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October 9 - October 9, 2025
A satellite closed the miles between us, but no machinery could close the gap between her world and the world for which I had been summoned to speak.
But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.
The new people were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish—and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again.
But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist,
And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body.
What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.
I cannot say whether that violence, even administered in fear and love, sounded the alarm or choked us at the exit.
I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog.
Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies.
I think I somehow knew that that third of my brain should have been concerned with more beautiful things. I think I felt that something out there, some force, nameless and vast, had robbed me of…what? Time? Experience?
How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?
I devoured the books because they were the rays of light peeking out from the doorframe, and perhaps past that door there was another world, one beyond the gripping fear
And if the Eighteenth Dynasty pharaohs were alive today, would they live in Harlem?
I didn’t yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble.
It is important that I tell you their names, that you know that I have never achieved anything alone.
the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness.
that love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism.
There was before you, and then there was after, and in this after, you were the God I’d never had. I submitted before your needs, and I knew then that I must survive for something more than survival’s sake. I must survive for you.
the profits of that struggle and others like it are ours, even when the object of our struggle, as is so often true, escapes our grasp.
parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine.
The need to forgive the officer would not have moved me, because even then, in some inchoate form, I knew that Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that have marked it from birth.
Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered.
All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and black girls to “be twice as good,” which is to say “accept half as much.”
The robbery of time is not measured in lifespans but in moments. It is the last bottle of wine that you have just uncorked but do not have time to drink. It is the kiss that you do not have time to share, before she walks out of your life. It is the raft of second chances for them, and twenty-three-hour days for us.
But my experience in this world has been that the people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration.
The mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from the long war against the black body, is not forged overnight. This is the practiced habit of jabbing out one’s eyes and forgetting the work of one’s hands.
But part of what I know is that there is the burden of living among Dreamers, and there is the extra burden of your country telling you the Dream is just, noble, and real, and you are crazy for seeing the corruption and smelling the sulfur.
When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be.
I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life in struggle.