Ta-Nehisi Coates

You know what I mean?

It's pretty clear there are other people who maybe... Look, I don't want to put thoughts and words into people's mouths

I dare say that there are people who wanted that to go a different way.

One of the things that happens is what I had was these kind of catch phrases that I would hear all the time that American politicians would say.

And I didn't understand why they said them.

OK.

And it was a vocabulary.

And, you know, that vocabulary, you know, included, you know, phrases like Israel has the right to defend itself.

Israel has the right to exist.

You know what I mean?

And it wasn't even like what you think about that is, you know, whatever.

But what I'm trying to say is it was repeated so much.

and un-interrogated and so specific about Israel that I was just like, why is this?

What I think is there's a world in which

you tell yourself or you speak a kind of language to yourself over and over and over and over again, and you never have to actually defend it.

You never actually have to have it interrogated directly, publicly.

And I think when you haven't had the practice of defending the thing, when you tend to speak in slogans,

You know what I mean?

Which I really try hard not to do, right?

Like I try to find my own language for what I saw.