Between the World and Me (One World Essentials)

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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 destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country,

racism is a visceral experience,

Dream rests on our backs,

the bedding made from our bodies.

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

the billy clubs of Birmingham sheriffs nor to the insidious gravity of the streets. Black is beautiful—which is to say that the black body is beautiful, that black hair must be guarded against the torture of processing and lye, that black skin must be guarded against bleach, that our noses and mouths must be protected against modern surgery. We are all our beautiful bodies and so must never be prostrate before barbarians, must never submit our original self, our one of one, to defiling and plunder. I loved Malcolm because Malcolm never lied, unlike the schools and their façade of morality, unlike the streets and their bravado, unlike the world

enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds.

you’re black, you were born in jail,” Malcolm said. And I felt the truth of this in the blocks I had to avoid, in the times of day when I must not be caught walking home from school, in my lack of control over my body.

What it feels like to be back. The black boy

act—as though my body were my own.

“Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,”

What does that mean

I then wanted was to write as those black people danced, with control, power, joy, warmth.

boys stood in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven pulling out?

What is pulling it out

The girl from Chicago understood this too, and she understood something more—that

are not equally robbed of their bodies, that the bodies of women

are set out for pillage in ways I could ne...

In ways I could never really know is what this book is to me. He describes what it’s like to grow up Black and mature and expand his horizons in ways I could never really know

is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country. It breaks too much of what

have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and

the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this

“Black-on-black crime” is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans,

The plunder of black life

Disembodiment.

problem of “race”—“race” itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem.

when you have rejected the Dream.

The Dream seemed to be the pinnacle,

We are living the dream. How does that affect our reaction to race. What do we do what can we do

“My bad.” Without even looking up he said, “You straight.” And in that exchange there was so much of the private rapport that can only exist between two particular strangers of this

Isn’t that kind of exchange common among people who have similar backgrounds. Are kind of like tribes tribes. New York Jews

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

racial is to hand over all those diamonds, fashioned by our ancestors, to the plunderer.

generational chains—my body confined, by history and policy, to certain zones.

would have loved for that to have been my life, how much I would have loved to have a past apart from the fear.

What it’s like to be black And achild

Remember that you and I are brothers, are the children of trans-Atlantic rape. Remember the broader consciousness that comes with that. Remember that this consciousness can never ultimately be racial; it must be cosmic.

It must be cosmic what does that mean

our bodies have refinanced the Dream of being white. Black life is cheap, but in America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value.

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