Between the World and Me (One World Essentials)

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

But a great number of educators spoke of “personal responsibility” in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility.

my experience in this world has been that the people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration. And the word racist, to them, conjures, if not a tobacco-spitting oaf, then something just as fantastic—an orc, troll, or gorgon.

there was no golden era when evildoers did their business and loudly proclaimed it as such.