Between the World and Me (One World Essentials)

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear. The law did not protect us.

But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker. However you call it, the result was our infirmity before the criminal forces of the world.

But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, “white people” would cease to exist for want of reasons.

Hate gives identity.

So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all.

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.

my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.

And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do.