Between the World and Me (One World Essentials)

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority.

And that stunted imagination is something I owe to my chains.

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 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 would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

Your mother had to teach me how to love you—how to kiss you and tell you I love you every night.

I felt myself to be among the survivors of some great natural disaster, some plague, some avalanche or earthquake.

exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong.

What I want you to know is that this is not your fault, even if it is ultimately your responsibility.

They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs.

I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free.

She compared America to Rome. She said she thought the glory days of this country had long ago passed, and even those glory days were sullied: They had been built on the bodies of others.

“We don’t understand that we are embracing our deaths.”

They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.

But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion.