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# 2024-12-08 - The Lost Cause by Ta-Nehisi Coates
When Between the World and Me Faced a School Book Ban, Ta-Nehisi
Coates Decided to Report It Out
> The only book learning we ever got was when we stole it. Master
> bought some slaves from Cincinnati, that had worked in white
> folks' houses. They had stole a little learning and when they came
> to our place, they passed on to us what they knew. We wasn't
> allowed no paper and pencil. I learned all my ABCs without it. I
> knows how to read and ain't never been in a school room in my life.
> There was one woman by the name of Aunt Sylvia. She was so smart
> she foreknowed things before they took place. --Mark Oliver
The summer of 2020 now feels like distant history, and it is easy to
be cynical about that moment given the backlash that has followed
that season of protests over the parade of Americans murdered by the
forces we pay to protect us. But I remember an even more distant era,
when the names of those killed died with the people who carried them.
Those 2020 protests succeeded in implanting some skepticism in
people who were raised on the idea of Officer Friendly. I think
that is what the white supremacists feared most--the spreading
realization that the cops were not knights and the creeping sense
among Americans that there was something rotten not just in law
enforcement but maybe also in the law itself. That fear explains the
violence of the response to the protests, but even that violence
redounded to the benefit of the protesters because it confirmed their
critique. What was the justifiably noble interest that required
tear-gassing protesters blocks from the Capitol, or the deployment of
secret police in Portland, or the literal cracking of heads in
Buffalo? While violence was never forsworn, by the end of summer
white supremacists had learned a lesson: The war might be raging in
the streets, but it could never be defeated there, because what they
were ultimately fighting was the word.
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. Nikole is my homegirl, and like me, she believes that
journalism, history, and literature have a place of honor in our
fight to make a better world. I had the great fortune of watching her
build the 1619 Project, of being on the receiving end of texts with
highlighted pages from history books, of hearing her speak on the
thrilling experience of telling our story, some 400 years after we
arrived here, in all the grandeur it deserved. Seeing the seriousness
of effort, her passion for it, the platform she commanded, and the
response it garnered, I knew a backlash was certain to come. But I
can't say I understood how profound this backlash would be--that a
"1776 Project" would be initiated by the president, that the 2020
protests would be dubbed by some on the right as the "1619 riots,"
thus explicitly, if in bad faith, connecting the writing and the
street, and that the White House would issue Executive Order 13950,
targeting any education or training that included the notion that
America was "fundamentally racist," the idea that any race bore
"responsibility for actions committed in the past," or any other
"divisive concept" that should provoke "discomfort, guilt, anguish or
any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her
race." It's true that the order was revoked after its author lost the
next election, but by that time it had spawned a suite of state-level
variants--laws, policies, directives, and resolutions--all erected to
excise "divisive concepts" from any training or education. The flag
of parental rights was raised. In Tennessee and Georgia, teachers
were fired. School boards in Virginia were besieged. And in North
Carolina, Nikole's tenure at the state's flagship university--where
she herself was an alum--was denied.
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." And I guess
it should be noted that what these politicians--and even some
writers--dubbed "critical race theory" bore little resemblance to
that theory's actual study and practice. So I will note it. But the
simple fact is that these people were liars, and to take them
seriously, to press a case of hypocrisy or misreading, is to be
distracted again. "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.'" It worked. Today,
some four years after the signing of 13950, nearly half the country's
schoolchildren have been protected, by the state, from "critical race
theory" and other "divisive concepts."
It may seem strange that a fight that began in the streets has now
moved to the library, that a counterrevolution in defense of brutal
policing has now transformed itself into a war over scholarship and
art. But in the months after George Floyd's murder, books by Black
authors on race and racism shot to the top of best-seller and
most-borrowed lists. Black bookstores saw their sales skyrocket. The
cause for this spike was, in the main, people who had been exposed to
the image of George Floyd being murdered who suddenly began to
suspect that they had not been taught the entire truth about justice,
history, policing, racism, and any number of other related subjects.
The spike only lasted that summer--but it was enough to leave the
executors of 13950 shook. And they were right to be.
History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates
the present. And framed a certain way, a story can be told that
justifies the present political order. A political order is not just
premised on who can vote but on what they can vote for, which is to
say on what unrealized possibilities can be imagined. Our
possibilities are defined by 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 it was possible 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.
