Between the World and Me (One World Essentials)

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves between the world and me….

Do not speak to me of martyrdom,

to be remembered

paris...

violets

But by now I am accustomed to intelligent people asking about the condition of my body without realizing the nature of their request.

Inside out; sadness leading to deeper meaning And black ppl—ever the patient and wise explainers. Sigh.

Thus America’s problem is not its betrayal of “government of the people,” but the means by which “the people” acquired their names.

the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.

As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.

destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations.

All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible.

But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this.

I can’t help but think of the trauma of medical procedures I’m coming out of. That black bodies have been subjected to. Experimented on. Is that why it feels so cumulative ?

catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.

From then on, I knew that there was a ritual to a street fight, bylaws and codes that, in their very need, attested to all the vulnerability of the black teenage bodies.

What of other cultures appropriating our armor? Do we know they don’t have a right to it bc they have the Dream and no right to our fear? What if ppl like me who learned late (way past 5) about how to be in a black body?

it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over.

We were laughing, but I know that we were afraid of those who loved us most.

nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear.

what matters is the system that makes your body breakable.

felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me.

You have not yet grappled with your own myths and narratives and discovered the plunder everywhere around us. Before I could discover, before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils that seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed.

but their mission did not change: prove the inviolability of their block, of their bodies, through their power to crack knees, ribs, and arms.

practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.

You have seen all the wonderful life up above the tree-line, yet you understand that there is no real distance between you and Trayvon Martin, and thus Trayvon Martin must terrify you in a way that he could never terrify me. You have seen so much more of all that is lost when they destroy your body.

Fail to comprehend the streets and you gave up your body now. But fail to comprehend the schools and you gave up your body later.

Educated children never offered excuses—certainly not childhood itself. The world had no time for the childhoods of black boys and girls. How could the schools? Algebra, Biology, and English were not subjects so much as opportunities to better discipline the body, to practice writing between the lines, copying the directions legibly, memorizing theorems extracted from the world they were created to represent.

Why—for us and only us—is the other side of free will and free spirits an assault upon our bodies?

When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing.

And I felt, vaguely, wordlessly, that for a child to be marked off for such a life, to be forced to live in fear was a great injustice. And what was the source of this fear? What was hiding behind the smoke screen of streets and schools? And what did it mean that number 2 pencils, conjugations without context, Pythagorean theorems, handshakes, and head nods were the difference between life and death, were the curtains drawing down between the world and me?

She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing—myself.

I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality.