Between the World and Me (One World Essentials)

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones,

Not being violent enough could cost me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body.

The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.

“If you’re black, you were born in jail,” Malcolm said.

I submitted before your needs, and I knew then that I must survive for something more than survival’s sake. I must survive for you.

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

Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made.

You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels.

“You exist. You matter. You have value. You have every right to wear your hoodie, to play your music as loud as you want. You have every right to be you. And no one should deter you from being you. You have to be you. And you can never be afraid to be you.”

Now I felt the deeper weight of my generational chains—my body confined, by history and policy, to certain zones. Some of us make it out. But the game is played with loaded dice.