking that tradition, invoking James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, or Angela Davis, explaining how these writers and activists revealed something of their own struggle to them. > 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. > I remember walking up an inclining street in Hebron and reaching a large metal fence with a revolving gate. At the top of the gate was a device about the size of a shoebox with a tube protruding from it. It looked like a camera. In fact, it was a turret designed to lock on and immobilize a target using “nonlethal” rounds fired via remote control. The device’s name—“Smart Shooter”—was written on the side. This was oppression’s avant-garde—the first initial steps to automated imperial dominance—and I had little reason to feel that such trailblazing efforts would remain in Palestine. And at that I despaired. > Zionism demands, as Levi Eshkol, prime minister of Israel during the 1960s, once put it, “the dowry, not the bride”—that is to say, the land without the Palestinians on. > Congress passed an immigration bill in 1948 that employed geographical and time restrictions in the hopes of keeping Jewish immigration to a minimum. That same year, the United States became the first country to recognize Israeli independence. The cause of Jewish whiteness was thus advanced by keeping “them over there”—and better still, over there warring against natives and savages. > They took Israel away from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years,” said South African prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd in 1961\. “In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state. > A political order is premised not just on who can vote but on what they can vote for, which is to say on what can be imagined. And our political imagination is rooted in our history, our culture, and our myths. > Even my words here, this bid for reparation, is a stranger’s story—one told by a man still dazzled by knafeh and Arabic coffee, still at the start of a journey that others have walked since birth. Palestine is not my home. I 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. > My sense is that if I spend more time talking to you than I spend complaining about you, then something wonderful often happens and the enlightenment is mutual. So 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. > 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. > 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. > American history is filled with men and women who were as lethal as they were ridiculous. > The late Jamal Khashoggi was fond of the Arabic proverb “Say your word, then leave. > 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. > Even as I listened to Avner talk, even as we sped easily and unimpeded down roads that Palestinians on the West Bank cannot use, part of me was still searching. I did this because the weight of evil is so great. I did this because if the worst was true, if I was forced to see it square, then I knew what must come next. I did this because “a good reason” is also a way out. The weakness in me is always talking. But so are my ancestors. > Zionism would free the Arab race from “the veil, the fez, the sickness, the filth, the lack of education.” This narrative of a barbaric Palestine plagued by filth and chaos, as contrasted with an ostensibly pristine and orderly West, has never faded. > 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. > Some of us see the lack of policy change and wonder if the movement itself was futile. But policy change is an end point, not an origin. 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. > The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else. I could hear that same pain in Avner’s and Guy’s words. They were raised under the story that the Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been confronted with an incredible truth—that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing. > We require another standard—one that sees the sharpening of our writing as the sharpening of our quality of light. And with that light we are charged with examining the stories we have been told, and how they undergird the politics we have accepted, and then telling new stories ourselves. > It may seem strange that people who have already obtained a position of power through violence, invest so much time into 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. > That is to say, words are powerful, but more so when organized to tell stories. And stories, because of their power, demanded rigorous reading, interpretation, and investigation. > But when you live as we have, among a people whose humanity is ever in doubt, even the small and particular—especially the small and particular—becomes political. > But we are not them, and the standards of enslavers, colonizers, and villains simply will not do. We require another standard—one that sees the sharpening of our writing as the sharpening of our quality of light. And with that light we are charged with examining the stories we have been told, and how they undergird the politics we have accepted, and then telling new stories ourselves. > The statues and pageantry can fool you. They look like symbols of wars long settled, fought on behalf of men long dead. But their Redemption is not about honoring a past. It’s about killing a future. > 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. > History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates or justifies political order. So it was with Josiah Nott looking back to Ancient Egypt to justify slavery. And so it is with the American Revolution and the founding of a great republic, or the Greatest Generation who did not fight to defend merely the homeland but the entire world. If you believe that history, then you are primed to believe that the American state is a force for good, that it is the world’s oldest democracy, and that those who hate America hate it for its freedoms. > > And if you believe that, then you can believe that these inexplicable haters of freedom are worthy of our drones. But a different history, one that finds its starting point in genocide and slavery, argues for a much darker present and the possibility that here too are haters of freedom, unworthy of the power they wield. A political order is premised not just on who can vote but on what they can vote for, which is to say on what can be imagined. And our political imagination is rooted in our history, our culture, and our myths. > When I was young, I felt the physical weight of race constantly. We had less. Our lives were more violent. And whether by genes, culture, or divine judgment, this was said to be our fault. The only tool to escape this damnation—for a lucky few—was school. Later I went out into the world and saw the other side, those who allegedly, by genes, culture, or divine judgment, had more but—as I came to understand—knew less. These people, white people, were living under a lie. > > More, they were, in some profound way, suffering for the lie. They had seen more of the world than I had—but not more of humanity itself. 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. A system of supremacy justifies itself through illusion, so that those moments when the illusion can no longer hold always come as a great shock. > When you are erased from the argument and purged from the narrative, you do not exist. 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. > Paulo Freire wrote of the “banking” system of education, in which students are treated as receptacles for information and judged on how efficiently—how “meekly”—they “receive, memorize, and repeat” that information. 