Between the World and Me (One World Essentials)

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

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.

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,

Fully 60 percent of all young black men who drop out of high school will go to jail. This should disgrace the country.

And I began to see these two arms in relation—those who failed in the schools justified their destruction in the streets. The society could say, “He should have stayed in school,” and then wash its hands of him.

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.

And it occurred to me, listening to your mother, that France was not a thought experiment but an actual place filled with actual people whose traditions were different, whose lives really were different, whose sense of beauty was different.

In America, the injury is not in being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after.

Our current politics tell you that should you fall victim to such an assault and lose your body, it somehow must be your fault.

This chasm makes itself known to us in all kinds of ways. A little girl wanders home, at age seven, after being teased in school and asks her parents, “Are we niggers and what does this mean?” Sometimes it is subtle—the simple observation of who lives where and works what jobs and who does not. Sometimes it’s all of it at once. I have never asked how you became personally aware of the distance. Was it Mike Brown? I don’t think I want to know.

But I know that it has happened to you already, that you have deduced that you are privileged and yet still different from other privileged children, because you are the bearer of a body more fragile than any other in this country.