The truth is that even as I know and teach the power of writing, I
still find myself in disbelief when I see that power at work in the
real world. Maybe it is the nature of books. 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. Their power is so intimate, so insidious, that
even its authors don't always comprehend it. I see politicians in
Colorado, in Tennessee, in South Carolina moving against my own work,
tossing books I've authored out of libraries, banning them from
classes, and I feel snatched out of the present and brought into
another age, one 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 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.
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 indoctrination of national dogmas
over the questioning of them. 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.
I know this directly. I imagine my books to be my children, each with
its own profile and way of walking through the world. My eldest, The
Beautiful Struggle, is the honorable, hardworking son. He has that
union job my father once aspired to, four kids, and a wife he met in
high school. My second son, Between the World and Me, is the "gifted"
one, or rather the one whose gifts are most easily translated to the
rest of the world. He plays in the NBA, enjoys the finer things, and
talks more than he should. I see We Were Eight Years in Power as the
insecure one, born in the shadow of my "gifted" son and who has never
quite gotten over it. He has problems. We don't talk about him much.
All these children suspect that my daughter, my baby girl, The Water
Dancer, is my favorite. Perhaps. She certainly is the one that is
most like me--if a little better, more confident, and more
self-assured. I see my books this way because it helps me remember
that though they are made by me, they are not ultimately mine. They
leave home, travel, have their own relationships, and leave their own
impressions. I've learned it's best to, as much as possible, stay out
of the way and let them live their own lives.
My loyalty to that lesson is dispositional--I am often struck by
secondhand embarrassment watching writers defend themselves against
every bad review. But it's also strategic: My work is to set the
table, craft the argument, render the world as I imagine it, and then
leave. Some people will like it, others won't, and nothing can change
that. I am at my worst out there defending my children and at my best
out of the public eye, enjoying the pleasure of making more of them.
But in the months after George Floyd, it became clear that this was a
privilege. Out in the real world, teachers, parents, students, and
librarians saw in this man's murder an America they had not
previously known. And with this new knowledge of the world, there
came an urge to understand. When these people spoke out, they found
their livelihoods imperiled. They did not have the luxury of
declining to defend themselves. I think a lot about this one note I
received from Woodland Park, Colorado. The school board was trying to
ban Between the World and Me. A resident wrote urging me to reach out
to one of the teachers who was fighting it. "He believes in you and
your message (as do I)," the resident wrote. "And he has been
suffering for it." Suffering. It felt inhuman to let that pass. So I
sent along a note of support. I even went on TV to call out the
school board. But after that I retreated into my own private space of
bookmaking.
And then I read about Mary Wood. The outlines of the case were not
much different from others I'd heard about: She was a teacher in
South Carolina who had been forced to drop Between the World and Me
from her lesson plan because it made some of her students, in their
words, "feel uncomfortable" and "ashamed to be Caucasian." Moreover,
they were sure that the very subject of the book--"systemic
racism"--was "illegal." These complaints bore an incredible
resemblance to the language of 13950, which prohibited "divisive
concepts" that provoked in students "discomfort, guilt, anguish, or
any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her
race or sex." And it was not just the students' complaints that
resembled the executive order--the South Carolina 2022 budget
contained a prohibition lifted, nearly word for word, from 13950.
The connection between the legislation and 13950 was obvious. Still,
for the first time I began to think about the vocabulary being
employed--discomfort, shame, anguish--and how it read like a
caricature of the vocabulary of safety that had become popular on
campuses around the country. I suspect this was intentional.
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. The strategy banks on the limited amount of
time possessed by most readers and listeners and aims to communicate
via shorthand that is just as often sleight of hand. It's not
surprising that everyday people grappling with laundry, PTA meetings,
and bills do not always see the device and the deception. But the
difference is clear--Mary's protesting students were not looking to
attach a warning to Between the World and Me about its disturbing
imagery or themes but to have the book, by force of law, removed from
the state's school altogether.
Literature is anguish. Even small children know this. I was no older
than five, crying in the back seat of my parents' orange Volkswagen
while they argued up front. When they turned to comfort me, they were
shocked to learn that I was crying not about their argument but about
the grasshopper who starved in winter while the ant feasted. The wolf
devours Grandma. The gingham dog and the calico cat devour each
other. 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 on a whim, that he had condemned me and every
other nonbeliever to eternal suffering. 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. For my part, the anguish of the story of the
grasshopper and the ant was in the moral of the story: that laziness
and foolishness made one worthy of starvation. This kind of
retribution left me empty, and even then I felt I wanted no part of a
world that called starvation just. That was my personal
revelation--and one that apparently ran contrary to the story's
intended message. But in my anguish, in my disagreement with the core
of the text, I found my truth. And that, I suspect, is the real
problem. Whatever the attempt to ape the language of college
students, it is neither anguish nor discomfort that these people were
trying to prohibit. It was enlightenment.
