Between the World and Me (One World Essentials)

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know.

This officer, given maximum power, bore minimum responsibility. He was charged with nothing. He was punished by no one. He was returned to his work.

That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket.

“I could have you arrested!” Which is to say: “I could take your body.”

The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.

And I remember thinking how much I would have loved for that to have been my life, how much I would have loved to have a past apart from the fear. I did not have that past in hand or memory. But I had you.

We are entering our last years together, and I wish I had been softer with you. Your mother had to teach me how to love you—how to kiss you and tell you I love you every night. Even now it does not feel a wholly natural act so much as it feels like ritual.

I felt that I had missed part of the experience because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear.

I spent years developing a career, acquiring assets, engaging responsibilities. And one racist act. It’s all it takes.” And

From the a mother, a doctor who pulled herself out of poverty with supreme focus, lost her brilliant child to a cop.