Between the World and Me (One World Essentials)

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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.

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.

that love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism.

The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects—are the product of democratic will.

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.

There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream.

When their own vulnerability becomes real—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 am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free.