I tracked down Mary's number. We spoke for about a half an hour. She
talked about the whole ordeal--the paranoia incited by anonymous
complaints; the school board meetings where she was pilloried; the
threats to her job. She spoke of the conservative tilt of the area
where she taught, Chapin, South Carolina--a lakeside town to the
northwest of the state capital of Columbia. She spoke of her own
enlightenment, of going off to college and reading postcolonial
literature until she felt the puzzle pieces of the world locking into
place. She talked of George Floyd's murder and how she'd formed a
book group with her department in that watershed summer. That was how
she found Between the World and Me. We were the same age. We both had
children who drove us crazy. We both practiced yoga for sanity. And
she needed it now, more than ever. All this she said in an accent
that told me that she was not just from someplace but of that
someplace. I have an accent just like that, remarkable as a facial
scar. And there was something else just as remarkable. Mary didn't
teach civics or current events. She taught writing. Advanced
Placement language and composition, to be precise. For the exam,
students would have to write an argumentative essay themselves, and
to help them learn how, she'd called upon Between the World and Me,
my loud and boisterous second son. Perhaps I am straining the
metaphor, but I really did feel like one of my children had gone and
gotten someone else into trouble.
"What will you do next year?" I asked Mary toward the end of our
phone call.
"I'm going to finish the lesson I started," she said. "I'm going to
teach Between the World and Me."
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. When I go out in the
world, it's gratifying to hear that people have shared part of that
joy, but Mary didn't just enjoy reading the book. The book had
brought her into the fight.
I finally broke the silence. I told Mary that I had been thinking of
coming down there, but I feared making a tense situation worse. Still
she urged me to come. There was a school board meeting in a week,
which she and some of her supporters would attend. I agreed to join
them.
By the next week I was with Mary, eating salad and drinking iced
green tea at a restaurant near 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 much this fact would help was unclear.
Chapin High School was overseen by Lexington-Richland School District
Five. The district has long leaned conservative. During the Trump
years, it toppled. School board meetings had become an open mic for
reactionaries, conspiracy theorists, and attention seekers. The
visible radicalization began with the district's response to
COVID--local residents began queuing up at meetings to denounce
quarantining as tyranny. I've watched videos of these events, and
they feel formless--a rage in search of a cause. The rage went from
masking and vaccination to DEI and pronouns. Something called
"emotional learning" would catch an occasional stray. But mostly, the
great enemy of Chapin was critical race theory. It was said that
District Five had become a staging ground for "educational warfare"
on CRT, a doctrine that was held responsible for "anxiety,
depression, and self-hatred," that raised suicide rates, and that
made students "ashamed to be white." I was told that there was an
occasional air of menace at the meetings, as when one speaker warned
the board, "We are watching," or another claimed that the country was
under the sway of practitioners of "pagan ways" and exponents of
"child sacrifice" and the "drinking of blood." And it was quite
normal for such sentiments to be applauded by spectators.
That District Five school board meetings had become contentious was
reflected in the security that greeted me at the door. I had to empty
my pockets, permit my bag to be searched, and pass through a metal
detector. On the other side I saw two beefy men dressed in army green
with visible bulletproof vests. This struck me as a bad omen. But the
guards greeted me politely, and when Mary and I turned the corner
into the hallway leading to the meeting room, we were met by a woman
named Brandi, a middle school science teacher. She stood in front of
a table handing out flyers against censorship, and when she saw us,
she smiled warmly.
Inside the meeting room, people milled around and chatted. There were
tables at the front of the room, assembled in a U shape, with
microphones and nameplates for the various officers of the district.
We walked over to the side of the room opposite from the tables,
where Mary's mother, Kathryn, waited for us. I shook her hand and her
eyes grew big and she smiled. She pointed us to our seats, which
she'd reserved, and in mine I found a copy of Between the World and
Me.
"Would you sign, please?" Kathryn asked, still smiling.
