The Message

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Created: Over 1 year ago

My 28 highlights

Whatever it lacked in science, the City of David made up for in merriment.
’s true that I grew up in a house of words—articles, books, lyrics. And it’s true that writing took hold of me young and held me in its orbit, but there were many moons pulling at the tides of my mind
Recounting the exploitation of the peasants of medieval Europe, the historian Barbara Tuchman wrote in A Distant Mirror that in the “tales and ballads” of the time, peasants were depicted as “aggressive, insolent, greedy, sullen, suspicious, tricky, unshaved, unwashed, ugly, stupid.” Tuchman quotes from stories of the time asserting that an unexploited peasantry “troubles God,” and the universe can only be set right when peasants are left to “eat thistles and briars, thorns and straw.” The stories justified the forced labor of feudalism—emphasis on “forced”:
My Niggerology, so far from harming me at home, has made me a greater man than I ever expected to be,” Nott wrote to his mentor, the anthropologist Samuel Morton, in 1847. “I am the big gun of the profession here.”
Apprised of Harrison’s report, 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.”
It was clear that such power must serve something beyond my amusement—that it should do the work of illuminating, of confronting and undoing, the violence I saw around me, that beauty must be joined to politics, that style possessed must meet struggle demanded
By the next week I was with Mary, eating salad and drinking iced green tea at a restaurant in Chapin. She was the portrait of a familiar Southern archetype—blond, kind, outgoing, homegrown, daughter of the local football coach and a kindergarten teacher. Her claim to Chapin was strong—stronger even than some of the parents who despised her. The town had seen an influx of families looking to live somewhere conservative and traditional. Mary wasn’t that. She was fighting for her job in the very school where she had earned her own high school diploma. How
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.
“We need not resort to any long-drawn arguments to defend negro-Ethnography against the Notts and Gliddons of our day,” wrote Black nationalist James Theodore Holly in 1859. “Let them prove, if they can, to the full satisfaction of their narrow souls and gangrened hearts, that the Black faced, woolly haired, thick lipped and flat nosed Egyptians of ancient times did not belong to the same branch of the human family that those negroes do who have been the victims of the African Slave-trade for the past four centuries.”
All told, from 1974 to 1993, total annual exports from Tel Aviv to Pretoria averaged $600 million a year. Through all those critical years, Israel was not just an ally of South Africa; it was the very arsenal of apartheid.
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 it.
In 1977, South African Army chief Constand Viljoen marveled at the efficiency of the Israeli checkpoints in the Occupied Territories. “The thoroughness with which Israel conducts this examination is astonishing,” Viljoen noted. “At the quickest, it takes individual Arabs that come through there about one and a half hours. When the traffic is heavy, it takes from four to five hours.”
I read the early Zionist Moses Hess naming himself as part of “an unfortunate, maligned, despised, and dispersed people—but one that the world has not succeeded in destroying,” and I hear the prophets of Black nationalism, the struggle into which I was born, the struggle of Garvey and Malcolm, the struggle that gave me my very name. “Jewish noses cannot be reformed,” Hess told his people. “And the black, wavy hair of the Jews will not be changed into blond by conversion or straightened out by constant combing.”
As early as 1887, Baron Edmond de Rothschild had proposed purchasing and leveling the quarter to create a plaza for worshippers. Three days after the Old City fell, Rothschild’s vision quickly became a reality when Israeli bulldozers razed the quarter. One hundred thirty-five homes were demolished and 650 people rendered homeless.
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.
We said our goodbyes to Mr. Jaber and then followed Sawsan in her car to a Middle-Eastern restaurant a few miles away in nearby Chicagoland for a gathering of friends and fellow Palestinian activists, teachers, and lawyers. We ordered fatoush, yalanji, kubbeh, and hummus. A man in a keffiyeh kept coming by serving Arabic coffee—the kind I’d had at Tania’s home in Birzeit. Every thirty minutes or so, the volume of the music would rise and there’d be a huge sing-along for someone’s birthday or some other celebratory occasion. Sawsan kept apologizing for the festivities. But the food, the volume of song, the coffee, the whole day, all of it combined to impart a feeling of coming back to a home, even though it was not my own.
Around the same time George Floyd was killed, Nikole Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for her lead essay in “The 1619 Project,” which argued for America’s origins not in the Declaration of Independence but in enslavement.
“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,” writes Noura Erakat in her book Justice for Some.
“We should form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia,” Herzl wrote in his 1896 manifesto, The Jewish State. “An outpost of civilization against barbarism.”
Kathryn Schulz’s piece “The Really Big One
I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel.
I think about my entire childhood,” Sawsan said. “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.”
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
In the September 1967 issue of The Atlantic, in an article titled “The Swift Sword,” Barbara Tuchman wrote of Israeli soldiers “fighting and crying,” describing them as “lions” who “fought with tears” while assuring her readers that the Israelis, because of their own history, were a different kind of army. “The Jewish people are not accustomed to conquest, and we receive it with mixed feelings,” General Yitzhak Rabin told Tuchman.
the nineteenth century, as ex-slaves sought to build the first egalitarian democracy in American history, they were opposed by white men who claimed to be “Redeemers”—not just of government and society but of history and art. They raised statues. They wrote histories, memoirs, and novels. And then, with the work of Redemption complete, more stories were published so that terrorists and bandits would be remembered as knights and champions
“The land of our fathers is waiting for us; let us colonize it,” wrote Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, linguist and godfather of modern Hebrew, in 1880.
The City of David simply made it extremely uncomfortable for Palestinians to be here. I thought back to my visit to Columbia, South Carolina, and all the monuments to the enslavers and advocates of Jim Crow. I thought of how the Confederate flag had once flown over the State House. I thought of the kind of people who came to see those monuments, who thought the flag to be important. And then I imagined the state that ruled over me and my family importing all of that to my very front door.
At Medill, she’d dreamed of drawing those brackets from the perspective of a Palestinian woman. It was a perspective that, in all my time in journalism, in all the newsrooms in which I’d worked, in the journalism schools where I had taught, I had never once encountered. She spoke about the impossibility of finding work that allowed her to write as she wished, and I could tell by the way she spoke that this frustrated dream was not just hers but one she held for her people, for she too was a steward, and she too was a bearer, and she too had ancestors.