At one point in his narrative, upon hearing for the first time about an act of violent, murderous land theft, which had happened less than a lifetime ago upon the very ground he was standing upon, Coates asks his archeologist guide to “Stop”—stop talking and explaining—that he needs to sit down to process the truth of what he’s just learned, since it negated everything he’d understood and been conditioned to accept and believe prior.

Indeed this book, and Coate’s brilliant, profound, graceful gift of sharing harsh truths, will haunt me in the same way, for a very long time: I needed to sit down, too, after finishing it.

Within the harsh truths Coates shares with us is a profound plea for us to acknowledge them, awakening ourselves enough to seek and demand universal justice and an end to racialized violence.

What also comes across is Coate’s own sense of deep remorse at realizing he didn’t fully comprehend the truth—like most of us, he’d believed and accepted what he’d studied, and been told by respected peers and colleagues—because what he’d been told was the uplifting story of an oppressed people who had ultimately triumphed over their oppressors.

It is a heartbreaking shock to learn that victims of violent, racist, genocidal oppression can ultimately be so traumatized by it, they sometimes become perpetrators of the same racist violence themselves.

His intent is that we begin to simply acknowledge the harshest truths shared by the very people who are currently being ethnically cleansed and annihilated by racially-motivated oppression and violence: the Palestinian people, since 1948—exactly as we acknowledge the oppression and genocide of the Jews!—and that we become haunted by the injustice enough to not only more fully comprehend the truth of our shared reality, but to also better acknowledge who WE are, and what has been done in our name. And to demand and end to it. “Stop.”

Can we ultimately see how racism and violent colonialism diminishes us? I hope so. From this sobering revelation, we, and our proxies abroad, might actually begin to do better, and be better, as a more humane, just and truly democratic nation. We might actually start to save the world.

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Price	$19.6
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The Message