The Message summary

Slavery required a warrant, a justification, a story. 

There had to be a reason, something that explained why bondage, terror, and exploitation were natural and just. Something that reassured enslavers and eased the consciences of slave drivers and ship captains, presidents and priests, kings and queens. That convinced ordinary people with eyes and ears that the horror they saw and heard was somehow right.

Ideas can be contested, inverted, and turned against their inventors. Ancient Egypt was one of those ideas in nineteenth-century America. It was a battlefield – a site of struggle, the terrain on which competing narratives clashed. 

The idea of a “Black Egypt” haunted Nott’s successors. The educator Samuel Train Dutton was one of them. Like Nott, he claimed “savage” Africans were naturally suited to slavery. The existence of a thriving Black population in Ancient Egypt, resembling the very people he sought to dehumanize, didn’t fit the story he wanted to tell about timeless bondage. American schools, Dutton said, must teach children “how the Ancient Egyptians differed from the Negro, and why.”

The word “vindicate” comes from a Latin verb with a complex etymology: vindicare, meaning “to set free,” “avenge,” and “lay claim to.” Those three senses resonate through Black vindicationism, a movement to set a people free, avenge its oppression, and lay claim to the dignity it had long been denied. 

Vindication in this triple sense echoes through another powerful narrative: the story of the state of Israel’s creation. This exemplary case of the long arc of the universe bending toward justice is inscribed in the architecture of Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. Moving through the memorial, you first encounter the Book of Names – seventy volumes, each the height of an adult human being, each containing 17,500 pages filled with the names of the five million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Later, you watch David Ben-Gurion declaring the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 from a grainy black-and-white reel. 

After a wave of pogroms in Russia in the 1880s, the American clergyman William E. Blackstone lamented the plight of the millions of Jews who, as he put it, “cannot stay where they are, and yet have no other place to go.” What made this tragic situation so absurd was that it had an obvious solution: Palestine. 

Here, Blackstone said, was a land without a people, and a people without a land. Ninety years later, Israel’s prime minister, Golda Meir, echoed this idea: the land on which Israel was established had no owners.

Avner Gvaryahu remembers the day he began questioning the stories he’d been told. He was a sergeant in the Israeli army. His men had just forced their way into a house in the occupied West Bank. When he entered, one of his soldiers was screaming and pointing a rifle at a man holding a terrified little girl. By the time Gvaryahu worked out what was going on – the man was trying to take his daughter to the bathroom – she’d already peed her pants. It was one of those moments, he says, when you think, “What the fuck are we doing?”

Benny Morris, the Israeli historian, argued that once Israel’s founders committed themselves to expelling Palestinians, they should have finished the job. The Israel-Palestine conflict, as he sees it, is the result of their failure to do so. The story could have ended there.