The Message

Content Warning: This section discusses racism, colonialism, and enslavement, including a reference to sexual violence.

This chapter opens with a poem by Sonia Sanchez in which the speaker talks about making home anew in order to build a future. In the essay proper, Coates reflects on his trip to Dakar, Senegal. While packing for the trip, he received a sketch from his mother depicting his father reading a book. A young Coates captioned the sketch “Daddy reads all the time” and “Daddy says he reads to learn” (25). Coates later learned that his father had come home without a paycheck that day and was perhaps looking in his books to figure out why he, a Black man who worked hard for his family, had so little financial room for error, while those who profited from the exploitation of others enjoyed the privilege of not having to worry about their errors.

Now, Coates knows that the oppressors justified their actions with narratives from figures like Josiah Nott, a racist anthropologist who claimed that Black Americans were inferior and that they had made no contributions to the great civilizations of the world. He made a point to discount the fact that one of antiquity’s so-called “great civilizations”—ancient Egypt—was on the African continent, and when he did grudgingly acknowledge that fact, he argued that Egyptians and other North Africans were not truly African and that sub-Saharan Africans were viewed as low, enslaved people in Egypt just as in the West.