I signed, sat down, and scanned the crowd. What I noticed was that
half the people in the room were wearing blue T-shirts. Mary
explained that blue was the school color, and Brandi had organized a
group of sympathizers on Facebook, asking them to wear blue to show
their support for Mary. An older woman named Bobbie sat next to me
and we struck up a conversation. She did not know Mary and did not
wear a blue T-shirt. But she explained that after George Floyd's
death, her church had created a reading group around race. (She'd
become a huge Colson Whitehead fan.) The head of that group read
about Mary and urged all the members to come out and show support.
This was the second time I'd heard of a reading group in this town as
the epicenter of political disruption. From bell hooks on, books by
Black authors helped Mary understand "why things are so fucked up."
And it was these books that had brought Bobbie out to support Mary.
I understand the impulse to dismiss the import of the summer of 2020,
to dismiss the "national conversations," the raft of TV specials and
documentaries, even the protests themselves. 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 cliched 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. And now, even here in Chapin, some people, not most (it
is hardly ever most), had, through the work of Black writers, begun
that work of imagining.
The board chair gaveled the meeting to order at 7 p.m. sharp. She
noted the full house and seemed to be girding herself for what was
coming. The board called for a moment of silence for "a great
tragedy," the specifics of which the chair did not explain. There was
a prayer and the pledge of allegiance and a report from the
superintendent on "academic freedom." From that point, allusions to
Mary's case crept into the board's business until about an hour in,
when, the undercard having been completed, the main event commenced.
The board was giving the community its opportunity to speak.
As the first woman approached the microphone, I scanned the room,
trying to ascertain the breadth of Mary's support. Only a few weeks
earlier, parents were queued up, at this same meeting, to demand her
firing. Now when I looked out, I saw that the blue T-shirts were
populous enough to indicate that her backers were deep. And then the
comments began. It was a blowout. Parent after parent lined up to
support Mary, most of them met by whooping cheers. A 14-year-old girl
stood up and quoted from Between the World and Me, noting that in all
her time in school she had never been assigned a book by a Black
author. Mary cried silently and whispered to me a running commentary
about each speaker--their family, their occupation, whether they had
kids in the district. No one, not a single speaker, stood up to
support the book's banning. I was initially surprised by this, but
later I understood--school board meetings, and local politics, are
small affairs, easily dominated by an organized faction, and that
night the faction was Mary's.
Sometimes I will be at a reception or an event or even out on the
street, and a brother will approach me to thank me for my work, and
his build, how he moves, his language, his haircut will inform me
that he has just finished a bid. I see these brothers and I remember
my time teaching in a prison. I see these brothers and I see that
shadow version of myself that my parents and teachers warned would
take shape if the notes in lipstick red continued, if my "conduct"
did not improve. The line between me and them, between me and the
shadow, feels thin. I don't think I have an intended reader--audience
is not something I think about directly--but if I did, it would be
those brothers, or rather that younger version of them trying to
navigate the line. There was not a single person like that in the
audience at that hearing, which was about what I expected. And I'd
spoken to enough audiences to understand that if you're lucky, your
writing moves beyond its imagined recipients. But I wasn't speaking
here. I wasn't even the subject. What I seemed to be witnessing was
less about a book as it was about something more localized--a kind of
referendum on the school district's identity.
Mary taught an Advanced Placement class, which is to say her audience
was not kids meandering off to college, as I had, but students aiming
for college credits and a head start in that world. There was a sense
in the room that avoiding "divisive concepts" was not just wrong on
moral grounds but that it represented a lowering of standards; that
to ban a book was to erect a kind of South Carolina exception for
Advanced Placement--one that validated the worst caricatures of
Southern whiteness often bandied by the kind of Northerner who
thinks, "We should have just let them secede." The room was
embarrassed. I remember one man, Josh Gray, a professor at the
University of South Carolina, standing up, his hair pulled back in a
ponytail, and bringing this self-inflicted humiliation into view in a
way that would never have occurred to me. "I can tell you, as a
redneck who's worked all over the world and met people from all over
the world," he said, "don't make the perception that [the students]
have to compete against worse by actions like this that do not
reflect well on our community."
This may seem self-interested, a stance taken more to avoid a stigma
than to break an arrangement of power. It's a legitimate
question--especially in the age of social media and loud virtue
signaling that followed 2020. But virtues should be signaled, and the
signalers should act to make their virtues manifest. It is the
absence of the latter, not the presence of the former, that is the
problem. And I doubt that anyone ever parts with power in the name of
charity. In this case, self-interest meant that here in the heart of
Jim Crow, and Redemption, ideas to the contrary could not be driven
from the public square. And that is progress. It just isn't
inevitable that such progress continues.
