Right Is Right

or, the puzzle piece of words

The sentence reached me the way the important ones always do — secondhand, on my phone, in the middle of doing something else. A screenshot. A line making the rounds, attributed to Ta-Nehisi Coates, about Israel: that like slavery, there is no good version of the project. Someone had stacked another writer on top of it, Priyamvada Gopal, filing it to a sharper point — there is no majoritarian ethnonationalist project that is not racist. None.

I read it twice. Then I did something I am a little embarrassed to admit. I texted my college boyfriend.

Let me back up, because the text does not make sense without the fight, and the fight is twelve years old.

We will call him Matt. We dated in college, around 2012, and we broke up — really broke up, the first of what turned out to be many times, because we have spent the decade since cycling through friendship and silence and the occasional ill-advised reunion — over Israel. Over Palestine, I would say now. At the time I could barely say anything at all.

Because here is how that argument went, and if you are Black and have ever tried to explain something true to a certain kind of smart white man, you already know the choreography. Matt had the facts. He had the year the state was founded. He had a tidy working definition of Zionism, set down like a man laying out a winning hand. He could name the first prime minister. I could name none of it. I was twenty. I had a feeling in my body the size of a house and a vocabulary the size of a shoebox, and he watched me fail to fit the one into the other and decided the failure was the whole story.

I could not articulate it. So he concluded there was nothing to articulate.

I have turned that night over for twelve years, and here is what I finally understand it was about. It was never really about Israel. It was about two completely different ideas of what it means to know a thing.

Matt understood knowledge as recall. You know something if you can produce it on command, in the agreed-upon vocabulary, citations attached. By that standard I knew nothing, and he was generous enough to tell me so.

But there is another way of knowing, and it is the one I was raised inside, and it does not fit in his shoebox either. I come from people who have been studying this exact kind of project — the kind that sorts human beings into those who belong and those who may be removed — for a very long time. They left me that study in the obvious places: the books, the speeches, the essays, a whole library of people articulating, beautifully, what I could not yet say. But they also left it in me. Imprinted. The way you inherit a grandmother’s hands or a mother’s refusal to shrink. I did not have the first prime minister. I had something older and less impressive-sounding and, it turns out, more accurate: I knew where a project like that goes. I knew because dehumanization has only ever had the one destination, and my people have been standing at that destination for four hundred years, taking notes.

What I needed from Matt that night was not agreement. It was trust. I needed him to watch a twenty-year-old fumble for the words and think, they aren’t saying this well, but they are a person who knows this kind of thing. Call it a trusting understanding. What I got was the other kind — the distrusting kind — where every gap in my vocabulary got read as a hole in my case. And then, because it is always right there within reach, he went for the oldest move in the drawer. He suggested, more or less, that I only took the Palestinians’ side because I was Black. As if my lineage were a bias to correct for instead of a credential to respect. As if the very thing that let me see it clearly were the thing disqualifying me from the room.

I want to be honest about what that does to a person, because I think we undersell it. To know something true in your body and be told, by someone who loves you, that your knowing is only your feelings — that is not a debate. It is a slow erasure. It feels like being walked through a rose garden and pricked, lightly, politely, a thousand times, until you are bleeding everywhere and no single cut is big enough to point to. You come out hollow. And the hollowing is the function, not the side effect, because a hollow person can be talked into nearly anything — can even be talked into believing that a project built on moving a people off their land might, with the right story about who they are, come out fine in the end.

That shadow has a name, and I have stopped being shy about saying it. It is white supremacy, and it does not need a hood or a slur to operate. Sometimes it is just a very well-read man, explaining, patiently, why your certainty does not count.

So when that line crossed my phone — there is no good version of the project — I did not feel informed. I felt recognized. Somebody had finally handed me the puzzle piece of words I had been missing for twelve years. Not a new idea. The idea was never the problem; I had the idea at twenty, in my chest, fully formed. What I was missing was a sentence clean enough to set on the table, so that a man who respects only sentences would be made to look at it.

I texted it to Matt. I told him it was not an invitation to relitigate the whole of the Middle East — God, no, we have done that across enough years and enough beds for several lifetimes. I told him it only named the thing I could not, back then. That there is no good engagement with a project ordered that way. That it is never good, no matter the narrative about the other side, no matter what you think you know. That you simply have to know this system, and that any system built on ethnicity is, always, a loss.

I was no prophet. I want to be clear about that. There was no foresight, no magic. There was only a person who had been taught, in the bone, by people who paid for the lesson, that right is right.

Living with that kind of conviction has cost me more than I will put in a magazine. I do not say that with any pride. I honestly do not know, some days, whether it makes me principled or just impossible — naive, self-righteous, insufficiently interested in all the complexity everyone keeps insisting upon. I hold that uncertainty plainly. I could be wrong about how I have carried it.

But I was not wrong about the thing itself. And at twenty, shoebox and all, I understood one more thing clearly enough to act on it: I was not about to keep giving up no coochie to a man too pussy to clock racism when it was standing right there in the room, reciting its founding dates.

So that is the story. A screenshot, a text, a breakup that is somehow still ongoing twelve years on.

I was right because I was right. I was right because right is right. And I was right because the project of Israel is wrong.

I just did not have the words yet. I have them now — and it turns out the words were never the knowing. They were only ever the proof I kept being asked to show.