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. > We are, Black people, here and there, victims of the West—a people held just outside its liberal declarations, but kept close enough to be enchanted with its promises. > So 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. > I walked away and found a seat in the shade, away from everyone. At this moment, all that I had seen across the days began to avalanche—the cave evictions, the massacre in Hebron, the monuments to genocide, the checkpoints, the wall of devouring, and so much more. Those who question Israel, who question what has been done with the moral badge of the Holocaust, are often pointed in the direction of the great evils done across the world. We are told that it is suspicious that, among all the ostensibly amoral states, we would single out Israel—as though the relationship between America and Israel is not itself singular. But the plaque was clear: “The spiritual bedrock of our values as a nation come from Jerusalem.” This effort that I saw, the use of archaeology, the destruction of ancient sites, the pushing of Palestinians out of their homes, had the specific imprimatur of the United States of America. Which means that it had my imprimatur. This was not just another evil done by another state, but an evil done in my name. > But passport stamps and wide vocabularies are neither wisdom nor morality. As it happens, you can see the world and still never see the people in it. Empires are founded by travelers, and the claim of some exclusive knowledge of the native is their mark. I always imagined reparations as a rejection of plunder at large. And who in modern memory had been plundered more than the victims of the Holocaust? But my prototype was not reparations from a genocidal empire to its Jewish victims, but from that empire to a Jewish state. And what my young eyes now saw of that state was a world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy. I was seeking a world beyond plunder—but my proof of concept was just more plunder. > But when the light cleared I had new eyes, and I could see my own words in new ways—and the words from which they were derived—the stories, columns, speeches, and talks presented by “willing intellectuals.” So much seemed obvious. I now noted a symmetry in the bromides—that those who claimed Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East were just as likely to claim that America was the oldest democracy in the world. > Imagine learning to swim by reading and memorizing the steps of a front crawl but never jumping into a pool. Why do we teach our students this way? > We have lived under a class of people who ruled American culture with a flaming cross for so long that we regularly cease to notice the import of being ruled at all. But they do not. And so the Redeemers of this age look out and see their kingdom besieged by trans Barbies, Muslim mutants, daughters dating daughters, sons trick-or-treating as Wakandan kings. 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. 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. > Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and the fountains, but the water itself. > And every expansionist power needs a good story to justify its plunder. > But I know how sadness can exert its own gravity, growing more powerful the longer it holds you. > 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. > A system of supremacy justifies itself through illusion, so that those moments when the illusion can no longer hold always come as a great shock. > 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. > In fact, it is the whole reason race was invented. Africans had to either be excised from humanity or cast into the lower reaches to justify their exploitation. > Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others,” writes Edward Said. That its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice. > Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics. A policy of welfare reform exists downstream from the myth of the welfare queen. Novels, memoirs, paintings, sculptures, statues, monuments, films, miniseries, advertisements, and journalism all order our reality. Jim Crow segregation—with its signage and cap-doffing rituals—was both policy and a kind of public theater. 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. > 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. > But virtues should be signaled, and the signalers should act to make their virtues manifest. It is the latter, not the former, that is the problem. > Those who claimed Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East were just as likely to claim that America was the oldest democracy in the world. And both claims relied on excluding whole swaths of the population living under the rule of the state. > 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. > 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. And this power is an extension of the power of other curators of the culture—network execs, producers, publishers—whose core job is deciding which stories get told and which do not. > I want to tell you I was wrong. 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. I learned that here. In Haifa. In Ramallah. And especially here at Yad Vashem. > 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. > I guess it’s worth pointing out the obvious—that the very governors and politicians who loudly exalt the values of free speech are among the most aggressive prosecutors of “divisive concepts. > 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. > There has to be something in you, something that hungers for clarity. And you will need that hunger, because if you follow that path, soon enough you will find yourself confronting not just their myths, not just their stories, but your own. This is difficult, if only because so much of our myth-making was done in service of liberation, in doing whatever we could to dig our way out of the pit into which we were cast. And above us stand the very people who did the casting, jeering, tossing soil into our eyes and yelling down at us, “You’re doing it wrong.” But we are not them, and the standards of enslavers, colonizers, and villains simply will not do. We require another standard—one that sees the sharpening of our writing as the sharpening of our quality of light. And with that light we are charged with examining the stories we have been told, and how they undergird the politics we have accepted, and then telling new stories ourselves. > 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. > 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. > An inhumane system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television. > 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. I could hear that same pain in Avner’s and Guy’s words. They were raised under the story that the Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been confronted with an incredible truth—that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing. > 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. > You cannot act upon what you cannot see. And we are plagued by dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world. And it is not enough to stand against these dissemblers. There has to be something in you, something that hungers for clarity. And you will need that hunger, because if you follow that path, soon enough you will find yourself confronting not just their myths, not just their stories, but your own. > I doubt that anyone ever parts with power in the name of charity. > When you are erased from the argument and purged from the narrative, you do not exist. Thus the complex of curators is doing more than setting pub dates and greenlighting—they are establishing and monitoring a criterion for humanity. > The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors. > Your oppression will not save you, that being a victim will not enlighten you, that it can just as easily deceive you. > 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 that they have the power to form their own. > Film, music, the theater—all can be experienced amidst the whooping, clapping, and cheering of the crowd. But books work when no one else is looking, mind-melding author and audience, forging an imagined world that only the reader can see. > History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates or justifies political order. > Great canons angle toward great power, and the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it. > 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. 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. > I felt that I was still waking up, feel that I am still waking up, still searching for the right words. > This tradition of writing, of drawing out a common humanity, is indispensable to our future, if only because what must be cultivated and cared for must first be seen.