The following afternoon, I met Mary for barbecue. I was actually
giddy from the night before. I had expected to come into a den of
hectoring fanatics. And instead I'd found that there were allies
fighting back. Allies. When I started writing, it felt essential to
think of white people as readers as little as possible, to reduce
them in my mind to resist the temptation to translate. I think that
was correct. What has been surprising--pleasantly so--is that there
really is no translation needed, that going deeper actually reveals
the human. Get to the universal through the specific, as the rule
goes. Still, even as I have come to understand this, it feels
abstract to me. What I wanted was to be Mary for a moment, to
understand how she came to believe that it was worth risking her job
over a book.
Mary's grandfather was a social worker and World War II vet who was
blinded disarming mines. He came home a ferocious advocate for the
disabled, but Black disabled veterans particularly. Although Mary
knew her grandfather, he didn't talk about his history as an
activist. She found out from a book after his death. Her parents were
more liberal than the norm--the type who in a red voting district
still put out a Biden 2020 lawn sign. But what she mostly had growing
up was an ill-defined sense that the world, as it was conventionally
explained, didn't make sense. She'd been bred to be a Southern lady,
but it didn't really take. She had to be bribed into etiquette class
with Bojangles. In church, Mary did not obsess over being saved so
much as she wondered why there were no women in the pulpit. And then
in college, books righted the frame: She read bell hooks's Talking
Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. When she finished, she
called her mother and said, "This is why things are so fucked up." It
was exactly the experience that the purveyors of 13950, the book
banners, and those targeting CRT were seeking to prevent.
We finished eating and took a drive over to the state capital. South
Carolina was the first state to secede and also the state where both
Reconstruction and Redemption reached their most spectacular ends.
All through that period, South Carolina had been a majority-Black
state, and at the height of Reconstruction, before its undoing in
Redemption, the state was home to an emancipated working class and a
multiracial democracy. It's quite the story--but it's not the one
that the State House tells. There is a beautiful sculpture there
wrought by the astronaut turned artist Ed Dwight. But most of the
sprawling 22 acres of the State House proper are a shrine to white
supremacy. A collection of giant statues sits on raised platforms, so
that men like Strom Thurmond, who pinned his entire political career
on segregation, loom like gods. Wade Hampton, who enslaved
generations and then fought in a bloody war to uphold that system, is
there. So is Ben Tillman, who once boasted of lynching from the
Senate floor. Tillman knew of what he spoke. In 1876, Tillman pitched
in to massacre Black people in Hamburg, and in 1895, he'd rallied
white South Carolinians to write Black people out of the state's
constitution. The movement to erase Black people from politics swept
through the South and won the day in legislatures, state houses, and
courts. But if you just looked at the obvious organs of the
government, you'd miss the breadth of the attack.
We have lived under a class of people who ruled American culture with
a flaming cross for so long that we have sometimes failed to
recognize the political power of culture. But they have 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 African 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.
That is the heart of it. It is not a mistake that Mary teaches
writing at its most advanced level and has found herself a target.
Much of the current hoopla about book bans and censorship gets it
wrong. This is not personal--it is political. It is not about me or
any other writer. It is about all of us--writers and readers,
comrades, and the work we do together. To think. To question. To
imagine. I can't say I always knew it, but in my time teaching it
soon became clear that becoming a good writer would not be enough. We
needed more writers, and I had a responsibility to help them as a
reader, to be an active audience for the stories they wanted to tell,
or as a teacher, so that they could learn to tell them better, to
reach deeper into their own truth in the same way that brought me
euphoria, and reach into the hearts of readers and set them on fire,
as Mary had been set on fire since college: by words on a page.
As we walked the grounds of the State House, I thought about what it
meant for a young student to visit these same grounds. I thought
about what it must mean to walk amongst these Klansmen, enslavers,
and segregationists raised up on their platforms to the status of
titans. I thought about what it means to go back to the schools,
where work rooted in these truths is slowly being pushed out, to the
libraries that are being bleached of discomforting stories. And I
thought how 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.
The statues and pageantry can fool you. They look like symbols of
wars long settled and on behalf of men long dead. But their
Redemption is not about honoring a past. It's about killing a future.
From The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Copyright 2024 by BCP Literary,
Inc. Published by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division
of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
(HTM) From: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ta-nehisi-coates-the-message
tags: article,political,race
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